In recent years, venture businesses, entrepreneurs and corporate managers have been gaining widespread attention. What are their qualifications and personal history? What were the opportunities that enabled them to become entrepreneurs? What experiences did they have? What setbacks and failures did they have, and how did they recover from them? To anyone who wishes to become an entrepreneur, entrepreneurs' answers to such questions should provide valuable guidelines.

This project aims to develop an educational program to study the strategic roles of corporate managers. For this purpose, a series of cases will be built up so that students can experience vicariously the complex activities of contemporary managers, based on a number of interviews with renowned managers in Japan. The interview records will be edited in the form of video clips and case books, and released to the public at such places as the Entrepreneurial Museum of Challenge and Innovation, so that they can be utilized in professional school education not only at Kwansei Gakuin University but also at other institutions. Some will be translated into English for users worldwide. Some of the interviewed managers will participate in lectures and in two-way discussions with students. Related symposiums are also planned.

Since this project will be conducted in association with economic organizations such as the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Kansai Economic Federation, and various companies, students will have direct access to current industrial information and be able to share the know-how involved in creating cases. The cases thus created can be smoothly made available to the business world as well as to society in general. A major feature of this project is students' active participation in the development of an MBA education program through their cooperation with faculty members in creating MBA cases.

The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology established the "Development of Educational Program at Professional Schools" Project in 2006 as a successor to the education support program for forming law schools and other professional schools, introduced by the ministry in 2004. This program aims at promoting the education of highly professional people by coordinating professional schools with related industries and professional associations, and by selecting, through a third-party evaluation, leading educational projects that will contribute toward improving the quality of education in line with the human resources requirements of each business sector. In FY2006, 14 (2 joint projects and 12 single projects) were accepted out of 60 applications from professional schools (excluding law schools). The "Development of Cases on the Strategic Roles of Contemporary Entrepreneurs" program at the Institute of Business and Accounting, Kwansei Gakuin University, was chosen by the ministry for FY2006 and FY2007.