The MBA in Entrepreneurship (MBAe) helps you gain the necessary skills, meet the right people and develop your entrepreneurial project. It is for people who have ideas and want to see them through either as a start-up entrepreneur or as a change agent in existing organisations. Read all this before? Skip to next steps
Jochen: Many people have great ideas, but it's often the next step in the journey when you're trying to realize that idea that's the difficult one. It's backing yourself, taking that risk and establishing that startup. There's no shortage of good ideas, but what we find that people need is 4 things: key knowledge, the entrepreneurial mindset, self confidence and networks.
We believe that we can create the conditions in which the entrepreneurial mindset can be taught and your ideas can grow.
Yuxin: It's quite overwhelming information, but it's really fun, especially learning with a group of really smart people.
David: What makes the MBA special is the fact that it's tailored for students, it's informed by great research and it's applied. Students get to work with their material straight away. That opportunity to actually use the knowledge immediately is a great benefit of this program.
Jochen: The UTS MBA and entrepreneurship is designed as 3 graduate certificates. Each of these certificates is helping you to build the business knowledge, the relationships and the self confidence to achieve your goals.
Melissa: Two things that you should consider before joining this course is what is your passion and what is the purpose? This is really important, because the subjects are designed in a way to enable you to create that purpose and to find a mechanism or a way of designing an organization that will allow you to achieve that purpose.
Luke: I'm a full believer in what the course is trying to do and I can honestly say, so far it's been absolutely amazing.
Jochen: The course content is being covered, UTS also delivers a whole range of other activities and that could include master classes, hackathons or incubators that will help you to build the networks and get in touch with the kind of people that you need to progress your idea.
Jochen: I'm really excited about this program, because it provides the opportunity for students to meet and to work with like minded people. The MBA entrepreneurship is about change. It's about making things happen. It's for those people who want to grow their idea into something that matters to themselves, to their community or to the world at large.
UTS Business School’s Master of Business Administration in Entrepreneurship (MBAe) is a unique 1 or 2-year intensive MBA designed for entrepreneurs and innovators. The flexible modular structure of the program allows students to study the program in stages while developing and working on their entrepreneurial or innovation project. Students also have access to a project space - the Venture Lab, a mentor program and non-award based master classes and events with entrepreneurs and industry partners.
Course structure
The MBA in Entrepreneurship is uniquely designed as three integrated modules, Commercialisation, Entrepreneurship and Venture Acceleration, that build your capabilities and confidence as you progress through the program.
Autumn: Commercialisation - Gaining and applying key business skills
6CP (intensive block classes)
Develop an understanding of how finance and accounting information is used to support strategic and operational decision making for early ventures. You will gain a basic understanding of finance and accounting concepts and help plan and deliver financial management-related aspects of early ventures and small businesses. Teaching staff Associate Professor Prabhu Sivabalan and Professor Dave Michayluk
6CP (intensive block classes)
Gain a basic understanding of how to collect and interpret data about markets, customer behaviour, experiences and sales to help a path to market for new ventures and launch new and innovative products or services. Remove much of the guess work from start-ups as you learn about market segmentation, marketing and sales strategies and how use analytical techniques to make evidence-based and data-driven decisions. Teaching staff William Page (opens external LinkedIn profile)
12CP (intensive block classes)
Understand the operations of an early-stage enterprise.
Integrates your newly formed knowledge in accounting, finance, data analysis and marketing with entrepreneurship, innovation, commercialisation and strategic management as you learn how to evaluate a business opportunity and develop it through the various stages of commercialisation towards an operational business model for early-stage enterprises. Teaching staff Professor David Brown
Spring: Entrepreneurship - Building relationships and strategic capacity
6CP (intensive block classes)
Learn how to be an effective leader and manage people and organisational growth in early-stage enterprises. You will examine core issues such as setting expectations, understanding individual behaviour and motivation, job and culture design, managing performance, mentoring and developing staff, and providing effective rewards and incentives for good performance. Teaching staff Dr Tim Rayner(opens external LinkedIn profile)
6CP (intensive block classes)
This subject develops knowledge in governance, contracting and negotiation for early-stage enterprises. Learn how to set up a business, get things started and operational. The key aspects covered are business law, agreements, corporate structures, intellectual property, professional advice and other relevant regulations. You also learn about principles of ethical business practices and develop your negotiation skills. Teaching staff Lynne Teo(opens external LinkedIn profile)
12CP (weekly evening plus intensive block classes)
Work on a live start-up or innovation project in this subject that focuses on the professional practices of developing corporate and entrepreneurial strategies. Drawing on knowledge of strategy, design thinking, data analytics and start-up methods, you will work with real clients to investigate a strategic challenge and create innovative solutions and recommendations. The aim of this subject is to provide you with the knowledge and skills required for examining, designing, testing, improving or redesigning viable businesses. Teaching staff Dr Jochen SchweitzerandTarra van Amerongen (opens external LinkedIn profile)
Summer: Venture acceleration - Developing your business key value proposition
6CP (block mode)
This subject helps you appreciate your entrepreneurial purpose, integrate your profile, build your resilience and learn about alternative business models. Founding a venture requires imagination, courage and strength of character. Every founder is different and Silicon Valley best practices may not serve all. Founders need to identify their own 'why' and 'how' to cradle their idea, so that they build a business that suits their character, team and market need. This subject combines purpose, resilience training and systems thinking to helps founders find a business model and not run out of steam.. Teaching staffDr Ele Jansen (opens link to external site)
Equip yourself with the knowledge and tools necessary to leverage international opportunities for your start-up. This subject investigates the dynamics of launching and managing a business in different international environments, as well as the additional oversight challenges that come with growing an existing business into new territories. The subject will give you a global lens through which you can test and validate an emerging business idea or start-up.
