American Entrepreneurship: A history
The course seeks to provide a wide array of insights into entrepreneurship, innovation, the dynamics of competition, and American economic growth. Among other topics, it will reveal the origins of consumer credit (1850s), discuss the four entrepreneurs who drove New York to the center of American commerce, the creation of modern accounting, how Ray Kroc discovered McDonald’s, how Steve Jobs developed such a remarkable insight into product design, the trip to Bath in the United Kingdom that laid the basis for the American industrial revolution, the emergence of modern media and with it marketing, why Andrew Carnegie gave up making (a lot) of money to smelt steel—and transform industrial management, how protecting the rights of the disabled or regulating landfills created great new business opportunities for the alert, the origins and evolution of the information economy. We will even take time to consider how COVID-19 created entrepreneurial opportunities. And the course will feature five or six guest speakers, all of whom are or were highly successful businesspeople whose personal histories illuminate topics central to this course.
The course design is flexible because I will look for student engagement in framing classes, exploring topics and the history of specific entrepreneurs or innovations of interest to students.
History casts a long shadow; come and learn in whose shadows we are walking and how to see how entrepreneurs are even now creating new businesses and thus new shadows. Perhaps you too will cast a significant shadow because you will have an historical perspective!
For more information, contact: Prof. Fred Carstensen at fred.carstensen@uconn.edu