FOR EVERY MAJOR AND EVERY STUDENT

Entrepreneurship is not just about starting ventures. It’s about identifying opportunities for innovation and approaching the world with a creative, resourceful, and adaptive mindset. Trinity's program equips students from diverse disciplines with essential, real-world skills and empowers them to succeed in any field they pursue.
 

Curricular Options for Entrepreneurship at Trinity

Minor

 

Minor in Entrepreneurship
Discover the specifics of the minor’s curriculum, the courses you will take, and the opportunities you will have.

Minor

Pathways Discovery

 

From Ideas to Reality
In this Pathways Discovery option, explore the process of generating creative ideas and getting them into the world.

Pathways

First-Year Experience

 

Creative Genius
Enroll in this first-year experience course to hone your innovative and critical thinking skills.

FYEs

LEARN FROM LEADERS

Who You'll Learn From

At Trinity, you’ll be learning and networking with industry leaders and experts who offer years of experience as business founders and senior executives as well as a passion for preparing young entrepreneurs to prosper.

 

The Faculty

Taking advantage of the Alamo City’s booming startup and tech scene and an impressive, international professional network, Trinity offers a unique adjunct faculty model that brings exemplary entrepreneurs into the classroom as instructors.

Faculty Bios

 

The Entrepreneur and Investor in Residence 

The Entrepreneur in Residence helps get student ventures up and running with critical coaching and feedback. Then, the Investor in Residence helps keep them going by ensuring they have what they need to secure additional funding.

Trinity is one of the few institutions that maintain a resident investment adviser for its undergraduates, a rare—yet invaluable—resource.

Meet the EiR Meet the IiR

10%

of Trinity students participate in curricular or co-curricular entrepreneurship experiences

44

majors represented by students in entrepreneurship program

#8

on the Forbes "Most Entrepreneurial Colleges" list

5

student companies win $50,000 in the annual Stumberg New Venture Competition

DEVELOP PRACTICAL, REAL-WORLD SKILLS AND KNOWLEDGE

What You'll Learn

In a world defined by change, it takes a certain skill set and know-how to embrace environments of uncertainty and thrive in them. Trinity’s entrepreneurship program teaches you how to do exactly that. You’ll learn how to build something from nothing and find solutions to problems that create and deliver real value to customers and other stakeholders.

Learning Outcomes

The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship fosters an encouraging environment for you to live the full entrepreneurial experience in and out of class. It allows you to safely take chances, make mistakes, and try again so that you will enter the real working world with the confidence, experience, and skills you’ll need to discover innovative solutions to problems and make a real impact.

 Operational Knowledge
  • Apply basic business knowledge to environments where you start from zero
  • Identify and manage risk
  • Establish customer groups
  • Learn startup methodology
  • Build viable, scalable, and sustainable products, services and organizations
  • Refine and model projections that cover a range of possible outcomes
  • Discover what stakeholders really want
     
 Relationships and Networking
  • Build relationships by engaging with a diverse range of perspectives and working collaboratively
  • Practice deep listening and move beyond transactional relationships to create deep connections
  • Approach each person and partnership with respect and interest, with the aim to cultivate shared understanding
  • Meet and learn from outstanding guest speakers in every entrepreneurship class
     
 Try, Fail, and Try Again
  • Build, test, refine and repeat as you evaluate desirable, feasible, and viable solutions
  • Know how to apply stakeholder expertise and knowledge to the idea development and validation processes
  • Strive for optimization
  • Pursue innovative solutions to real-world problems
  • Show initiative, make decisions and act quickly to get feedback and learn how a solution can be improved
     
 Innovative and Critical Thinking
  • Identify and evaluate opportunities for new ideas
  • Understand and reframe complex problems in new and creative ways
  • Brainstorm new solutions for unanticipated problems
  • Identify challenges, understand the root cause of a problem, and draw on different perspectives to generate and test novel solutions
  • Ask and answer questions that draw out ideas and identify assumptions
  • Understand the conditions and contexts that influence and complicate the consideration of a solution
  • Evaluate and synthesize various sources of information to make actionable insights
     
 Responsible and Ethical Behavior
  • Develop ethical behaviors and decision-making skills in a rapidly changing and uncertain environment
  • Understand how leadership and actions can have long-term impact
  • Perform at the highest level of personal and professional integrity
  • Practice ethical, informed, and responsible behavior
     
