Program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Launched at Stanford GSB

Stanford GSB will launch a new 20-week evening Program in Innovation and Entrepreneurship (PRIE), in January. Applications for this certificate program are now available.

Aimed at industry participants who do not have an MBA, as well as entrepreneurial graduate students, the non-degree program will expose participants to fundamentals of business and practical aspects of moving a business idea forward. The 60-person program will bring together Stanford PhD and other non-business graduate students with Silicon Valley innovators, scientists, and engineers to gain greater understanding of the pathways to commercializing innovations and to learn general management skills.

Since 2006, the business school has conducted a successful four-week program, the Summer Institute for Entrepreneurship (SIE), which teaches entrepreneurship to non-business graduate students in life sciences, engineering, and the humanities.

The new PRIE certificate program builds on that success to extend this learning content to a wider variety of individuals.

“Our goal is to expose participants to the fundamentals of business while also engaging in the practical aspects of identifying, evaluating, and moving entrepreneurial ideas forward,” said Peter Reiss, faculty director of both programs.

The new PRIE winter classes will be open to Stanford master’s or doctoral students or postdocs as well as men and women from Silicon Valley who have strong technical backgrounds and training, and who hold graduate degrees in their fields of expertise. All participants should have high proficiency in their field, perhaps even some business experience, but must not have had previous graduate business education, said Reiss.

“This new program will provide graduate students and graduates in non-business fields with the management knowledge and skills they need to become leaders in established and startup organizations,” said Garth Saloner, dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Saloner, along with Stanford University President John Hennessy, developed the original idea for the summer program as a way to help graduate students in non-business disciplines to collaborate with one another and benefit from the resources of the business school.

“The program is designed to be innovative, to get emerging entrepreneurs out of their daily environments and expose them to different ways of thinking and interacting in the business world,” said Aimee Slobin, associate director of both programs. The new program “provides participants from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to learn about business fundamentals and bring a venture idea to life in a collaborative environment.”

The new PRIE winter program will be housed in the school’s Knight Management Center, due to open just weeks before the first PRIE session in January. The deadline for applications is November 15.