Master of Science in Technological Entrepreneurship

The Master of Science in Technological Entrepreneurship STEM program gives aspiring high-tech entrepreneurs the skills and knowledge they need to make their ideas a reality.

Drawing on Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business, Institute of Design, and Chicago-Kent College of Law, the program provides students—particularly those with technical backgrounds—with a comprehensive curriculum to explore innovative, entrepreneurial, and design-thinking approaches in their work.

Collaboration, networking, and mentoring are woven throughout the program, and strong connections with Chicago’s vibrant entrepreneurial community and Illinois Tech’s innovation-focused groups and resources provide a wide range of opportunities for hands-on experiences.

Stuart’s Master of Science in Technological Entrepreneurship (STEM) program provides future technological entrepreneurs with the scientific and quantitative managerial skills to successfully engage in entrepreneurial activities, such as developing a business idea, commercializing a technology, or working as an intrapreneur to drive innovation within a tech-based company.

Courses cover essential entrepreneurial skills and knowledge, including but not limited to ideation, market recognition, customer discovery, prototype design, financial modeling, visualization and data analytics, and social media marketing analytics.

Stuart School of Business is a global leader in bridging technology and business, offering distinctive education that provides students with the knowledge and skillsets to become outstanding professionals in economics, finance, analytics, marketing, business, public administration, operations, and management.

Business at Illinois Tech has a prestigious history that dates back to the late 1890s, with some of the nation’s first courses in “Family and Consumer Science” (including “Home Economics” and “Household Management”) being offered by the Lewis Institute, Stuart’s original home, and the Institute’s subsequent formation of the university’s Department of Business and Economics in 1926. Combined with the merger of the Lewis Institute with the Armour Institute, and the earlier pioneering works of Philip D. Armour, a merchant financier, Julia A. Beveridge, a librarian turned public administrator, and Frank W. Gunsaulus, an entrepreneurial preacher in the 1880s, the Department Business and Economics ultimately grew into a separate school at Illinois Institute of Technology – the Stuart School of Business, in 1969, with a gift from Lewis Institute alum and renowned financier Harold Leonard Stuart. Harold L. Stuart himself was a national leader in the field of investment banking in the first half of the 20th century, and his Chicago investment bank played a pivotal role in establishing the city as a global financial hub.

Over a period of more than 125 years, harnessing curricular innovations by Julia A. Beveridge and George N. Carman, and incredible scholarly works by trailblazing Illinois Tech scholars Herb A. Simon (author of Administrative Behavior, later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics), Karl Menger (developer of the St. Petersburg paradox in economics) and Abe Sklar (developer of the Copula in financial modeling), the Stuart School of Business has refined education in the disciplines of economics, finance, analytics, business and public administration, marketing, and management.

A long-standing leader in curricular innovation, in 1990, building on the foundational works of numerous Illinois Tech scholars, and Harold L. Stuart’s own contributions to finance and the broader business community, the Stuart School of Business established quantitative finance as an academic discipline, with a world’s first postgraduate Master’s program in Financial Markets and Trading – a program that highlighted a new model for embedding into a postgraduate academic program the emphases on career readiness and connectedness with the business community, and transformed business school education.

Today, the Stuart School of Business continues to be a frontier innovator in accredited education, offering academic programs and co-curricular opportunities that place students on the path to self-actualization and career success. Leadership, entrepreneurship, experiential learning, positive societal impact, and connectedness to the business community, combined with a human-centered approach to student development, and an unyielding focus on student success, continue to be core pillars at Stuart. Stuart is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – an accreditation achieved by fewer than 6% of business schools worldwide.

The STEM-designated Master of Technological Entrepreneurship program requires 33 credit hours of graduate work. The objective of the program is to train entrepreneurs, prospective entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs who intend to start, build, and manage businesses and business initiatives that leverage technological innovation to generate growth, efficiency and competitive advantages.