A Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation was announced Wednesday at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Dean Douglas T. Breeden made the announcement during the annual Entrepreneurship Symposium, sponsored by the Fuqua Entrepreneurial and Venture Capital Club.
Fuqua is creating the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation to advance scholarship in these particular areas. The center will also expand and support the MBA Program for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Fuqua School and support Duke University s related efforts to spawn new ventures and transfer technology to the commercial sector.
The Center will take an interdisciplinary approach by collaborating with other schools within Duke, including the Pratt School of Engineering, the Duke Medical School , and the Duke Law School , says Breeden. Conducting world class research on entrepreneurship and innovation and integrating it into our educational program will distinguish our center from other entrepreneurship centers. We expect the center to place Fuqua among a very small handful of business schools known for research excellence and research-based education in entrepreneurship and innovation.
Breeden also announced that Wesley Cohen, the Frederick C. Joerg Professor of Business Administration at Fuqua, will be the centers faculty director. The center will promote broad research that builds on the existing strengths of the faculty of Fuqua and other university units in business strategy, economics, finance, decision making, health services and marketing.
"One of the rationales for the creation of the center is to promote academic scholarship in a wide range of fields, says Cohen. The center will also provide guidance to individuals and firms who wish to start or assess new ventures in innovation-intensive settings and markets both regionally and nationally.
The center will provide Duke MBA students an opportunity to combine classroom learning with practical application in entrepreneurship. Currently, Fuqua's full-time MBA curriculum already includes numerous courses on entrepreneurship and innovation, including Entrepreneurial Strategy, Entrepreneurial Execution, Entrepreneurial Finance, New Product Development, and the Duke New Ventures Clinic. More than a dozen of Fuqua's full-time faculty members currently engage in research and teaching that focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship.