Lilie Undergraduate Courses
Develop your entrepreneurial mindset through Lilie Undergraduate Courses and the Entrepreneurship Minor.
The Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Lilie) is the home of experiential learning and co-curricular activities in entrepreneurship and innovation at Rice University. We prepare our students to be entrepreneurs and innovators in whatever walk of life they choose, be it a technology startup, government agency, civic group, non-profit, small business, or large corporation.
Looking for graduate courses? Visit the Lilie Graduate & MBA webpage.
Undergraduate Course Highlights
ENTR 360 · FOUNDER'S JOURNEY
No case studies. Just real founders.
Fireside chats with startup founders, investors, and leaders sharing the realities of building companies.
ENTR 361 · ENTREPRENEURIAL COMMUNICATION
Great ideas need great storytellers.
Learn how to pitch, persuade, and communicate with the audiences that matter—from customers to investors.
ENTR 369 · NEW ENTERPRISES
Where ideas become ventures.
Whether you have a startup idea or not, you'll learn by doing in Rice's hands-on venture creation course.
ENTR 461 · FINANCING THE STARTUP VENTURE
The inside story on startup funding.
Discover how startups secure funding and what investors look for at every stage of growth.
Entrepreneurship Minor
Students are encouraged to complement their major area of study by enrolling in Lilie courses, which teach frameworks for solving problems and navigating ambiguity. For those students looking for a deeper dive into the startup and venture funding space, the Entrepreneurship Minor is an 18 credit journey that will position students to be the change makers, innovators, and trendsetters they desire to be. Whether students take one course or complete the entire minor, our curricula will equip them with an entrepreneurial mindset which allows them to:
Identify critical problems or market opportunities and to develop validated solutions to meet these needs
Design solutions that are sustainable, inclusive, and equitable
Embrace empathy to better understand customers, users, clients, and team members
Excel in interdisciplinary teams and in communicating messaging across departments, organizations, and industries
Some courses are cross-listed as part of the curriculum in schools and programs, including Engineering and Social Science. If you have questions, just stop by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation & Entrepreneurship or schedule office hours at lilie@rice.edu. We are here to help you build the skills and mindset you need to be a successful innovator in whichever path you choose.
For course schedules by semester and course section, time, and location information, please visit courses.rice.edu
Undergraduate Courses
ENTR 220 · INTRO TO DESIGN AND INNOVATION
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING
Dive into human centered design and innovation as a way to build new products and services. This course is experiential, project-based, and collaborative. You'll try out different methods for uncovering human needs, make sense of data you gather from the field, and build and test your ideas. After taking this course, you'll walk away with the skills, methods, and mindset to use design and innovation to make impact in any career path you pursue.
ENTR 221 · NEW ENTERPRISES: DISCOVERY
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING
New Enterprises: Discovery emphasizes exploration, research, and discovery to uncover problems worth solving. You'll explore multiple areas of personal interest to surface opportunities to pursue as a startup venture, an innovation you want to bring to the world, or a career path. You'll walk away having experimented with a few options you can pursue next and a sharper ability to find opportunity in unexpected places.
ENTR 222 · AI AND TECH PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL
AI hasn't just changed what products are possible, it's changed how you build them. This course teaches product management fundamentals from concept to prototype while using AI as a research engine, synthesis tool, and rapid-prototyping partner, compressing months of discovery into days and turning ambiguous ideas into testable products at startup speed.
ENTR 223 BUSINESS MODELING FOR ENTREPRENEURS
3 credit hours, offered every Fall and Spring
The course teaches how to translate a startup business plan into a bottoms up quantitative model of the business and its underlying assumptions. Students will learn how to build a model of cash flows for a startup, how to use that model to track performance and identify errors in the underlying assumptions and adjust, and how to update the model based on realized performance.
ENTR 224 · BIAS AND MEDICAL DEVICE DESIGN
1 CREDIT HOUR · OFFERED FALL
This course explores the hidden biases that exist in product design with a focus on the tradeoffs entrepreneurs and innovators face when making decisions on how to design, build, and test their medical products and devices. Through the lenses of failed medical devices, poorly designed clinical trials, lack of stakeholder understanding, and interpretation bias students will discuss opportunities to proactively increase diversity of users that can lead to a more impactful, inclusive design. Assessments will consist of in and out of class exercises, reflections and a group project.
