Cesar Bandera, Ph.D
Leir Chair in Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and
Management
Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship
Martin Tuchman School of ManagementNew Jersey Institute of
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VentureLinkNew Jersey Institute of
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bandera@njit.edu
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About Me
I am an electrical engineer who was thrust in the mid-80’s into entrepreneurship. After decades of helping students from the vantage point of industry, I am now helping startups from the vantage point of academia.
My research interests follow three paths: cross-cultural experiential entrepreneurship education, innovation-driven business incubation, and mobile healthcare innovation. In addition to teaching most NJIT courses in entrepreneurship, I am also a serial entrepreneur and currently the founding partner of an m-health company that conducts wireless public health campaigns for CDC, NIH, EPA, and foreign ministries of health. I help students and alumni launch their own startups and secure funding; if their product or service is in my technology wheelhouse, I help with product development as well. Every year since 2018, the Princeton Review has ranked our entrepreneurship program #1 in New Jersey, and in 2022 I was awarded the Leir Chair in Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Management (which is too long to fit on a business card).
I received a Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University at Buffalo, NY, with a concentration in biomimetic machine vision and AI. My work has yielded journal and conference publications and book chapters, four patents, the NASA Space Act award, and two Small Business of the Year Nominations from the US Department of Defense. I am Associate Editor of the Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, Senior Member of the IEEE, serve on the board of the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, and have served as Director of the Academy of the International Council for Small Business. I work with an awesome team of Ph.D students in Business Data Science, and in 2018 I was honored with the NJIT Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award, and in 2020 designated NJIT Master Teacher.
When I am not in publish-or-perish mode, I rebuild antique single-ended vacuum tube amps, jam on vintage Moog synthesizers, and try to keep roadworthy a 5.0L Mustang ragtop, all which are older than my students.
My Frequent Courses
· ENTR210 (previously ENTR410) “Introduction to Entrepreneurship” is a face-to-face introduction to entrepreneurship. Many students with innovative ideas or newfound opportunities take this class to validate the commercial potential. Each student forms her/his own company and is responsible for all aspects of the startup (i.e., no groups). This course teaches you to learn how to critique from the point of view of investors so that you can then improve your own work.
· ENTR330 (previously ENTR430) “Entrepreneurial Strategy” is a course on bootstrapping your startup. Going into this course, we assume you already have a clear concept. We will prototype the idea, get market feedback, and hopefully some real start-up money!
· MGMT640 is the graduate and Executive MBA face-to-face and distance-learning version of ENTR410.
· MGMT680 “Entrepreneurial Strategy” is a face-to-face course that teaches strategies for the formation, growth, and harvesting of technology-based start-up companies. It helps student evaluate a career as an entrepreneur, or as an intrapreneur within a larger organization. Students are exposed to actual entrepreneurial environments for which they must develop actionable strategies for immediate execution. This course is often taught in parallel with Dr. Ellen Thomas’ MRKT631 Marketing Research.
· ENTR490 “Independent Study” is a one-on-one 3 credit-hour course in which the student conduct a research project associated with entrepreneurship, or advance a startup initiated in another NJIT course (a business plan is required). Enrollment in an Independent Study requires prior approval of the instructor, and a proposal delineating the project and the deliverables (in other words, see me before the registration deadline).
· ENTR725 “Independent Study” is the graduate version of ENTR490.
· MGMT390-IDS “Principles of Management” is a strategic management course for Honors students who have already developed a technology and business plan for an innovation and are part of the Interdisciplinary Design Studio.
Other Courses
· ECE416/417 “Senior Design Project” is a two-semester program of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. See me if you need signal processing help in your senior project.
· NSF I-Corps is a program that commercializes university innovation. It couples university inventors with entrepreneurship mentorship. See me if you need the latter.
· ENTR320 (previously ENTR420) “Financing New Ventures” focuses on the financial aspects of entrepreneurship. From where can you get startup capital, and how much will it cost you? How much is your company worth at different stages of maturity? How do you plan an exit strategy? These are some of the issues covered, and it helps to have already validated your value proposition in ENTR410.
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