The SMED Curriculum is an interdisciplinary course designed to teach students how to think and act entrepreneurial. Students learn how to start-up and operate a business while at work, thus turning their jobs into earning. The course will build on cross-curricular academic skills, by integrating inquiry-based learning and business tools that will enable students to analyze, create, develop and pilot or run small businesses in an online campus environment.

Concepts and skills are reinforced by a strong emphasis on hands-on experiences. Applications to society, individuals, and the utilization of technology are included.

This course includes a broad series of lessons and activities that offer a variety of modalities for ultimate student engagement and content retention. Each module contains a series of lessons that include introduction of content, virtual demonstration of that content, and repeated opportunity to practice that content, along with a quiz per lesson, test per module, and final exam at the end of the course.

Students acquire the knowledge and skills needed to manage the development of innovations, to recognize and evaluate potential opportunities to monetize these innovations, to plan specific and detailed methods to exploit these opportunities, and to acquire the resources necessary to implement these plans.

Topics include entrepreneurial thinking; innovation management; opportunity spotting and evaluation; industry and market research; business strategy; business models and business plans; financial forecasting and entrepreneurial finance; pitching to resource providers and negotiating deals; and launching new ventures.

This curriculum is centered on three key aspects of entrepreneurship:

1. the individual, their traits, skills, and attributes that make entrepreneurs successful,
2. the business ideas, how to generate them, where to look for them, how to expand them, and
3. how to ensure they are valid business ideas with potential to meet profit goals.

These elements, developed in the course, will assist any current or potential entrepreneur develop and grow a business now or in the post-Covid_19 economy.