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Faculty Fellows Program Overview
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The Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership is the sponsor of a highly competitive Fellows program—the Faculty Fellows in Entrepreneurship. The Faculty Fellows program is a key initiative in the Academy’s objective of broadening the understanding, appreciation, and inclusion of entrepreneurship in all disciplines. The program is based on a comprehensive definition of entrepreneurship that embraces the social, intellectual, and economic value created through the application of entrepreneurial principles. We view entrepreneurship as a process of opportunity recognition and resource acquisition that leads to the creation of something new, whether a new business or new approaches to solving social problems. Entrepreneurial behaviors can benefit larger corporations, and independent artists pursuing innovative strategies for career management.
The Faculty Fellows program is designed to stimulate and support the development and teaching of entrepreneurship courses in disciplines across the curriculum. The Faculty Fellows Program seeks to increase the number and scope of courses and experiences in entrepreneurship and to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit in all students without regard to academic major. Proposals for new courses, revisions of current courses, and specialized modules are welcome.
The Fellows Program is focused on building a cross-campus community of entrepreneurial faculty. Since its inception in fall 2004, the Faculty Fellows curriculum initiative has supported more than 50 faculty, and served as a catalyst to strengthen entrepreneurship education more broadly. In five years, the number of courses with entrepreneurship content, the level of enrollment, and the number of faculty teaching entrepreneurship have all more than doubled. Entrepreneurship courses are now available in 13 of the 15 degree-granting colleges at Illinois, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and students in all 15 colleges have enrolled in such courses.