Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Liberal Arts

Catalog description

Entrepreneurs and liberal arts graduates share a surprisingly broad array of learned traits. Both rely on well-trained habits of critical, analytical, and systems thinking, effective oral and written communication, perspective taking, coalition building, and intercultural competence to understand, challenge, and transform the limits of conventional systems and practices. For entrepreneurs, this training leads to the creation of new and innovative nonprofit and for-profit ventures; for liberal arts professionals, this training is often used to develop, expand, and alter our understanding and appreciation of the ever-shifting contours of the human experience. When integrated deliberately, this course prepares undergraduate students to imagine innovations and create ventures that add value to our understanding, experience, and expression of the liberal arts. Entrepreneurship, which cultivates self-efficacy and personal agency as professional learning behaviors, is perhaps especially salient for the liberal arts, which tend not to be prescriptively careerist. In this way, students who take this course can more intentionally pursue creative career work that extends the value and experience of their undergraduate liberal arts education.