The largest business plan competition, Accelerate Michigan, had just completed its main award ($500,000) a week before. This week, however, a dozen startups gathered in the basement of Ann Arbor SPARK to give their pitch after weeks of hard work not for prize money but for the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to take…
This week was the kick off of the University of Michigan Innovation Corps (I-Corps) summer session where 80 scientists, engineers and mentors gathered in Ann Arbor to participate in the 8-week entrepreneurial-immersion program developed by Steve Blank and the National Science Foundation (NSF). For those not familiar with I-Corps, it is an intense entrepreneurial training…
I’ve sat through approximately 50 pitches in the last 2-3 weeks and many times I hear a common example of how the teams have tested their ideas with customers… “We went out and showed our prototype to a bunch of people and everyone we showed it to said yes, they would buy it!”. The problem…
As an entrepreneur, you look at life through a different lens. Instead of seeing the world as it is, you tend to start seeing the world as it “should be” or “could be”. Instead of taking things on face value you tend to stop and question how they came into being and why and who did…
Consider this question: “Describe the value of a gas station”. I like to ask entrepreneurs this question as a thought experiment of how hard it is sometimes to isolate value from something we are used to experiencing every day. A typical response is “a place where I gas my car”. That is incorrect, that is…
Last night was the UM Student Startup Showcase at the new TechArb location where 225 Ann Arbor entrepreneurs gathered to see not only the 8 most recent student startups to complete the TechArb program but also to meet the 20 new UM Student Startups entering TechArb for session #7 (Nov-2011 through April-2012). Many thanks to…
We have made great strides in developing and teaching skills and processes that help entrepreneurs figure out how to take their ideas, reduce risks and more efficiently test and validate (or invalidate) they’re assumptions. As you probably know I’m a huge fan of the lean startup model and customer development. I’m also really happy to…
This is the final blog post of the Acceleration Project. See last week’s post for the Acceleration Phase and the first post in this series for an overview of what I’m rambling on about here. On the evening of Thursday, April 21, 2011, 40 student startup ventures met in the basement of the parking garage…
This is the third phase (fourth blog post) of the Acceleration Project. See last week’s post for the Skill Building Phase and the first post in this series for an overview of what I’m rambling about here. I was thinking back to a strategy session I was having at one of my early startups I…
This is the second phase (third blog post) of the Acceleration Project. See last week’s post for the Application Phase and the first post in this series for an overview of what I’m rambling about here. In Colorado Springs, teams gather to sharpen their skills, train and win. They analyze their performance, meet with experts…
Doug Neal 