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On the first day of his final class at Duke, Jon Fjeld, PhD put up three words.
Empathy. Value. Uncertainty.
“I wouldn’t have been able to articulate any of this twenty years ago,” he says.
It was a simple framework, but one that took decades to arrive at.
For Fjeld, teaching entrepreneurship became something more than instruction. It became a process of learning what matters most.
Before Entrepreneurship
Fjeld’s relationship with Duke began long before his interest in entrepreneurship.
He first came to Duke in 1977 as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy, drawn to questions of ethics, meaning, and how we make sense of the world. After several years, he left academia for the private sector, spending over two decades building companies, navigating uncertainty, and living through both success and failure. In 2005, he returned to Duke as a faculty member at the Fuqua School of Business with the same passion for teaching, but with an extensive set of new experiences to draw from.
What He Thought Entrepreneurship Was
At Fuqua, Fjeld began teaching entrepreneurship and later stepped into the role of Executive Director of the Fuqua Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (Fuqua CEI).
“I thought I knew what I was doing,” he says.
The model was clear. Start with an existing, viable idea, often a technology. Build a business plan around it. Assemble a team. Seek funding.
Students learned how to evaluate opportunities and construct ventures within that framework. But a drawback was that they were always working with someone else’s idea. They lacked ownership and did not care deeply about the outcome.
“It’s a bit embarrassing to look back on how I thought about it,” he admits.
It was structured. Logical. And incomplete.
A Program That Marked the Shift
Over time, that thinking began to change, and the shift showed up in how Fjeld designed programs.
One of the clearest expressions of that change was Program for Entrepreneurs (P4E), developed during his time as Executive Director of Fuqua CEI.
In P4E, the starting point changed. Students were responsible for finding ideas, testing them, and deciding whether they were worth pursuing. Structured as a sequence of “New Venture” creation courses, the program guided ventures from opportunity evaluation through strategy, operating plans, and launch, with each stage tied to concrete deliverables and critical decision points. Teams advanced only when their ideas held up under scrutiny, and pivots were a legitimate and even encouraged outcome.
Just as importantly, it brought together MBA students, undergraduates, and graduate students from across Duke, creating interdisciplinary teams that reflected the university’s broader strengths. What began at Fuqua became a step toward something larger, opening the door for entrepreneurship education to extend beyond a single school and into a university-wide experience. “I came to Fuqua with a lot of bad ideas,” says Nick Kirby, MBA ’17. “Based on Jon’s advice, I decided to go find someone working on a good idea I could support.”
That decision eventually led him to Sprinter Health, where he helped build a company that has served more than 100,000 patients.
“It wasn’t my idea,” he says. “But it was a good idea.”
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Stepping Into Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship
After years of teaching and leading Fuqua CEI, Fjeld was asked to take on a broader role, bringing together different parts of the university around entrepreneurship education.
In 2018, he became Director of the Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative (Duke I&E).
His time in Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship would come to be defined by three core contributions.
First, he helped build the connective tissue across Duke. Entrepreneurship already existed in many forms across the university, but often in parallel. Fjeld focused on forming partnerships, aligning efforts, and creating common ground across schools and disciplines. That work helped shift entrepreneurship from isolated programs into a coordinated, university-wide effort.
“Unflappable, strategic, dogged, attentive to culture,” says Edward Balleisen. “He strengthened the team ethos, deepened partnerships across Duke, and did it all with good humor, patience, and integrity.”
Second, he helped establish a shared language for entrepreneurship education. Through the Model for Entrepreneurial Action, he and his colleagues introduced a framework centered on action, discovering opportunities, developing solutions, and delivering them into the world. The model gave students, faculty, and partners a consistent way to understand entrepreneurial work across disciplines.
Finally, he brought ethics to the center of entrepreneurship education.
He came to see that ethics needed to be embedded in the work itself, not treated as something separate, an idea he would later help advance with peers across universities. Fjeld collaborated with educators across institutions to shape how ethics is integrated into entrepreneurship education and to help build a broader dialogue about its future. Working with Tom Byers, Entrepreneurship Professor at Stanford University and Faculty Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and Laura Dunham, Dean of the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas, he helped form a community of educators focused on these questions. Together, they presented at conferences across the country, contributing to the field while also positioning Duke as a leading voice in entrepreneurship education.
“Try to create something good,” he says. “But also succeed.”
“Jon brought a level of philosophical rigor to entrepreneurship education that’s rare,” says Tom Byers, Entrepreneurship Professor at Stanford University and Faculty Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. “In our work together, he consistently pushed the conversation beyond how we build ventures to why we build them. That shift, integrating ethics directly into entrepreneurship, has influenced how many of us now approach teaching in this field.”
Together, these efforts extended beyond individual programs, shaping how entrepreneurship is taught and understood across institutions.
“Jon helped shape not just what we teach, but how we think about entrepreneurship at Duke,” says Jamie Jones, current Director of Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship. “The interdisciplinary foundation we have today exists in large part because of how Jon approached this work.”
What has grown since is a shared approach, one grounded in common language, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a clearer sense of purpose.
By the time Fjeld transitioned leadership to Jamie Jones in 2022, the conditions were in place not just for growth, but for scale, now reflected in Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship’s reach. In the 2025–2026 academic year, 4,061 unique students engaged with Duke I&E programs, including 43% of the undergraduate Class of 2025 and 23% of graduate and professional students. Participation spans 47 undergraduate majors, 34 PhD disciplines, and all eight Fuqua degree programs, with more than 300 PhD students involved, reflecting a truly university-wide ecosystem.
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What He Learned
Over time, through teaching, working with students, and reflecting on his own experience, Fjeld’s understanding of entrepreneurship became simpler.
He began to see that what mattered most was not the plan, or even the idea, but how well you understood the people you were trying to serve.
“We did not listen to customers. We did not understand needs,” he says.
Entrepreneurship, as he came to understand it, begins with empathy, a deep understanding of people and the context of their needs. From there, it is about creating something that brings real value and learning how to move forward without certainty.
“You only learn by doing it badly for a while until it clicks,” he says.
Over time, those lessons became clearer.
Develop empathy. Create value. Manage uncertainty.
“None of those ideas is new,” he says. “But putting them together this way, that took time. This way of approaching problems is not just for entrepreneurs, but for anyone trying to build something meaningful in the world.”
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