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{shortcode-8c0dd475ea3269f67b1a4d37d27db5cc232a1fc2}hen Josh Lerner first crossed the Charles River to teach at Harvard College, he wasn’t sure anyone would show up.
A longtime Harvard Business School professor and one of the world’s foremost experts on entrepreneurship, Lerner had spent his career teaching MBA students about ideating and funding companies. But when he floated the idea of bringing a class on entrepreneurship to the College during the pandemic, he thought it might flop.
“I was like, ‘I’m absolutely crazy,’” he said. “No one has ever taken a case class at Harvard College before — it’s just going to be completely bizarre.”
It wasn’t. In spring 2021, 40 students logged onto Engineering Sciences 94: Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the first course of its kind at the College. Within minutes of Lerner’s first question, 15 hands went up on Zoom.
“I just ran an experiment, and I’ve just got data that this is actually going to work,” Lerner recalled thinking at the time.
Five years later, entrepreneurship at the College has exploded. Once limited to extracurricular programs and social enterprise workshops, the College now offers half a dozen classes on startups, venture capital, and innovation.
The change is visible in numbers. This semester, ENG-SCI 30: “Startups: From Idea to Exit,” co-taught by Lerner and Spencer M. Rascoff ’97 — co-founder of Zillow and now the head of Tinder — has an enrollment of more than 300 students, roughly 100 more than staff anticipated. The course is also now one of the largest electives at the College, drawing nearly as many students as cornerstone classes like Computer Science 50 and Life Sciences 1A.
This year alone, two new courses added biotechnology and life sciences focuses to the mix, reflecting growing demand across disciplines. And next semester, another on startup finance — taught by Lerner and venture capitalist Kent Bennett of Bessemer Venture Partners — will join the lineup.
For Lerner, who spent decades watching HBS build a catalog of dozens of entrepreneurship courses, the College’s newfound enthusiasm fills a long-standing gap.
“It didn’t seem like a lot of course offerings were like the bread-and-butter we have at the Business School, which are entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurial marketing, all that kind of stuff,” he said.
His goal, he said, was to bring the “structured learning” of the Business School across the river — to give undergraduates a foundation before they dive into experiential programs at the Innovation Labs.
But the College’s embrace of entrepreneurship didn’t come easily.
Alain Viel, who teaches MCB 102: “Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship in the Life Sciences,” said that for years, the word “entrepreneurship” itself raised concerns among administrators.
“For a while, the College was kind of hesitant to push these kinds of courses because there was the word ‘entrepreneurship’ in it, and they thought it was too pre-professional,” he said.
Sam H. Magee, who leads entrepreneurship programming at the Office of Undergraduate Education, said he has encountered “healthy questioning” from Harvard administrators around entrepreneurship classes.
“It took me a while to figure out Harvard time, which is a little bit slower than MIT time,” he joked, recalling the decade he spent helping student startups at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The College’s hesitation reflects a broader tension between Harvard’s traditional focus on the liberal arts and the more applied mandate of startup education. While MIT has long embraced industry partnerships and hands-on learning, Harvard’s commitment to theory kept it at a distance — until its recent foray into engineering and innovation.
But Viel argued that the two approaches are not antithetical, but that they can, and should, co-exist.
“Instead of saying that creativity and entrepreneurship is something that is in addition to liberal arts education, it becomes a part of liberal arts education,” he said.
Viel added that courses like his help students connect classroom ideas to real-world application.
“You go to college, you get a liberal arts education, you graduate, and then you start to think about, ‘what kind of skills do I need to go and apply for that specific job?’” he said. “What we can do through creativity and entrepreneurship classes is bridge that gap.”
That bridge-building has also been central to the Lemann Program on Creativity and Entrepreneurship, developed by the late biologist Robert A. Lue and Brazilian investor Jorge Paulo Lemann ’61 in 2020, and now led by Magee. The program offers studio lab courses, CE10 and CE11, and provides workshops, funding, and an accelerator for student founders.
Laura S. Wegner ’25, who participated in the Lemann Program and is now a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, said the combination of academics, mentorship, and hands-on experience was rare and valuable.
“It is more like a class that joins academics plus an incubator setting,” she said of the LPCE. “You actually do the things that you should be doing and then also get advice and feedback on them.”
Students said the growing slate of startup courses has filled a long-empty niche at Harvard.
“Harvard and the liberal arts education keeps a lot of concepts and ideas in a bubble, sort of without context,” said Christopher B. Kim ’26, a Biomedical Engineering concentrator currently taking Life Sciences 132. “It’s really nice to have a class that’s extremely applied to what I’m going to be doing.”
Jang G. Choe ’26, who studies human and evolutionary biology and economics, said classes like LS-132, which focuses on biotechnology entrepreneurship, offer a low-stakes way to the workings of the industry.
“I think there are students who may gravitate toward more traditional paths like banking or consulting simply because they haven’t had the same exposure or the luxury to take risks early on,” he said. “That’s why it’s so meaningful to have more accessible spaces like this biotech entrepreneurship class.”
Lerner sees the interest as validation — and motivation to keep going. His next goal: to formalize entrepreneurship as a secondary field at the College.
“There’s a bunch of challenges that are there,” he acknowledged. “But I’m optimistic — we’ve got a bunch of exciting classes here, and it seems like there’s a lot of positive interest around this.”
Viel, for his part, hoped that enthusiasm continues to reshape Harvard’s understanding of the liberal arts.
“We should still continue to have a College that focuses on liberal arts education, but we need to integrate new aspects to adapt higher education to the society where we live,” he said.
—Staff writer Stephanie Dragoi can be reached at stephanie.dragoi@thecrimson.com.
—Staff writer Thamini Vijeyasingam can be reached at thamini.vijeyasingam@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @vijeyasingam.
