EPS3531 Failure is Good: as Long as You Act, Learn, Build and Repeat
4 Advanced Management Credits
Among the building blocks of Entrepreneurship education, this course focuses on “failure”. Is it relevant? Should we even care? Is it important? Does it even matter? The assumption is YES, and we will examine this hypothesis by exploring academic journal articles, learning from case discussions and rom experiences of entrepreneurs including my/yourself. After all, Entrepreneurial Though and Action (ET&A) will not necessarily make any given effort more successful (at least no research so far). ET&A does not guarantee success; some (but not all) will fail. But knowing how and under what conditions “failure can be good”, employing ET&A will enable more individuals to try, try sooner, often fail sooner, try more times/multiple simultaneous ventures thus making personal success more likely and sooner. These in turn will increase the aggregate number of successful ventures for society as a whole. In essence, the course will shed positive light on the dark side of entrepreneurship. There is often good in failure-how so? There is often a better way to fail- how so? Entrepreneurship permeated Babson College; it is considered the liberal arts of business education. Keep an open mind, think outside of the box, re-evaluate view of failure and intellectually challenge your peers as well as yourself!
Prerequisites: None