P&Q’s 2026 Best In Class: Babson Olin, Entrepreneurship

Babson College’s FW Olin Graduate School of Business has been named the 2026 Best in Class MBA program for entrepreneurship by Poets&Quants

Picture a fire station somewhere in Massachusetts, mid-shift, and a group of firefighters working through a Babson College course between calls. The subject isn’t finance or marketing. It’s entrepreneurial leadership – how to make decisions with incomplete information, coordinate a team under pressure, and act when the variables around you are, in Stephen Spinelli’s words, wild. It’s an unusual classroom for a business school. At Babson, it’s treated as exactly the kind of environment the college exists to prepare people for.

“Entrepreneurial leadership is about how I interact one-on-one, one of many, to solve the problem in high-intensity environments, usually,” says Spinelli, speaking to Poets&Quants in his office on Babson’s Wellesley, Massachusetts campus a year out from handing off the presidency. “Putting a fire out is a pretty high-intensity environment.” The firefighters get credit toward a Babson credential for the course – on equal footing with a student who completes a semester on campus. It’s a small program, but it captures something Spinelli has spent his presidency trying to institutionalize at scale: the belief that entrepreneurial leadership isn’t a major, it’s a discipline that belongs everywhere, taught to everyone, in whatever setting people actually need it.

It’s also a big part of why Babson is P&Q’s choice for the 2026 Best in Class Award for Entrepreneurship. The recognition isn’t for any single program or ranking. It’s for an ecosystem that Spinelli, in his final year as president, is racing to prove can hold together as one coherent whole before he hands it to a successor.

A WIDE NET UNDER ONE ROOF

That belief runs through the Arthur M. Blank School for Entrepreneurial Leadership, the organizing structure Spinelli describes as roughly 60 programs spread across seven distinct perspectives – among them women in entrepreneurship, franchising, and finance. It’s market-facing by design, spanning everything from business plan competitions to internships wired directly into a student’s degree work. “It is where the rubber meets the road in a curated environment,” Spinelli says, and he’s candid that the school still has work to do explaining what the Blank School actually is to people outside Babson. The ambition, though, is unmistakable: a single architecture broad enough to hold nearly every entry point into entrepreneurship the college offers, from a first-year business plan pitch to a mid-career executive dropping in for one workshop.

Money is following that ambition. Babson is in the middle of a $150 million investment in the Herring Family Entrepreneurial Leadership Village, a new campus hub built around labs, AI-focused workspace, incubator space, and a home for the college’s entrepreneurship club. Spinelli’s language about it is uncharacteristically blunt for a college president discussing capital projects: “We’re just pouring it on.” The bet is that Babson’s undergraduate program – ranked No. 1 nationally for 32 consecutive years, a streak Spinelli notes no other school has matched in any specialization ranking – stays untouchable by continuing to out-invest in the delivery system that built the streak in the first place, rather than resting on it.

A HIGHER BAR ON DAY ONE

What makes Babson’s model distinct, in Spinelli’s telling, isn’t just the volume of programming. It’s the standard the college holds students to once they leave it. He describes his expectation of a Babson graduate hired into a new job bluntly: on day one, tell me how you’re going to create value, not what you learned. “I don’t want interns,” he says. “My job is to find the best ones that haven’t – create value from it.” It’s a philosophy that treats the internship-and-training pipeline most employers still run as an outdated buffer, one Spinelli thinks artificial intelligence is about to make harder to justify. If entry-level employees are expected to produce rather than absorb, he argues, a business education has to train for the version of the job that already assumes AI is doing the absorbing.

He reaches for a boxing analogy to describe the gap between traditional classroom learning and what Babson is trying to build instead. Training to box, he says a boxer friend once told him, is brutal – and still nothing like being in the ring. Spinelli wants Babson’s coursework to close that gap: “Can we bring education closer to being in the ring?” The Blank School’s internships, pitch competitions, and venture work are the mechanism. The goal isn’t to simulate business decisions in a classroom exercise; it’s to put students in situations closer to the real, disordered thing, with real consequences attached.

WHERE THE DEMAND COMES FROM

Spinelli traces some of that market-demand instinct to an unlikely source: his own son, a choral-music director with a doctorate who told him that the moment he landed his first real job, he realized he needed a business education, because, as Spinelli recounts it, “dad ain’t paying the bills.” The anecdote is personal, but it’s also the thesis underneath everything Babson is building institutionally – that the need for entrepreneurial and business literacy isn’t confined to people who intend to found companies. It shows up in a music professor figuring out his own value proposition, in a firefighter finishing a leadership course between shifts, in a mid-career professional enrolling one class at a time.

Spinelli’s case for Babson’s model rests less on any single program than on the range of people it’s built to reach: from 18-year-old undergraduates protecting a 32-year ranking streak to firefighters and working professionals who never set foot in a traditional MBA classroom. Whether that range holds together as one coherent brand, or ends up feeling like several different schools operating under one name, is likely to be one of the open questions Spinelli hands to his successor. He’s already thinking about the pace of change that successor will inherit.

“The future of higher education is going to be more dynamic in the next five years than it’s been in the last fifty,” he says.

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