HBS

From The Intelligent Entrepreneur:

When Management of New Enterprises appeared in the 1947 course catalog, it was the first time any course at HBS had used the word "entrepreneur" in its description, or focused on problems faced by people in new businesses.

The course proved wildly popular.  HBS had a great chance to be at the forefront of entrepreneurial research and teaching.

But the school allowed the opportunity to fall by the wayside.

Why? Well, because it was the 1950s.  Harvard Business School was practically a flagship for the era of corporate America and the man in the gray flannel suit.

As a later HBS account of its own history put it, an inclination toward entrepreneurship was seen as a "personality defect," and the prototypical entrepreneur was presumed to be a chronic malcontent.

The HBS placement office loved big companies.  After all, their recruiters showed up, made offers, and kept the schools employment stats high.

Professors who wanted to win tenure focused on subjects that the employers of HBS graduates wanted them to mastercorporate finance, for example, and general management of large organizations.

Now scroll forward to the 1960s and 1970s.  HBS students pushed back, at least a little.  For example, group of students raised $5,000 to run a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal asking small, entrepreneurial businesses to come interview on campus.

But while students oversubscribed just about every entrepreneurship class the business school offered, the subject had almost no stature among academics, as one history put it. By 1980, very few entrepreneurship courses existed at HBS at all. Those that did exist were often listed in the course catalog with the initials "TBA"---to be announced---where the professors' names would normally go.

Finally, in the early 1980s, the school started to change.

Howard Stevenson, a veteran HBS professor who had left for a career in private business, returned at the invitation of the new dean and began to develop a real entrepreneurship curriculum. Around the same time, the school surveyed its alumni, and the results were a shock.

Half of its graduates claimed to be entrepreneurs fifteen years after graduation. They tended to be happier, healthier, and less likely to be divorced than their classmates who worked for large firms. For the most part, they loved what they did. As Stevenson put it, they never wanted to retire.

The e curriculum he and his colleagues designed, Entrepreneurial Management, was broken into five sections, each representing a stage in the process of entrepreneurship.

Evaluate the opportunity.
Assess required resources.
Acquire the resources.
Manage the venture.
Harvest the value.

Most important, Stevenson and his colleagues become evangelists for their cause. Their core conviction, reflected in every aspect of the new curriculum, was that entrepreneurship can be learned.