How do you recognize an opportunity? How do you determine whether an idea is worth pursuing? How do you test assumptions, understand customers, navigate uncertainty, bring together the right people and resources, and adapt when the original plan does not work?
Those are entrepreneurial questions. They are also business questions.
At Carey, students develop the skills to approach them through coursework, hands-on experiences, connections across Johns Hopkins, and opportunities to put ideas into practice. For students who want to launch a venture, the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship provides an important pathway within the broader Johns Hopkins ecosystem. But Carey does far more than just connecting students to an accelerator.
As a business school, Carey helps students develop the knowledge and confidence needed to turn expertise, ideas, and opportunities into action.
“Entrepreneurship is the art of creation,” said Jake Dreier, assistant director of the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship. “By teaching it, we equip students with the skills and confidence to shape the future they want to see.”
From expertise to opportunity
Students come to Carey with different experiences and ambitions.
Some arrive with a business idea already taking shape. Others bring expertise in healthcare, technology, science, finance, marketing, or another field and begin to recognize opportunities as they deepen their business knowledge.
That intersection is where entrepreneurship can become especially powerful.
A student may understand a problem because they have spent years working in an industry. Another may identify an unmet need through research or a technical innovation. Someone else may have a creative idea but need to understand how to build an organization around it.
The common thread is the ability to move from recognizing an opportunity to asking what it would take to do something about it.
Carey helps students build that capability by giving them a foundation in the disciplines entrepreneurs need: markets, customers, strategy, finance, operations, innovation, and organizational leadership.
Just as importantly, students learn to test what they think they know.
For Anthony Terry, a Carey MBA candidate and founder of Projecto Alminé LLC, that meant bringing business discipline to an ambitious creative vision. Through the Pava Center’s Spark accelerator, he learned to move beyond assumptions and conduct data-backed customer discovery and market analysis.
Instead of simply presenting a compelling concept, he developed a bottom-up analysis of the market opportunity for his venture.
That shift—from idea to evidence—is at the heart of an entrepreneurial mindset.
Learning by doing
Entrepreneurship is difficult to learn entirely from a textbook.
Students need opportunities to make decisions with incomplete information, hear from potential customers, test ideas that may fail, revise their approach, and try again.
That is why experiential learning is such an important part of the entrepreneurial journey.
Across Johns Hopkins, Carey students can connect with the Pava Center and its programs, including Kindling, a pre-accelerator for students exploring entrepreneurship; Spark, which helps students test and validate early-stage ideas; Fuel, for more developed ventures; and the Social Innovation Lab for mission-driven ventures.
Spark alone gives students opportunities to work through customer discovery, market research, and the fundamentals of launching a venture with support from Pava Center staff, student strategic advisors, and industry mentors. Each academic year, more than 100 student ventures complete the accelerator, according to Paul Davidson, associate director of the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship.
But the goal is not simply to move every student toward the same destination.
“Many students come to Johns Hopkins with excellent technical skills and backgrounds but very few have launched a company,” Davidson said. “So they are able to learn the necessary skills, complementing their academic and other professional interests.”
For Carey students, business education can provide a bridge between expertise and execution.
Entrepreneurship at the intersection of disciplines
One of Johns Hopkins’ strengths is the breadth of expertise students can encounter across the university.
Business knowledge can intersect with medicine, public health, biotechnology, engineering, technology, the arts, and social impact. Entrepreneurship provides a way to bring those areas together around a problem, opportunity, or idea.
Corinne Brassfield, Carey’s director of Strategic Partnerships & Student Innovation, saw that cross-disciplinary energy while serving as a judge at a recent Spark Showcase.
“Hearing pitches from students spanning schools and courses of study, with innovations ranging from apparel to emergency response to AI solutions was truly inspiring,” Brassfield said. “Our students are doing meaningful work, building real products and the energy in the room at the showcase was palpable.”
For Carey, that kind of collaboration is particularly meaningful.
The school is preparing students to lead in a world where complex problems rarely fit neatly within one discipline. An entrepreneurial mindset encourages students to look beyond traditional boundaries, identify connections, and imagine new ways of creating value.
Sometimes that leads to a startup.
Sometimes it leads to a new product, technology, strategy, social enterprise, or solution within an established organization.
Either way, the underlying skills remain valuable.
A pathway that continues after graduation
For students who do decide to build companies, the Johns Hopkins entrepreneurship ecosystem can continue to support them as their ventures grow.
The Pava Center offers funding opportunities, mentorship, and programming for student entrepreneurs and recent alumni, including the Alumni Accelerator. Participants can continue refining their business models and addressing the challenges that emerge once an idea becomes a growing company.
Carey alumna Magnolia Manzano (MBA/MS Biotechnology ’24) is one example.
After spending more than a decade managing oncology clinical trials, Manzano founded LUMIQO, an AI-powered company focused on improving safety data workflows in oncology clinical research. Her Carey education helped her pair deep industry expertise with business knowledge, while the Pava Center’s Alumni Accelerator helped her refine her approach to customer outreach.
Her journey illustrates the value of a continuum rather than a single entrepreneurship experience.
Students can begin by exploring an idea. They can develop the business skills to evaluate it, test it through hands-on experiences, connect with mentors and advisors, and pursue funding and accelerator opportunities. And after graduation, they can remain connected to resources that help them continue building.
Building for what’s next
The ultimate measure of entrepreneurship at Carey is not simply the number of companies students launch.
It is also the number of students who leave with the ability to see opportunity where others see uncertainty—and with the skills to act on it.
That may mean founding a company. It may mean bringing an entrepreneurial approach to a large organization, creating a new solution in healthcare, developing an innovative technology, or building something that does not yet exist.
“Entrepreneurship is about creating a world that you love,” Dreier said. “And entrepreneurship is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.”
At Carey, students have opportunities to exercise that muscle in classrooms, through experiential learning, alongside mentors and across the broader Johns Hopkins innovation ecosystem.
The result is something larger than an accelerator or a single competition.
It is an approach to business education that encourages students not only to prepare for the future, but to help create it.
For the next generation of Carey entrepreneurs—and for students who will carry an entrepreneurial mindset into every kind of organization—that work can begin with a single idea and a willingness to ask what comes next.