 Adaptive Communication
  • Create and communicate new, complex, and audience-appropriate messages leveraging a variety of genres and media
  • Develop and employ storytelling as an integral part of all forms of communication
  • Rally resources and people to your cause
  • Master pitches as a clear, short, and persuasive communication form
  • Write a full and actionable business plan for any type of organization
     
 Empathy
  • Understand stakeholders and their behavior in the context of their lives
  • Engage, interact with, and interview stakeholders through thorough interviews and short “intercept” encounters
  • Immerse yourself in the experience of what your stakeholders experience
  • Cultivate a deep understanding of others’ feelings and experiences
  • Build relationships of trust to collaborate, engage others in action, and create change
     
 Empowered Leadership
  • Turn ideas into actionable plans and implement them well
  • Find multiple approaches for achieving success
  • Pursue an idea or a desired goal even when the probability of succeeding is low
  • Work with others while maintaining a high degree of independence and personal accountability
  • Create teams with diverse members, perspectives, skills, and talents
  • Engage others inclusively in co-creating real value and change
  • Boldly lead new initiatives
  • Step out of your comfort zone to accomplish great things
     

Subject Areas

In addition to learning the basics that all entrepreneurs need to succeed, you will have opportunities to learn how to develop ventures oriented towards social impact and the arts.

 

New Venture Creation and Development

From understanding the fundamentals of new ventures to mastering venture planning and sales, you will learn everything you need to turn an idea into a reality, as an entrepreneur or intrapreneur.

 

Social Impact

You will learn the tools, skills, and mindset needed to innovate for a better world, creating purpose-driven projects and ventures that work collaboratively with the community to solve real problems.

 

The Arts

Starting from the artistic craft you know, you will examine and pursue the breadth of professional opportunities available in the creative economy and your field of practice.

Experiential Learning

Entrepreneurship isn’t about textbook learning, it’s about active doing. Thus, you won’t just study entrepreneurship, you’ll do entrepreneurship.

 

International

Summer Internship Programs

When you’re ready to study abroad, you can intern in the summer with international startups in programs such as Trinity’s Madrid Summer Internship Program or Shanghai Summer Program.

Semester Programs

You can also enroll in an entrepreneurship-specific semester abroad through Trinity Study Abroad providers like DIS (Stockholm Semester), IES (Dublin), IFSA (New Zealand) and more!

Global Mindset

As part of your study abroad experience, you can also take your venture concept with you and figure out how to do some aspect(s) of your business abroad. Will you manufacture abroad? Open a key international partnership? Establish a key foreign market? Use your time to take risks and learn what it's like to operate internationally.

 

Internships

Be a part of San Antonio’s booming startup scene and receive academic credit by interning through partners (like Geekdom, ImpactGuild, and LaunchSA), a wide array of startups, small businesses, and nonprofits and programs.

Students+Startups

With your paid summer internship through San Antonio’s Students+Startups, you’ll experience the exciting, stressful, and immensely rewarding life as a startup company employee. You’ll meet entrepreneurs who’ve built their companies from the ground up, and start building your professional network in the San Antonio startup scene. Students+Startups brings the best, most exciting young companies in San Antonio directly to you, matches your interests to their opportunities, and provides challenges to expand your skill set.

 

Independent Study

Students launch their own for-profit and nonprofit ventures, keeping 100% of their intellectual property. Receive academic credit for developing and working on your own for-profit or nonprofit venture.

Innovation Across the University

Trinity University’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a resource across campus to catalyze, develop, and support innovative programs and courses.

 

Education

Since 2015, the Center has been working with Trinity’s Department of Education's Master of Education in School Leadership program to recognize and evaluate entrepreneurial opportunities in education.

This collaboration has lead to the development of the Trinity School Design Network, a new school incubator and school leadership program for educators and entrepreneurs to launch innovative and high-quality traditional district, autonomous district, and charter schools in the San Antonio region.

 

Health Care Administration

Through the annual Tigertank and PRISm competitions, the Center works with Trinity’s Healthcare Administration program to develop intrapreneurial healthcare management graduate students that exercise transformational leadership and fuel innovation within the healthcare industry.

 

Humanities

Trinity University is defining what innovation in the humanities and liberal arts looks like in the 21st Century. The Center works with several groups and departments throughout campus as a critical sponsor and partner in innovation in the humanities through the Humanities Collective, the Mellon Initiative, and the various Humanities Labs on campus.