To receive this training, students often look outside the walls of the Law School.

Alain Goubau, a third year at the Law School, cross registered at MIT as a second year and took an incubator-style class called “Energy Ventures”. As a result of contacts he made and ideas he helped form during the course, Goubau co-founded Altaeros Energies—a company that is developing a novel kind of wind turbine.

“Taking that class [and] working yourself through a business plan for three months really forces you to think a lot,” Goubau says. He adds after the class was over he said to himself, “Now that we’ve thought about it, let’s try it.”

He said that meeting students with similar interests was a bonus of the class, noting that the first three weeks of class seemed like “speed dating” as students met and discussed their ideas. The interaction did not stop there. Students—a mix of policy, business, and engineering students—openly critiqued their peers’ ideas, using the course as a forum to discover the most practical and efficient ideas regarding renewable energy sources.

Kaja says the Law School should support this kind of programming, in addition to the foundational classes already offered.

“They’re still at the initial stages of setting [the program] up,” Kaja says. “It’s really important as they lay the groundwork for supporting entrepreneurship [to realize] that entrepreneurship is fundamentally a practical thing. It’s incredibly important steps that they’re taking to practically enabling entrepreneurship. That’s what made the incubator classes at Sloan so successful.”

Robb London, a spokesperson for the Law School, says that some courses introduced to teach entrepreneurship do touch on business planning but that students can and are encouraged to cross-register at Harvard Business School. David N. Back, a second year at the Law School, however, says that cross registering puts an unnecessarily large burden on the student to negotiate with teachers and administrators across schools and that schedules are not always lined up.

While Sloan-style incubator classes may not be offered at the Law School, Harvard has announced plans for a forum for students across the University to meet and discuss ideas earlier this year. The Innovation Lab, a new program that will open later this year at the Business School, aims to facilitate interaction between students with similar entrepreneurial dreams.

But one program like the Innovation Lab is not enough, according to Back. Back, who is working on a project involving transportation in India, says that though the Law School has begun to offer more courses and bring in more faculty specializing in entrepreneurship, it is still a relatively “small niche” at the Law School. He says the University—not the Law School—is holding back the entrepreneurial potential of students.

“The wealth of knowledge at Harvard is so extremely and unfortunately segmented,” Back says. “It needs to increase student collaboration.”

Back says he believes that the University should facilitate a larger program for entrepreneurship across all schools, hence enabling cross-school projects. For one start-up, he suggested, an architect at the Design School could work with a real estate specialist at the Business School, a budding real estate attorney at the Law School, and a city planning and urban development specialist at the Kennedy school.

Though he agrees that the Innovation Lab will start that kind of collaboration, Back says he hopes collaboration can be facilitated by reforming the steep requirements for cross-registering and truly recalibrating all school calendars. He says that it makes sense to have law-related programs to prepare young entrepreneurs at the Law School, and other resources should be distributed throughout the University for students to take advantage of.

“It should be easier to take advantage of opportunities elsewhere,” Back says. “The University has actively discouraged, and has been a huge impediment, of entrepreneurial activity not just at the law school, but across the University.”

—Staff writer Caroline M. McKay can be reached at carolinemckay@college.harvard.edu.