ENTR 360 · FOUNDER'S JOURNEY
1.5 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING
Founders Journey is a front row seat to how real products and companies actually get built. Each week during fireside chats, you'll sit across from founders who've crafted ideas, raised capital, crashed into walls, pivoted, and figured out how to survive the hard way. There is no theory for theory's sake here — just raw stories, honest lessons, and the patterns of work and viewing the world that separate thrashful motion from momentum with meaning. This class is about rewiring how you think: what entrepreneurs look and act like, how to spot real problems, test what matters, and move with conviction when the path isn't obvious to anyone around you. In Founders Journey, you won't just learn about entrepreneurship, you'll start to see the world around you through the eyes of a founder.
ENTR 361 · ENTREPRENEURIAL COMMUNICATION
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING
Entrepreneurial Communication focuses on how communication drives action in startup and high growth environments. In early stage ventures, unclear messaging can stall progress, while effective communication can unlock resources, alignment, and momentum. This course equips students to communicate with purpose across key audiences including teammates, investors, and mentors. Through hands on practice, students will learn to navigate ambiguity, influence decisions, and move ideas forward throughout the venture lifecycle.
ENTR 364 · INNOVATION FOR SOCIAL IMPACT
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING
Explore how change actually happens on the social issues you care about. This course is field-based, project-driven, and built around real community partnerships. You'll learn methods for understanding social context, examine how different organizations approach social innovation, and explore ways to create and measure impact. Working alongside a community partner, you and your team will dig into a social issue and contribute to the organization's efforts to address it. After taking this course, you'll walk away with the skills, methods, and mindset to use innovation for impact in any path you pursue.
ENTR 365 · DESIGN BUILD SHIP
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING · PREREQUISITE: ENTR 220, 222, OR 369 (MAY BE TAKEN
CONCURRENTLY)
Design Build Ship is an opportunity to put your ideas to test in weeks, not months. Using rapid prototyping tools to build physical and digital ideas, you will explore new startup ideas with prototypes that you test with users. You will refine your strategy, idea, and prototype based on feedback.
ENTR 369 · NEW ENTERPRISES
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING · RECOMMENDED PREREQUISITE: ENTR 221
Startups live or die by one question: does anyone actually want this? New Enterprises is your chance to find out. This course is experiential, team-based, and grounded in real customer discovery. You'll pick an idea, interview real customers, frame a problem worth solving, and design and run experiments to test whether your idea holds up. Based on what you learn, you'll decide whether to keep going, pivot, or stop. You'll walk away with the skills and mindset to think like an entrepreneur, whether you start your own venture, join one, or work inside a larger organization.
ENTR 461 · FINANCING THE STARTUP VENTURE
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL
Ever wondered how startups actually get funded? This course is experiential, team-based, and grounded in real deal work. You'll make sense of crowdfunding, angels, accelerators, and VCs. You'll size markets, run a crowdfunding campaign, apply to an accelerator, assemble an angel round, negotiate a term sheet, and pitch investors. You'll also sit on the other side of the table, evaluating deals as a VC. You'll walk away knowing when to raise, who to raise from, and how deals really get done, whether you want to launch a venture, join one, or invest in them.
ENTR 463 · ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGY
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED SPRING
The first half of this course provides an integrated strategy framework for entrepreneurs. The course is structured to provide a deep understanding of the core strategic challenges facing start-up innovators, and a synthetic framework for choosing and implementing entrepreneurial strategy in dynamic environments, as well as a general understanding of the financing options for early stage startups, including angel investment, accelerators, crowdfunding and the venture capital industry. The course identifies the types of choices that entrepreneurs must make to take advantage of a novel opportunity and the logic of particular strategic commitments and positions that allow entrepreneurs to establish competitive advantage. The second half of the course explores common dilemmas faced by founders surrounding team selection, contracting, equity compensation and incentives, communication in teams, and strategies for approaching each of these dilemmas. The course combines interactive lectures, speakers and case analyses. The cases and assignments offer an opportunity to integrate and apply the principles taught in the course in a practical way, and draws from a diverse range of industries and settings.
ENTR 465 · STUDENT VENTURE FUND: EVALUATING STARTUP
INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED SPRING · PREREQUISITE: ENTR 461
Students will identify, screen, and evaluate start-ups for investment by the Rice venture capital fund. Through this highly experiential course, students will learn tools for rigorously evaluating startup ventures for investment, valuing early stage companies, and structuring investments. Students will present their investment recommendations to an advisory committee.
ENTR 469 · LILIE NEW VENTURE CHALLENGE
3 CREDIT HOURS · OFFERED FALL AND SPRING · PREREQUISITE: ENTR 369 · APPLICATION REQUIRED
In this capstone project-based experiential learning course, students work on their own startup ideas in teams using the frameworks taught in the E&I framework courses (financing and strategy for startups, new enterprises, business modeling for entrepreneurs, human and social context in entrepreneurship). To apply for this course visit lilie.link/elab-app.
