Teaching at PSU

I have been teaching at Penn State Great Valley School of Professional Studies (an AACSB accredited business school) as an Adjunct Professor since the Summer session of 2003. I teach several courses, including "BUSAD 575 - High Tech Venture Development", "BUSAD 511 - New Ventures 1", and "BUSAD 522 - New Ventures 2", all in the MBA program in the Management Division of the B-School. In the 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 school years, I teach "High Tech Venture Development" in the Fall, "New Ventures 2" in the Spring, and "New Ventures 1" in the Summer.

I have taught BUSAD 511.101 "New Ventures 1" during Fall, Spring and Summer sessions. New Ventures 1 is the first of the Entrepreneurship specialty courses leading to the New Ventures MBA degree. I teach from a minimum of 8 students to as many as 30, almost all of whom are full-time employed, and who seem to generally be in their early thirties (though their ages range from mid-20's to "mature"). Their combined work experience, maturity, and academic focus on Entrepreneurship provides the leverage to maximize the course's potential.

For example, I taught the New Ventures 1 course in the Summer of 2008, with the class having 23 students. We formed five teams, and during the course they delivered five outstanding Strategic Plans for the businesses they created for the course. The businesses were innovative, well thought out, and very well presented. I would bet on each and every one of them to be successful with the management teams that created them.

I generally teach New Ventures 2 in the Spring sessions, but the scheduling depends upon the course demand and other factors. New Ventures 2 concentrates on actually launching the business and how to get it going and run it well, whereas New Ventures 1 introduces the creation of the business, innovating new products, finding funding sources, defining the market, building the organization, .... Hope to see you there.

High Tech Venture Development is generally offered in the Fall. It is right in my "sweet spot" of subject material, being both entrepreneurial and tech-oriented. For a funny spin on High Tech Venture Development, see this YouTube clip by RichterScales.

Here are some examples of the courseware for the New Ventures 1 courses:

• New Ventures 1 Sample Syllabus
  
  
• Sample class schedule for a Summer I session.
  
  
• Teaching notes for New Ventures 1   (Note: A password is required to view this document)
The class notes are extensive and for the class they are broken into notes for each class. The notes for each night are then posted to the Penn State Angel (teaching) system for the students to have prior to class. This assists them in following the class and alleviates some of their note-taking chore. I generally assign as either required or optional reading from one to six posted articles, papers, extracts or other reading materials, also posted to Angel.

Here is the syllabus for the New Ventures 2 courses:

• New Ventures 2 Syllabus for Spring 2006

Note that I am teaching New Ventures 1, not 2, in the Spring of 2007. This is simply an example.


• Teaching notes for New Ventures 2   (Note: A password is required to view this document)
The course was based on Case Studies, both from our texts and student-produced cases. We used the cases extensively throughout the course and many of the teaching notes were simply background material, as were the text readings, sans cases. The teaching notes for this course were largely derived from the Houghton Mifflin Instructors sites for the two texts used in this course.

Here are some examples of the courseware for the High Tech Venture Development courses: