Free Business courses online

In his recent Reddit AMA, visionary and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk wrote: “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree—make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e., the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

Whether you are contemplating starting a business for the first time or starting a new type of business, the most important tool you can have in your toolbox is knowledge. As a follow-up to Angelique O’Rourke’s recent article Top 10 Free Online Classes for Small Business Marketing, here are 11 highly rated free online courses on various topics related to starting a business. Together, they provide a broad entrepreneurship education from which anyone can benefit.

Note: Some of these courses are available in a self-paced format, while others are scheduled to run periodically. On some platforms, even after a scheduled course has ended, you can still enroll and take the course on a self-paced basis.

Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? This course from the University of California, Irvine Continuing Education department, will introduce you to the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, including the entrepreneurial process and how to recognize business opportunities. The goal is for people with little to no knowledge of entrepreneurship to emerge with tools they can use to assess their readiness to start their own business.

This course, which was rated the top entrepreneurship course and one of the top three business courses offered by massive open online course (MOOC) provider Coursera, is perfect for those who may have a great idea, but don’t have a business background. As the first course in Coursera’s “Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business” specialization, and as a general introduction to entrepreneurship, industry, and markets, it is well worth a few hours of your time.

“You have an idea for a product, but do you know who will want to buy it?” That’s the fundamental question explored in this course, which is offered by MIT on the edX MOOC platform. In this course, you will explore case studies of real MIT entrepreneurs, as well as perform various exercises that will help you identify and select the right customers for your business.

This is not a course per se, but rather a curated collection of articles and videos from resources around the web. It is organized into 12 self-paced lessons, starting with an overview of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship process, and progressing through various foundational topics and practical applications.

What better way to learn about entrepreneurship than from a successful entrepreneur? This course is taught by Steve Blank, who has built several Silicon Valley startups, authored two books on entrepreneurship, and teaches around the world. In this course, you will learn about the Customer Development Process, which teaches entrepreneurs how to develop and test their ideas using data from real customers.