Great ideas can succeed in multiple ways—how do you choose the best path?
Our three-day intensive Strategy for Startups course helps participants sharpen their strategic thinking. This is not a startup-building bootcamp; it's a deep dive into the critical choices that shape innovation-driven ventures and how to approach them strategically.
Whether you're a founder, employee, investor, or advisor, you'll gain a practical, systematic framework for making smarter decisions and turning ideas into reality.
Upcoming Offerings
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Last Session: July 7–9, 2025
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Next Session: We will announce future course dates and next year's schedule in early 2026.
PLEASE NOTE: This intensive is offered by invitation-only.
Through interactive lectures, case studies, and hands-on exercises, this three-day intensive course introduces a strategic framework for innovation-driven entrepreneurs.
The course focuses on the critical decisions startup founders must make as they launch and scale their businesses, highlighting the balance between experimentation, learning, and core strategic choices to gain a competitive edge.
Course materials are drawn from the book Entrepreneurship, Choice, and Strategy by Joshua Gans, Erin L. Scott, and Scott Stern.
For a preview of the framework, see the HBR article: Strategy for Startups.
By the end of this course, you will gain a deeper understanding of:
- The role of strategy in a new enterprise and the core strategic choices founders face.
- The trade-offs between learning/experimentation and strategic commitment.
- How to structure learning and experimentation to align with an overall entrepreneurial strategy.
- The integration of organizational choices with a structured process for selecting and executing a go-to-market strategy.
- Four generic go-to-market strategies and a framework for choosing among them.
This course is part of the Centre for Entrepreneurship’s offerings. For participants seeking further support on their entrepreneurial journey, the CfE also provides co-working space, prototyping labs, mentoring services, and specialized topic workshops.
The July 2025 session was led by Erin L. Scott, Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management, MIT. Dr. Scott has nearly two decades of academic and practical experience and has helped countless innovators navigate the journey from idea to commercialization. . Her research on startup strategy appears in Harvard Business Review, Management Science, and the new book Entrepreneurship, Choice, and Strategy
From July 2025 cohort:
"Honestly, I’m leaving this course a different person. This was exactly what I needed to do before starting my business. And this course was taught so well that it can be applied no matter what stage you are in business or how many years you have been in it."
- Matilda, Visitor
"I recommend it to anyone in the entrepreneurship/startup space. It was a great way of thinking and getting to a common language for strategy discussions."
- Rajiv, VMS Mentor, Faculty of Arts & Science, Centre for Entrepreneurship
"The primary component I found really interesting was the strategies on how to advance a startup into the market. It provided a concrete way to strategize and think about the impacts of various potential paths for building up a company. I particularly liked the case studies as they were a clear way to see the principles and strategies at work."
- Suresh, Faculty Member, Faculty of Arts & Science, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics
“This was the first course (or a series of lectures technically) that was perfectly easy to follow and participate in. I can confidently say that it has a lot to do with Erin's amazing presentation and communication skills. However, I believe the overall success of the course was also due in part to the entire cohort. People were very friendly and welcoming. I was able to strike up a conversation with almost everyone who attended – their perspectives were very insightful.”
- Sukhjeet, Student, Faculty of Arts & Science, Department of Computer Science