Interest in entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School is at an all-time high. Ninety percent of the MBA Class of '98, for instance, took one of the courses in the Entrepreneurial Management curriculum. Fifty percent took two, and a quarter took three or more. Some twenty HBS faculty members teach and do research in this field, including Professor Joseph Lassiter, who is putting his own imprimatur on the MBA elective Entrepreneurial Marketing, a joint offering of the School's Marketing and Entrepreneurial Management units.

Focusing on those high-potential startups and private equity-backed buyouts whose objective is either to double sales for an existing business or build $50 million per year of new business in less than five years, Lassiter has established several goals for the more than two hundred students currently enrolled in the class. For example, he wants them to learn how to manage the transition from the products and customers an enterprise has at the beginning of its existence to those it needs to achieve rapid growth, as well as to understand the effective execution of sales and marketing tactics in an entrepreneurial environment. After all, he smiles, "no matter how great a product may be, it doesn't amount to anything unless you can sell it."

To accomplish his objectives, Lassiter has undertaken a major course development effort with the help of Lecturer Michael J. Roberts , executive director of Entrepreneurial Studies, and the resources of the School's California Research Center (CRC), located in the heart of Silicon Valley and headed by HBS alumna Christina L. Darwall. Plugging Harvard Business School faculty into the region's technology, new venture, and venture capital networks, the CRC, which was established in the summer of 1997, has already proved invaluable in facilitating the development of new cases and scholarship.

Through the CRC, for instance, Lassiter and Roberts learned of entrepreneur Peter J. Goettner, the founder of DigitalThink, a Web-based information technology training company. In two cases featuring Goettner, "DigitalThink: Startup" and "DigitalThink: Building a Sales Force," students learn about the skills required to sell and adapt products in evolving markets. In "Chemdex," another CRC case written especially for the course, students discuss a number of financing and implementation issues that face company founder David P. Perry as he attempts to launch a Web-based specialty chemicals venture.

	The idea is to create the future you want, rather than wait for it to happen to you.

The cases alone, however, don't tell the whole story. The protagonists in these and many other Entrepreneurial Marketing cases come to class to discuss their experiences firsthand. "I want to bring the entrepreneurs themselves to the classroom and learn -- along with my students -- what the real lessons are in these operations," says Lassiter.

As a required part of the course, students contribute to the body of knowledge by completing field-based research projects that require in-depth analysis of specific new venture companies. Several students from the Class of '98, for example, undertook a marketing and strategy analysis for Harmonics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to help target its new product -- an interactive CD package enabling untrained "musicians" to jam with their favorite recording artists -- to its most likely buyers. Another team engaged in a study of the impact of electronic commerce on the sales information systems of Silicon Valley -- based Siebel Systems, identifying ways for the firm to modify its business model as more of its customers do transactions over the Internet. Along with the 50 studies completed last spring, the 75 projects under way this fall will become part of a burgeoning course information base.

"Entrepreneurial Marketing also gives students a resource-based model they can use to understand, in a highly structured way, the essential ingredients of the marketing process -- and how to increase the likelihood of success," notes HBS professor William A. Sahlman, whose research, along with that of Professor Howard H. Stevenson , serves as a foundation for the course's treatment of topics in entrepreneurial finance and management. Among other "tools of the trade," students study Sahlman's concept of "dynamic FIT management," which lays out the critical elements of entrepreneurial organizations (namely, people and resources, opportunity, context, and deals), and Stevenson's model of entrepreneurial management "as the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources currently controlled."

In addition, the course uses a framework developed by Lassiter showing how successful ventures obtain and use information from customers to modify their products and services, as well as how they continually look for highly qualified partners and managers to implement these changes. "The idea," says Lassiter, "is to create the future you want, rather than wait for it to happen to you."

Such an approach, he emphasizes, is usually achieved by entrepreneurs who hire the right people to fit their organizations' needs. "Studies of entrepreneurship," he concludes, "consistently show the overwhelming importance of the people who work in a venture. Making sure that they focus on opportunity rather than resources and that they organize themselves in such a way as to make decisions quickly are keys to success in these enterprises."

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