RANKING: The World’s Best MBA Programs For Entrepreneurship In 2024

Before Kai Skallerud ever even thought about business school, he was a third-year medical student.

Through previous work as a medical scribe and later as student, he shadowed doctors and helped chart patient care notes into the Electronic Medical Record. He came to recognize how incredibly inefficient the process was, so terribly time consuming and outdated. The hours and clicks spent charting pulled physicians away from patient bedsides and from their own families. Charting and administrative inefficiencies, Skallerud discovered, is the No. 1 pain point for providers year after year. It leads to burn out and lowers physicians’ quality of life.

“It’s very, very complicated in terms of all the reasons why that is, but the short story is I knew we could do it better,” Skallerud says.

He decided to apply to business school to see if he could fix the problem. He would apply to one school and one school only. If he got in, he’d put medical school on hold and try to build out this idea bubbling in his head.

The school? Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I specifically went for an MBA in healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship, and that’s why I chose Olin. I heard the entrepreneurship program was very experiential, it offered many opportunities to get hands-on experience in actually building things. That’s what I was looking for,” he tells Poets&Quants.

“I wasn’t looking to sit in a classroom with textbooks. I wanted to build. Especially considering the opportunity costs of my decision to step away from medicine and do the MBA, I knew my time was extremely valuable. And I wanted to spend every minute possible in a way that I felt was actually moving the needle.”

WASHU OLIN TOPS ENTREPRENEURSHIP RANKING FOR FIFTH STRAIGHT YEAR

Turns out, Skallerud could hardly have made a better choice. For the fifth year in a row, Olin Business School has finished No. 1 in Poets&Quants’ ranking of the World’s Best MBA Programs for Entrepreneurship. In fact, Olin has topped the list every year we’ve done the ranking, starting with our 2020 issue.

“This fifth consecutive top ranking further affirms our commitment to the critical role innovation plays in our economy and to the entrepreneurial spirit of our students, alumni, faculty and staff,” Olin dean Mike Mazzeo tells Poets&Quants.

“It’s gratifying to be part of a school where this spirit is built into our DNA and part of everyday conversations.”

Olin is followed by a school brand new to the ranking this year, ESMT Berlin – one of four European MBA programs to crack the top 10.

The difference between No. 1 and No. 2 was extremely close. Out of a total of 100 points spread between 16 metrics, Olin scored 44.45 points to ESMT’s 43.55 – less than a point difference.

“Entrepreneurship and innovation is a core pillar of ESMT and impacts our programs and faculty directly. It is integrated into all our programs, from the newly created MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, through to our executive MBA, and the custom programs we develop for companies,” Rebecca Loades, director of MBA programs at ESMT tells P&Q.

“A few factors that set our program apart: our global perspective, our entrepreneurship hub VALI Berlin, our access to Berlin’s startup ecosystem, and our strong faculty expertise.”

TOP 10 ENTREPRENEURSHIP PROGRAMS FOR MBAs

Just 5.66 total points separated the top five finishers in our 2024 MBA entrepreneurship ranking.

Following ESMT, Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Management (scoring 40.21 points) rose four spots to No. 3. That matches Rice’s 2022 finish after falling to seventh in last year’s ranking.

Esade Business School in Barcelona, Spain, (39.53) fell one spot to No. 4, halting a slow but steady climb in our ranking over the last several years. Esade finished seventh in 2021, fourth in 2022, and third in 2023.

And University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business (38.79) rounded out the top five, falling from its ranking high of second place a year ago. See the table below for the top 10 finishers in our entrepreneurship ranking for 2024.

 

2024 Rank	School	Total Weighted Score	2023 Rank	YOY Change
1	Washington University in St. Louis (Olin)	100.00	1	0
2	ESMT Berlin	97.98	NR	NA
3	Rice University (Jones)	90.46	7	4
4	Esade Business School	88.94	3	-1
5	University of Michigan (Ross)	87.27	2	-3
6	Arizona State University (W. P. Carey)	84.99	6	0
7	IE Business School	78.33	8	1
8	Babson College	77.53	4	-4
9	London Business School	76.54	5	-4
10	Clemson University (Powers)	71.84	NR	NA

METHODOLOGY

We made a significant change in our methodology for 2024. In years past, we ranked about 10 schools that did not submit data directly to Poets&Quants. We collected what we could from public websites and other reporting, but these schools were given no points where no reliable data could be found. That led to rankings where entrepreneurship powerhouses like Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business ranked in the teens and Harvard Business School struggled to crack the top 10.

This year, we did not rank these schools. Generally, these are large, prestigious programs in the M7 who have a lot of entrepreneurship resources – and a lot of students. Certainly, if you have the background, stats, and personal story to get into Stanford, you’re going to have access to one of the best entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world. It’s why Stanford GBS consistently has the most MBAs on our annual list of the top funded MBA startups.

You’re also going to be among hundreds of other superstars all vying for the same attention.

Our methodology is designed to measure how resources are allocated to individual students. We use percentages and ratios – based on the number of full-time MBA students in a program in a given year – to get a sense of what entrepreneurial resources and experiences are like on a per MBA basis. This tends to favor schools with smaller class sizes where an entrepreneurial dollar or a mentor’s time is more concentrated.

The 28 schools on this ranking are entrepreneurial gems, even as their MBA programs may not typically get as much ink as the prestigious M7s.

Other than that major change, our methodology is identical to last year. Read the full methodology here, and you can compare it to last year’s methodology here.

NEXT PAGE: ESMT’S Entrepreneurial Ecosystem + At Olin Business School, a culture of solving problems