MBA Programs with an Entrepreneurial Focus

With entrepreneurship becoming the fifth most popular concentration at business schools today, we thought we’d share the Graduate Management Admission Council‘s recently published list of dozens of  b-schools that offer innovation and entrepreneurship concentrations. If you’ll remember from a few weeks ago, Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine released their annual ranking of the 2012 best graduate programs in entrepreneurship.

Several top-tier MBA programs have expanded the number of classes and centers devoted to entrepreneurship, and roughly 5% of full-time 2011 business school students  founded their own companies right after graduation.  The jump has been particularly notable at places like the Wharton School, Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT Sloan School of Management.

For many people, an MBA program serves as a business incubator where they can develop their business idea or product in a low-risk atmosphere, and network and build relationships with partners and potential investors.

Granted, the best programs acknowledge that they don’t actually create entrepreneurs””they merely nurture innate ability. But whether you fall into the camp of nature or nurture as it relates to entrepreneurship, most people would agree that an entrepreneur needs to know the same basic skills as someone running a more established company. After all, every company began as a startup, launched by an entrepreneur.

If anything, you need to know all of the basics as opposed to specializing in one area. Our advice to current and prospective MBA students interested in entrepreneurship is to pay close attention in all of your classes””even in the areas you plan to outsource as soon as you have the budget.

(infographic courtesy of MBA.com)