Last month, with Baker and other visiting professors observing, Spinelli conducted a test-run of one case the group is developing with a Babson MBA class. The case focused on Babson alumnus Eric Johnson, who ran a family hair-care products business and later turned an ice cream maker with roots in Chicago's black community into a national food company.

With Johnson also observing, Spinelli asked questions typical of MBA cases, like how to value an initial public offering of the food business.

At several points, Spinelli also asked his students to consider the choices Johnson faced through the lens of race. Would borrowing money from a bank really have been a simple option for Johnson's company in the 1970s? Might he have to hire white employees to deal with white buyers?

After watching the class wrestle with his real-life dilemmas, Johnson says aspiring minority entrepreneurs need to hear success stories.

"It is important to know these things are possible, to identify with people who have done them," he says.

Backers of the program say more and better minority-focused case studies would benefit non-minority students, too. Says Steve Nelson, a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who also attended the Babson conference: "It makes students realize that there are different variables to every situation based on different cultures."

Perhaps most important, Baker adds, black-owned businesses are a largely untapped reservoir of useful business lessons.

"Some of these companies have survived where mainstream companies would have gone under," he says. "The genius of African-American business is they experience racism, but it has allowed them to come up with unconventional strategies that have allowed them to survive. Going through these experiences causes us to go back to this brain the Lord has given us and come up with new ideas."