12CP (block mode)
This capstone subject is about creating or re-thinking an entrepreneurial proposal around a clear customer need. Develop the building blocks of your venture by aligning resources, processes and revenue streams with a new value proposition as you design, test, improve and redesign your business model before pitching your proposal to a panel of experts and potential investors. Teaching staff Dr Jochen Schweitzerand UTS Entrepreneur in ResidenceTom Bass (opens external LinkedIn profile)
Ann H.: I really wanted to have my thinking challenged.
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The way I approach the world.
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David L.-T.: I think my brain is almost exploding with the amount of knowledge and skills, and
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different things that we picked up along the way.
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So, there's a lot to process, but I loved it.
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Liam D.: I really feel like I've changed significantly over the last 12 months.
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I think differently.
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Dr. Schweitzer: The MBAE is a one-year intensive programme.
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You join the programme with an idea in mind that you continue to develop.
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We help you to learn new skills and techniques.
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We challenge the way you're thinking, and we help you to get things done.
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David L.-T.: You could take whatever you're working on and you would be equipped with
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the skill to be able to build out a business model, pitch that business model, attract
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funding, scale a business, whatever it was.
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Liam D.: It's got the perfect mix of theory and practical application.
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Dr. Jansen: They have two courses that they're doing in parallel right now.
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One is the Global Entrepreneurship Course with future scouts, where we're going really
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wide with imagination.
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The other one is the Venture, Pitching, and Planning Course.
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That's where they learn the nitty-gritty hands-down, hard skills, business modelling, financial
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planning skills.
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And a few weeks after this, they do their pitch of their own business idea, and that's
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when it all comes together.
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David L.-T.: One of my favourite courses of the MBAE was the course that Ele taught.
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She really wants to help people find their fit.
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Dr. Jansen: When UTS gave me the chance to really be radical in this course, I thought,
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"Wow.
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What a gift.
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To work with business students and show them some of the values that come from humanities,"
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because I'm an anthropologist.
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Damian A.: I think it's a very experiential process.
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She's very good at identifying very interesting people that are literally sometimes a bit
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out of the box.
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Ishan M.-S.: What we did is we took an approach of play and prototyping to understand complex
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systems that stimulates their curiosity, their imagination, that they have fun with, yet
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is still grounded in very concrete terms.
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There are very disruptive technologies that are emerging, that are shifting the nature
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of work, shifting the nature of collaboration, shifting the nature of production, shifting
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the nature of distribution, and communication.
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Tom B.: The Venture Planning & Pitching subject is all about execution.
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It is taking all the hard skills that the students have learned throughout the entire
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year, and applying that to their [inaudible 00:02:29]idea.
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So that by the end of the whole course, they have a solid, fully-validated start-up, or
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even a social enterprise that they can pitch to the whole world on Venture Day.
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Liam D.: Working on these projects gave us the opportunity to learn while we were progressing
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through the things that we were interested in.
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Maria C.: My favourite part of the course was working on my venture.
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I was not doing kind of academic things, but doing things.
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Liam D.: One of the most positive things is no one sees any barriers to anything.
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They constantly look for solutions to problems.
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Maria C.: I'm going to use all the part of empathy, design thinking, business model,
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innovation, canvas, value propositions, all those different tools that we learned, for
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my future work.
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Ann H.: One of the things that I have loved the most has been my fellow students.
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Dr. Jansen: The students are amazing.
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But that word ... like, they're beyond amazing.
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Maria C.: Some from the public sector, some from the private sector.
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I find it really interesting to be part of that cohort, and bringing in different experiences
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from other parts of the world.
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David L.-T.: The strength of UTS Business School, in a lot of ways, is their engagement
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with the outside world, the entrepreneurial community, and the academics that do have
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real-world experience.
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Liam D.: Oh, I'm hoping that we all stay in contact, both with the staff of UTS and with
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the rest of the cohort.
