Courses to take at university

Hi- I guess from personal experience the best way to actually learn the spirit of entrepreneurship, is to be around entrepreneurs, nothing would beet a great network of experienced people and to observe and learn from them. As the Chinese proverb says: "A wise man learns from experience, a wiser man learns from the experience of others."

And i guess you can always look for entrepreneurship class. Management skill training and leadership would be a plus too. Just keep in mind class courses (other than good entrepreneurship class) wont teach the REAL entrepreneurship spirit.

I'd definitely find some classes where there is a lot of group work involved. In your groups, try and lead everybody; you learn a lot about yourself that way.

Try and get into a basic finance and basic accounting class.

Finally, talk to your professors about wanting to learn about entrepreneurship -- they usually have a lot to say.

I have taken a lot of entrepreneurship related classes in my MBA (different schools have different focuses). Some focused on how to generate ideas and then organize them and launch them and some focused on case studies from successful and failed ventures and included a lot of guest speakers who had either started businesses or turned around other businesses. For this class, we actually also had to find a real company, evaluate it from different aspects and then pitch to VCs why it is a good buy (our team won:D although we didn't end up buying the company). Other classes included business plan writing and competition, as well as real-life like, team-based ventures with tight deadlines, investors (alumni and real investors in our case) that you had to pitch to, customers that were complaining, etc.

The Cisco Entrepreneur Institute at AMIDEAST/Lebanon will start offering the "Starting a Business" workshop on June 5. This is one of a series of workshops developed by Cisco, Stanford University, Cornell University, and My Own Business, Inc. in cooperation with numerous other partners. The 55-hour workshop is designed to empower individuals who want to start a small to medium-sized business in Lebanon and is delivered by a successful local entrepreneur with the involvement of guest speakers and workshop advisors who are local entrepreneurs or experts on specific workshop topics. Participants will stay connected through an online learning community and mentorship program and will have access to numerous resources including Cisco's eTube and EntreOasis websites. If you would like more information, please contact AMIDEAST at tel. no. 01-989901, ext. 234.