IF YOU WANT...

To Start Your Own Company

Go to Harvard Business School

No, the world has not been turned upside down. The substantial resources Harvard has devoted to its entrepreneurial offerings in recent years are starting to show real results. By many accounts, Harvard has as strong a claim to being top start-up destination as Stanford does.

Anchored by its Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the school offers 33 graduate-level entrepreneurship courses, with the second-largest number of dedicated faculty after finance. But its push reaches well beyond the classroom. An annual New Venture Competition awards $150,000 in cash plus in-kind prizes. The school also assists graduates who are pursuing new ventures with loan reductions of $10,000 to $20,000 — last year, 21 student entrepreneurs received more than $325,000 through the program. Its biannual entrepreneurial summit gathers alumni with demonstrated early-stage traction, and an entrepreneurs-in-residence program invites accomplished founders (and funders) to hold weekly office hours to advise students.

Rob Biederman, class of 2014, says he entered Harvard Business School pretty much prepared to go back to Bain Capital, where he had been working in private equity. But a required first-year course, “Field III,” forces students, in teams of six, to found a company. The professorial advice and an eventual $5,000 in seed money and free office space on campus gave Mr. Biederman start-up fever, and he and his classmates created HourlyNerd — a rent-an-M.B.A. business model to disrupt the low end of the consulting industry — and had it up and rolling by the end of their first year. They met Mark Cuban — the Dallas Mavericks owner, who kicked in $450,000 — when he visited a class, and connected with other investors through a classmate. (No surprise there: Harvard says that 25 percent of venture capital partners in the world are H.B.S. alumni, providing significant networking possibilities.) Recent graduates have also founded the likes of Birchbox, Rent the Runway and Gilt Groupe.

John A. Byrne, author of eight books on business and founder and editor of Poets & Quants, a website that covers business education, ranked HarvardNo. 1 in his most recent assessment of start-up culture. Stanford’s graduates usually raise more money, he points out, but Harvard grads consistently start more companies.

H.B.S. is so serious about the push that it recently backtracked on a longstanding policy not to participate in Entrepreneur magazine’s ranking of graduate programs. And the decision had its desired effect: Harvard came in at No. 1 last year, while Stanford, long considered the entrepreneurial hotbed among M.B.A. schools, placed fifth.