J7SC 2E00 - The Invention of Entrepreneurship

There is, nowadays, a whole “world of entrepreneurship” out there: entrepreneurship is widely promoted around the world, with entrepreneurial ventures, finance, policies, education, research, and discourses proliferating everywhere. Yet this is a relatively recent phenomenon: it is only a few decades old. Where does this world of entrepreneurship come from? When and why did it come about? How does it affect the activities of entrepreneurs and what it means to be an entrepreneur? The course addresses these questions by introducing students, among other topics, to the birth of the word entrepreneur, to the rise of entrepreneurial finance, to the constitution of the Silicon Valley, to the debates around the dotcom bubble, and to the historically shifting forms and uses of business plans.

The course combines periods of:

• lecturing by the professor;
• discussion of their readings with the students;
• groupwork on the research report.

There is both an individual and a collective grade for each student. The individual grade results from an in-class, essay-based exam taken at the end of the semester. The collective grade is based on a research report prepared, in groups of 5 students, on one of the institutions of entrepreneurship.

The average quantity of weekly reading for class preparation amounts to one research article (50 pages). The actual and active reading of the assigned texts is a compulsory prerequisite for every session. Further work, amounting to an average of 2h/week over the whole semester, is required for the completion of the groupwork. Some time must also be set aside for revisions prior to the exam.