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"We got rid of all the bells and whistles." Jenna Goebig, a graduate student in business and architecture at the University of Illinois, visited India this winter as part of the Subsistence Marketplaces class. My team is developing a disaster relief shelter

University of Illinois Taught by: Madhu Viswanathan and John Clarke Both the socially conscious and the profit-minded see opportunity in a global market of up to four billion people living in poverty. Yet in most entrepreneurship classes, financially comfortable students develop products for customers who look a lot like themselves.

University of Miami Taught by: Outside advisers Some entrepreneurship classes live in business schools. Some live in engineering schools

"I was sweating bullets." Phillip Leslie is founder and CEO of ProOnGo, a Chicago company that makes expense-reporting software for smartphones.

University of Chicago Taught by: Craig Wortmann Though marketing courses are legion in business schools, sales classes are hen's-teeth rare. That's one reason Craig Wortmann's class feels so refreshing. The other reason is that Wortmann, a clinical associate professor and former CEO of two software companies, customizes material for the kind of scared and starving entrepreneur he once was.

Stanford University Taught by: Tina Seelig and Tom Byers Each year, a dozen Stanford students get front-row seats for business drama at its most compelling. Mayfield Fellows spend a third of their nine-month class interning in young Silicon Valley companies, where "anything you can imagine happening in a high-growth, high-impact company has happened," says Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program

Babson College Taught by: Faculty Marketing, finance, operations, and HR can be studied separately. Entrepreneurship encompasses them all. So Babson College, a business-oriented school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, introduces its entire freshman class to the subject of business by having students start one.

"Until then, this had been just a class project." Samit Gupta is co-founder, with Robert Rushenberg, of the start-up O2 Insights, based in Menlo Park, California. In 2009, he took the Technology Venturing class at Ohio State University.

The Ohio State University Taught by: Michael Camp The inventor-entrepreneur is a romantic figure. But plenty of companies thrive by commercializing the inventions of others. Technology Venturing builds businesses around sophisticated technologies that have not yet found commercial uses

Howard Schultz took a small Seattle coffee store and turned it into a global business with more than $10 billion in annual sales. Yet one of his greatest accomplishments, says the Starbucks CEO, was making it through the past few years. In his new book, Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul, Schultz chronicles his return to the helm of Starbucks during one of the most tumultuous times in the company's 40-year history

Stanford's new entrepreneurship class is not for the faint of heart. Launchpad is designed around a series of hurdles: the elevator pitch, the functional prototype, week after week of sales results.

On the whole , Inc. 500|5000 CEOs are upbeat. More than 80 percent reported that their businesses are in strong or very strong shape and are poised to grow in the months ahead.

Socialism, Ja or No? Our special report on Norway [" Ja, Socialism ," February ], the socialist Northern European country in which taxes are sky high but entrepreneurs are thriving, sparked a contentious online debate. The story, by Inc.

Credit card design has not changed much over the years. Now, Citibank is ushering in a new breed of credit cards with built-in computer chips.

In 2003, Laura Ching left a marketing job at Walmart.com to co-found Tiny Prints , a Sunnyvale, California, business that sells invitations, announcements, and other customized stationery online. The business is a perfect fit for Ching, a stickler for proper etiquette. Here are two of her favorite things.