Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship Academic Programs

Undergraduate Major and Minor

The Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship (SME) department gives future professionals the communication, leadership, and strategic thinking skills to successfully develop and manage businesses worldwide.

Undergraduate students majoring in entrepreneurial studies, international business, and non-profit management also take many courses in our department.  In addition to learning how to construct effective business plans and make sound decisions within unstructured environments, students gain experience applying core functional business principles to management problems.

MBA Program - Area of Emphasis

An MBA with emphasis in Management provides students with vital knowledge and understanding of how to analyze the changing competitive landscape faced by organizations, the leadership skills to develop and implement action plans to provide organizations with a competitive advantage, the entrepreneurship skills to recognize and develop new business opportunities, and the managerial skills necessary to successfully deal with the challenges of innovation, manage a diverse workforce and navigate the political landscape within a firm.

In addition, our MBA program offers several opportunities for experiential learning. One such opportunity is the course New Product Design & Business Development. This is a two semester course available to full-time and part-time MBA students. MBA students may register for one or both semesters (ENTR 6041 and ENTR 6042). Alternatively, full-time MBA students may enroll in the Carlson Ventures Enterprise, which enables students to work on a variety of innovation-related projects. Both the NPDBD course and the CVE experience enable students to work on live projects for sponsoring companies.

PhD Program

The PhD in Business Administration with a concentration in Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship focuses on the external relations between the organization and its environment as well as the internal processes of organizational adaptation and change.

It covers three broad areas of concentration: strategy; organizations; and business, government, and society with a strong international element.