MBA in Entrepreneurship expertise track Maastricht School of Management

The MBA is a generalist management program, but at MSM you can choose from different expertise tracks to fully align your MBA with your career ambitions, or to challenge yourself in new and unexplored areas.

The MBA expertise track in Entrepreneurship is designed for managers who thrive on a high return, and dynamic markets that lead to complex, innovative management challenges. This specialization offers courses on Entrepreneurship in Understanding Market Dynamics, Developing Distinctive Value Propositions, Developing Viable Business Models, and Designing & Scaling your Business.

Understanding Market Dynamics

If you are interested in starting a new business or developing a new business opportunity for your company, then understanding how and why markets change is essential for a successful strategy. In this course, you will learn how to derive the fundamental drivers that affect your organization. The course looks at three areas of market dynamics: industry dynamics, competitive dynamics, and organizational dynamics and how these different contexts influence the organization. Furthermore, you will learn how to carry out a scenario planning analysis, that will help you prepare your organization for future uncertainties.

Developing Distinctive Value Propositions

This course is focused on developing your competence at two important tasks for the launching of entrepreneurial ventures:

1. spotting opportunities,
2. developing product/service concepts that could be deployed to exploit market opportunities.

Entrepreneurial opportunities are rarely discovered through systematic search, yet systematic search can play a critical role in the enhancement of embryonic ideas for new business. Creativity plays a key role in entrepreneurship as it affects opportunity recognition, ideation, and the designing of value propositions. That is why this skills course helps you to develop your creative problem-solving skills. Of course, competence in creativity and value proposition design could also prove valuable outside entrepreneurship. Throughout the course, you will not be working in a classroom but in a true creativity lab: the ideas that you develop may have merit beyond this course.

Developing Viable Business Models

While a product or service may represent a compelling value proposition, it does not automatically turn into a commercial success. A sound and solid business model may allow you to increase your venture’s value creation and value capturing. In this course, you will be trained in the designing of business models through lectures, assigned readings, exercises, business cases, and group discussions. These insights will help you in developing business models that you could deploy to turn a value proposition into a viable business. Throughout the course, you will not be working in a classroom but in a true creativity lab: the ideas that you develop may have merit beyond this course.

Designing & Scaling your Business

This specialization course of the MSM MBA program prepares you to scale entrepreneurial ventures. The focus is on strategic growth options and organizational arrangements that make ventures better scalable. You will learn about developmental challenges that entrepreneurial ventures experience when growing and maturing. In addition to introducing common growth problems, this course builds on theoretical and empirical explanations to learn how entrepreneurs cope with developmental challenges. This course helps you develop a profound understanding of the diversity of growth challenges and growth options that ambitious entrepreneurs may face. By focusing on entrepreneurial growth, this course exposes you to the theory and practice of entrepreneurial management, it will help you develop a solid appreciation for the diversity of growth strategies that can be deployed, and growth patterns that can be observed in contemporary scale-ups.

The MBA specialization in Entrepreneurship is designed for managers who thrive on high return, and dynamic markets that lead to complex, innovative management challenges.

After having followed the specialization in Entrepreneurship you will understand the issues entrepreneurs in diverse markets are facing and you will be able to recognize new business opportunities. You will understand how to develop effective and profitable strategies that have both commercial and social benefits.

This expertise track offers courses on:

• Understanding Market Dynamics
• Developing Distinctive Value Propositions
• Developing Viable Business Models
• Designing & Scaling your Business