September 14, 2022
It takes a particular mindset to become a successful entrepreneur. A gift for innovation is certainly desirable, but equally important are the ability to spot a market opportunity, the perseverance to handle rejection and keep going, and the savvy to assemble and manage the right team. Few people understand this better than NYU Stern Professor of Entrepreneurship and Management Ari Ginsberg, who teaches The Entrepreneurial Mind in the MS Organization Management & Strategy (MSOMS) program.
Ginsberg’s focus in The Entrepreneurial Mind course is on "founder's dilemmas"—those critical early decisions founders must make with the minimal information available. For example, when is the right moment to start a company around your idea? Who should join you on the team? How would equity be distributed? How much power do you share with external investors? And if your venture is successful, how do you exit and move on to your next startup?
Ginsberg is an expert in the field of entrepreneurship, especially at Stern. As the original director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation focus area at the Stern School of Business, Ginsberg introduced an MBA degree specialization in entrepreneurship and innovation and founded a co-curricular new venture development program that provided students and alumni with workshops, mentoring, and seed funding through a business plan competition. Among the curriculum development initiatives he has worked on at Stern include courses that enable Stern graduate students to access maker space and technology development labs at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and to work together with graduate engineering students to acquire the knowhow necessary to commercialize frontier technologies successfully.
Professor Ginsberg lecturing in his course for the MS Organization Management & Strategy program
©Myaskovsky: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau.
This breadth of experience and familiarity with collaborative educational efforts serves him well while teaching in the joint MS program between Stern and NYU Shanghai. Many students in the MSOMS program will wish to bring their new skills back to China, which adds an extra dimension to the entrepreneurship course, Ginsberg said. “The dual value-added goals of the joint graduate program are achieved by designing and delivering a curriculum that teaches these students state-of-the-art decision-making and management tools that have been developed and taught in Stern programs, but also requires them to learn how to apply these tools to the Chinese context in which they will work. For example, in my entrepreneurship mindset course, students learn how to apply relevant key concepts, analytical frameworks, and decision-making tools by applying them to a new venture idea of their own that they would actually be developing in China rather than in the U.S. This serves to integrate the content-based ideas developed in the West with the eastern perspectives that shape how they can be applied in China.”
Since many MSOMS students are recent college graduates with little to no prior business school education or business experience, Ginsberg tailors the entrepreneurship course to the cohort. “I designed the course based on comprehensive data about the entrepreneurial backgrounds and interests of the enrolled students, whom I poll months before I finalize the course design.” The poll asks whether they have taken any undergraduate entrepreneurship courses, and what kind of, if any, entrepreneurial experience they have had. Students are also asked about their employment plans, whether and when they hope to found a startup, the type of product or service they would prefer to work on in a new venture setting, and their main motivation for becoming an entrepreneur.
After sharing the results with his students, Ginsberg said, “I then introduce foundational analytical frameworks to explain that the course is not just about how to become a successful entrepreneur, but how to become entrepreneurially minded in order to create new economic value in any type of organizational setting. The tools and analytical frameworks covered in the course are not just relevant for founding an independent startup, but also for creating new business ventures in established, or mature, corporations.”
Rather than teach from standard textbooks, Ginsberg curates a set of case studies and readings based on the students’ backgrounds and goals and his own years of course design and delivery. In addition, he explained, “Rather than relying on class lectures and exams to facilitate and evaluate student learning, I weave experiential learning assignments into the course, because they are necessary to advance students' abilities to identify and successfully resolve key startup challenges that they will face as they go about developing their own new venture ideas and make difficult decisions with limited resources under conditions of ambiguity and uncertainty.”
According to Sam Chen, MSOMS Class of 2023, Ginsberg’s approach is effective. Chen called the course “an incredibly valuable experience,” sharing that the feedback the professor provided on his group project was so valuable that “it would help refine my new business idea into a proposal that can ideally serve as the basis for an actual business plan or venture down the road.”
Professor Ginsberg and the MSOMS students
©Myaskovsky: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau.
As the MSOMS students head to NYU Shanghai for the fall and spring semesters, they will continue to build on these skills and knowledge in subsequent courses focused on innovation, managing change, collaboration, and managerial skills. Whether they end up starting their own business or joining an existing company, their entrepreneurial foundation will be instrumental to their success as creative thinkers and dynamic leaders.