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I really want to see where everyone ends up.
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Tom B.: If I had access to this course at the beginning of my own entrepreneurial career,
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I would have saved myself many years of grief in making rookie mistakes before I actually
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hit a home run.
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Dr. Jansen: I think what we've created is an innovation pedagogy, which means a way
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to teach innovation that touches into the precipice of something that's emerging that
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we can't really name yet?
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But it feels like the future of education.
Flexibility is the key
Don't put your career or entrepreneurial dreams on hold. The MBAe is designed to be undertaken while you work, with classes mostly at night and on weekends. While the full MBA in Entrepreneurship can be completed in one calendar year you can also:
complete the MBAe over two years by reducing your study load
start with the Graduate Certificate of Commercialisation, which consists of the first module, to get a taste of what it will be like to study the MBAe. This may also be an option for people with professional work experience but no prior university education
At the conclusion of the MBAe, students pitch their venture, refined and perfected over the previous year, to experts, entrepreneurs and potential investors. In 2017 the winning project, Dlivee, secured $25,000 in seed-funding and support. Learn more about the 2018 event here and in the video below.
Dr Jochen Schweitzer: This room has filled with people now which is really wonderful to see. So a big welcome to everyone. This is Venture Day. We already went through a first round of 16 pitches and I just quickly want to announce who's going to be our final 10 presenters.
Professor Andrew Parfitt:
We've had a very exciting day and there are a few people who are probably even a little bit more excited now with the later part of the programme. We're delighted that we've celebrating here the first Venture Day, but also the end of the first year of this great program.
Ann Hoban: Today was a great day when we all had an opportunity to present on our individual projects.
Annette McClelland: This was the final day to allow us to show off all the great we've done in five small minutes.
Michael Griffin: Bit of a mixed bag of looking forward to it and being terrified by it.
Petra Andren: You had projects that were more in the social impact space and you had projects that I could see could potentially become profitable businesses. Always good to present what you've done to a panel of people that are from the real world and to get constructive feedback.
Liam Daley: I'm Liam Daley, founder of Dlivee. The customer controls the purchase so the customer should control the delivery.
Today's been absolutely fantastic. It's more than I could have imagined.
Lance Kalish: And I know it's still early, but where do you see yourself specifically?
Peta Portelli: I'd love to take it into the wearable technology space eventually.
Petra Andren: But would you consider that, partnering with somebody who knows manufacturing?
David Langford: How do you intend to address that issue through the integration of the variety of apps?
Ali Linz: If my delivery options are different today than my default ones.
Maria Cadena: When I got there, I was confident of what I had, and when I finished, I couldn't believe the amount of applause I got.
Petra Andren: I think the students really benefited from that and, of course, being a judge I benefited from it as well because I saw some amazing ideas.
David Lillo-Trynes: I was just so happy to get answers and happy to talk about what we were working on. It's pretty nerve-wracking but I feel really good now.
Dr Jochen Schweitzer: I think it was an incredible job that you did in presenting this so smoothly, so all that practising has really paid out I think.
Professor David Brown: People are becoming the custodians of their own destiny and if there's a place in which we really see this, this is in entrepreneurial activity in all it's different forms.
Petra Andren: I thought the presentations were terrific. Look, just another observation, I did my MBA about 11 years ago now and I was the only woman. So great to see that there are a lot of women presenters today. And teams that are men and women, that's going in the right direction. So great. But great job everyone.
John Lee: I'll repeat those words. I think the entrepreneurship and innovation in Australia is in very good hands.
Ali Linz: The pitches were of an outstanding quality in content, but also in presentation. Well done.
David Langford: The results in the marking were very close. The third prize tonight, Lift Me.
The second prize is Tekuma.
And the first prize winner, Dlivee.
Petra Andren: Not only were there a lot of great ideas, but the pattern behind them, and you could tell that a lot of these students will actually follow through and I think we're going to see some amazing businesses as a result. Really entrepreneurship is something that you will only learn by doing, but this course is exactly that. These students have taken an idea and then gone out into the real world and tested it, so they are actually learning by doing as well as learning about those vital tools, finance, intellectual property, pathway to market, all those things, it combines. I think it's a great initiative and I don't know any other school that does it. So good on UTS.
The student experience
The MBAe challenges the boundaries of years of professional experience.
Ann Hoban
MBAe graduate and Director City Life at City of Sydney
It has the perfect mix of theory and practical application...
Liam Daly
MBAe graduate, founder Delivee
Entrepreneurship is something you only learn by doing, and this course does exactly that.
Petra Andrén
CEO Cicada Innovations and MBAe Venture Day Judge
How your year will look
All classes in the MBAe are taught either on weeknights or weekends. To get a feel for how your year will look, check out the current MBAe cohort's calendar. Note that your year's classes may change.
