Free online courses from MIT for entrepreneurs and innovators

Learn about technology, business strategy, leadership development, and more.

Photo: iStock

By Sara Feijo

Do you have an innovative idea but are not sure how to transform it into a venture? Are you looking to level up your entrepreneurial skills? Do you want to deepen your knowledge of innovation and technology?

Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT OpenCourseWare and MITx offer a selection of free courses and resources straight from the MIT classroom designed to empower current and aspiring entrepreneurs with the skills to jumpstart and grow their ventures. Whether you’re looking to expand your business, deepen your knowledge of technology, or are interested in introducing innovative ideas to your organization, try your hand at these courses.

Entrepreneurship courses

• Entrepreneurship 101: Who is Your Customer: Learn about the first important skill for aspiring entrepreneurs — the paying customer.
• Entrepreneurship 102: What Can You Do for Your Customer?: Discover and apply the process of entrepreneurial product design.
• Becoming an Entrepreneur: Develop the business skills and startup mindset needed to embark on your entrepreneurial path.
• Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans: Explore the ins and outs of preparing and launching a new venture plan.
• Executing Strategy for Results: Discover practical tools that help leaders achieve their organizations’ strategic priorities, as well as novel ways to use data to measure strategy execution and identify what is and isn’t working.
• The Analytics Edge: Get real-world examples of quantitative methods providing a significant competitive edge that has led to a first order impact on some of today’s most important companies.
• Seminar in Corporate Entrepreneurship: Learn about the practical challenges of making an established company entrepreneurial, and examine various roles related to corporate entrepreneurship.
• Business and Impact Planning for Social Enterprises: Think through your own social business model and impact plan.
• Entrepreneurship without Borders: Examine the opportunities and problems for entrepreneurs globally.
• Entrepreneurial Finance: Take a deep dive into the elements of entrepreneurial finance, focusing on technology-based start-up ventures and the early stages of company development.
• Communication for Managers: Develop and polish communication strategies and methods through discussion, examples, and practice with an emphasis on writing and speaking skills.
• Leadership Development: Enhance your leadership skills.
• You Can Innovate: User Innovation & Entrepreneurship: Understand the phenomena of — and distinctions between — user and producer innovation, concepts such as sticky information and low-cost innovation niche, and more.
• Bootstrapping for Entrepreneurs: Learn about the process of innovating in resource-scarce environments.
• Just Money: Banking as if Society Mattered: Understand the role banks play as intermediaries in our economy and how they can produce positive social, environmental, and economic change.

Technology and innovation courses

• Ethics of Technology: Discover the tools of philosophical ethics concerning technology.
• AI 101: Get an introduction to artificial intelligence designed specifically for those with little to no knowledge of AI.
• Mathematics of Big Data and Machine Learning: Explore the Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model, a breakthrough in computer programming that combines graph theory, linear algebra, and databases to address big data problems.
• Product and Service Creation in the Internet Age: Change the way you think about innovation by exploring new, internet-age innovation processes.
• The Iterative Innovation Process: Learn how you can use the iterative innovation process to develop your own innovative ideas.
• Innovation Systems for Science, Technology, Energy, Manufacturing, and Health: Examine the science and technology innovation system.
• The Science and Business of Biotechnology: Take a close look at early-stage biotechnology companies and understand the underlying science, technology, and disease targets to facilitate drug discovery, clinical development, and greater patient access to new therapies.
• FinTech: Shaping the Financial World: Explore the ways in which new technologies are disrupting the financial services industry.
• Adaptive Markets: Financial Market Dynamics and Human Behavior: Explore the origins of market efficiency and its failures, the foundations of investor behavior, and practical implications.
• Optimization Methods in Business Analytics: Get an introduction to the theory, algorithms, and applications of optimization.

• Project Evaluation: Essays and Case Studies: This book — based primarily on materials prepared for the course Project Evaluation — is structured to be of interest to anyone focused on infrastructure systems, especially engineers, planners, and managers who design, build, and operate those systems.
• Entrepreneurship Collection on MIT OpenCourseWare: Learn about entrepreneurship at MIT and browse through a selection of the institute’s entrepreneurship-related courses.

MIT OpenCourseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. MITx offers hundreds of high-quality massive open online courses adapted from the MIT classroom for learners worldwide.