Launching a new business venture is a daunting task that requires extensive preparation, market knowledge, considerable capital, and more. It helps if you know the various steps involved in setting up a new business, scaling it, finding investors and customers, managing the books, and everything in between.

Here's a list of free online resources, on the topic of entrepreneurship, by top-notch educational institutions and our generation's most famous and successful entrepreneurs.

Most of these courses are available as video lectures, and you can finish them within a week to gain a solid understanding of entrepreneurial thinking, challenges, and solutions.

1. Harvard Innovation Labs' Startup Secrets

This is a two-part lecture hosted on YouTube, with each part being an hour and thirty minutes in length. Although not a proper course with a certification afterward, it's a good lecture for beginners and provides the right tools for budding entrepreneurs to ace startup fundamentals. It's completely free, and you only need around three hours to finish the course.

Although it's ten years old, the information shared in these two presentations still carries valuable insights. It's part of Harvard's i-labs Lectures series with the sessions on Startup Secrets hosted by Michael J Skok, a serial entrepreneur with two decades of investments, mentoring, and teaching experience.

This series focuses on discontinuous and disruptive changes that new businesses can bring about to beat their competitors. It also gives information about the type of startup ventures one should invest in, which offers further insight into the kind of startup ideas you should pursue and work on.

2. MIT's Nuts and Bolts of Business Plans

Hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Open Courseware portal, this course is offered every January during the Independent Activities Period(IAP). It has six sessions in total spread over two weeks. Each session is three hours long and covers topics like Introduction to Business Plans, Refining and Presenting Your Venture Idea, Marketing and Sales, etc.

This is a free course with content hosted online in the form of YouTube videos and downloadable notes. The current course content and lectures series are from the 2014 IAP sessions taught by Joseph Hadzima, Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Participants get to interact and share ideas with MIT students and researchers who go on to participate in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

3. freeCodeCamp's The Foundations of Entrepreneurship

freeCodeCamp started as a free online resource to teach people how to code. Its free learning sessions online cover a wide range of topics, including the Foundation of Entrepreneurship. This is a five-hour and ~47 minutes video tutorial course hosted on YouTube. It aims to cover topics generally left out by university courses like Building Relationships, Avoiding Burnout, Who to Take Advice From, Happiness, Ethics, etc.

Chris Haroun, Founder & Managing Partner at LinkedIn, teaches this course and brings his wealth of experience as a venture capitalist, financial analyst, and more to the table. If you're looking for practical, real-life examples of launching a business and want to go from freelancer to entrepreneur, this is the course for you.

4. Polsky Entrepreneurship Courses

Hosted by the Polsky On Demand Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation under the aegis of the University of Chicago, these courses aim to provide lessons and workshops in entrepreneurship, free of cost. Polsky on Demand has more than 100 hours of digital content covering every topic, from launching a startup to scaling and maintaining it.

You'll need to subscribe to their newsletters to gain access to course material and mentorship programs. These are the two courses on entrepreneurship you can access for free:

• Entrepreneurship Essentials (E2) covers beginner basics like Starting Your Venture with Low/No-Cost Solutions, Fundraising for Your Startup, etc.
• Polsky Entrepreneurial Outlook 2021 focuses on entrepreneurship in different sectors like the media and entertainment, cybersecurity, health care, etc. You can explore the Polsky On Demand website to learn more about additional courses to help you with your entrepreneurial endeavors.

5. Small Business Basics

This course is hosted by the United States Small Business Administration. It has six sessions divided by broad topics like Planning, Launching, Managing, Marketing, etc. Each topic has several objectives, ranging from 25 to 70 that you need to fulfill to ace the sessions. Each session is broken down into objectives like How to Write a Business Plan, Introduction to Pricing, Finding and Attracting Investors, etc.

All the objectives have a corresponding short video lesson. Most of these lessons are only a minute or two long, with a few objectives reaching the 10-minutes mark. Samples of the documents discussed are also available to download at the end of each session.

6. How to Start a Startup

If you want to learn entrepreneurship through the lens of successful entrepreneurs, this is the course for you. It boasts of names such as Sam Altman and Dustin Moskovitz, the President of Y Combinator and the Cofounder of Facebook, Asana, and Good Ventures, respectively.

The most interesting aspect of this course is that the complete course transcription and annotations explaining every aspect of the course are available on Genius. So, if you aren't able to follow the content or terminology, you can rely on the annotations provided by Genius to break down the topic into the simplest terms.

Course sessions cover unique topics like Talking to Users, How to be a Great Founder, Doing Things That Don't Scale, and so on besides regular stuff like Growth, Sales and Marketing, etc. Its practical approach makes it the ideal course for people looking to start their own business while working a full-time job.

Enroll in an Entrepreneurship Course Today

All the courses listed above provide unique insights into topics ranging from turning an idea into a business opportunity to selling it properly to investors to get funding, from scaling it to managing it as a successful venture and everything in between, without costing you a dime.

Taking the initiative is a hallmark of an astute business person, so enroll in one of these courses today to imbibe the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.