From Lab to Market: Learning Entrepreneurial Marketing Through Multi-Semester, Stage-Gate, Capstone Project in STEM MBA

Entrepreneurs build successful businesses by taking innovative ideas from research labs to market. This article describes a pedagogical approach and its outcomes in utilizing a multi-stage, multi-course, and multi-semester capstone integrative project to teach entrepreneurial marketing (EM) of early-stage technologies. Herein we explain concepts and practices that enable the learning needed within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) MBA programs to commercialize and market products and services arising from new technologies. The pedagogy follows a four-course sequence that applies strategic frameworks and tools to develop opportunity space for a patented idea, develop the idea into product options, undertake customer discovery, build marketing and sales strategies, and translate opportunities into venture planning. These lab-to-market outcomes are accomplished by applying deliberate practice-based action learning methods to build students’ knowledge bases and problem-solving process skills that increase their entrepreneurial expertise. Through learner engagement in a sequence of innovative, data-driven, analytical processes that focus on identifying, validating, and strategizing around scalable new ideas, this pedagogy enables students to learn EM skills that can be applied to different industries and companies at various stages of development but with an emphasis on early-stage technologies.