UCF I-Corps Announces Inaugural Class

Nine Entrepreneurial Teams Selected
Representing Cross Section of University Programs

(ORLANDO, Fla) – The University of Central Florida (UCF) I-Corps committee announced the entrepreneurial teams selected to participate in the program’s inaugural class. Teams will embark on their 10-week journey beginning January 30, 2015.

The inaugural I-Corps class represents a cross section of students from various UCF programs, including College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS), Institute for Simulation and Training (IST), Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC), NanoScience Technology Center (NSTC), College of Medicine (COM) and School of Visual Arts and Design (SVAD).

UCF I-Corps teams generally consist of an Entrepreneurial Lead (EL), Principal Investigator (PI) and Industry/I-Corps Mentor. Inaugural teams include: Talon Simulations (CECS); Autonomous Vehicle (IST); Smartphone Spectrometer (NSTC); e-Book Platform (CECS); Xapagy (CECS); MotivATE (COM); HybridaSol (FSEC); Healthshares (COM); and iBeacon Platform (SVAD).

These aspiring entrepreneurs will participate in an immersive, hands-on program designed to teach them how to test their ideas, gauge feasibility, understand consumer demand, examine competition and develop mutually beneficial partnerships to help transition their ideas into profitable enterprises. Experienced advisors and mentors oversee the teams and coach them toward success.

The inaugural teaching team consists of a mix of experienced entrepreneurs and UCF faculty including Thomas O’Neal, Oscar Rodriguez, Michael O’Donnell, Cameron Ford, Ivan Garibay and David Metcalf. The entire teaching team was trained at the Lean LaunchPad Educators Seminar at Stanford. This training was facilitated by Jerry Engel and Steve Blanks, creators of the Lean Launchpad movement. Engel, a professor at Berkeley (University of California) and National Faculty Director of the NSF

I-Corps program, will be co-teaching the first and last inaugural classes with the UCF teaching team.

Dr. Nicoleta Hickman UCF’s FSEC, will serve as the PI for HybridaSol. “Our entire team is excited to accept this honor and challenge,” says Dr. Hickman. “To be part of this first group is very special, and we are determined not to disappoint. We realize this is a major investment in HybridaSol by the National Science Foundation and the I-Corps committee.”

Ivan Garibay, Ph.D.

Ivan Garibay, Ph.D.

Ivan Garibay, Ph.D., serves as Program Director for UCF I-Corps. “Being named one of only 15 universities nationwide to lead an I-Corps site is an incredible opportunity and privilege for UCF,” explains Garibay. “The I-Corps committee put much time and effort into choosing teams representing diverse ideas and innovations. We look forward to seeing the transformation and progress of our inaugural class.”

UCF I-Corps Welcomes Pioneer of Lean Startup Movement

0- 256UCF plans to debut its I-Corps program in a big way.  Jerome “Jerry” Engel, Ph.D. – co-founder and leader of the Lean Startup movement – will make special appearances at the UCF campus and at a community mixer downtown, in partnership with Canvs and Starter Studio, to help officially kick-off the UCF I-Corps program.

UCF I-Corps – administered by the UCF Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (UCF CIE) – is a statewide program designed to foster, grow and nurture an innovation ecosystem through partnerships between the National Science Foundation, Florida universities and venture capital and entrepreneurial communities.

Central Florida is poised to become the epicenter of the Lean Startup movement in Florida.

This hands-on methodology emphasizes engagement and experiential study. The approach requires teams of researchers and students to propose and test their business hypotheses in “real-world” scenarios. Industry mentors review findings with students, helping them make appropriate adjustments to their innovation and/or commercialization plan in preparation for bringing their ideas to market.

Ivan Garibay, Ph.D., serves as Program Director for UCF I-Corps.

“The I-Corps program will help promote and facilitate innovation and research throughout the entire state of Florida,” explains Dr. Garibay.  “UCF is honored to have been selected as one of 15 sites I-Corps sites across the nation.  Having the opportunity to bring the co-founder and leader in the Lean Startup movement here to Central Florida solidifies the foundation of this very exciting and promising program.”

Jerry Engel collaborated closely with Steve Blank, chief architect of the Lean LaunchPad method, to help develop the curriculum and co-author the LaunchPad Educators Guide. Engel is a leader in entrepreneurship education, venture capital, corporate innovation and regional economic development. He joined the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 and founded the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. As an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business he has instructed in both the School’s MBA and Executive Education programs specializing in Entrepreneurship, New Venture Finance, Corporate Innovation, and Venture Capital. He has taught the Lean LaunchPad at U.C. Berkeley and across the U.S. as National Faculty Director of the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which has trained over 300 teams of the nation’s leading scientists. Internationally he is supervising programs in Asia and Europe.

For more information about UCF I-Corps, please contact us.

Get Out of the Building!

0- 237One of the key concepts in the Lean LaunchPad methodology is Customer Discovery, otherwise known by its call to action – “Get Out of the Building!”  Expect to hear that phrase constantly during the first weeks of class.

It’s essential to the process that team PIs and entrepreneurial leads meet face to face with as many potential customers, users, and influencers of their technology as possible. There is no substitute for the comprehensive feedback you get by reading the eyes and body language of your customer. It can be ego-deflating as well, particularly when the customer’s value of your technology and how they’d use it is totally different than you thought – for the twentieth time!

So what to do? You keep going. Getting out of the building.

You’ll tweak your interview targets based on the comments you get. Over time, as you use this feedback to drive the evolution of your Business Model Canvas, you’ll get better at refocusing and finding next-stage customers. Remember the discussion about the multiple pivots your idea would go through during the I-Corps term? This refocusing on new customers and new needs is that pivot process in action. Your value proposition, customer, distribution channel, and other elements of your startup will move and morph based on the demands of your market. You usually end up in a very different place than you started.

To maximize the effectiveness of the Customer Discovery process, it’s important to be highly prepared from the first interview. Don’t accept that you’ll get better with experience. While true, don’t ad lib your way through the first sessions. When you create your first list of customer prospects, they’re likely to be the people you think are the best fit for your technology. Your best prospects. Why wouldn’t you prepare to do a good job the first time? Role-play with other people, including from other teams. Read and heed advice from the required text Talking to Humans (Constable, 2014). Find and watch videos online on Customer Discovery and interviewing skills. Be the best interviewer you can be from the first day. In doing so, you’ll position yourself to maximize your information gathering process. Within the Lean LaunchPad framework, the greater the volume and quality of your information, the quicker you may find a viable business model for your startup.

Failure Spoken Here

1078182_54057625 (Custom)

What’s the truism about the chance of failure for a random startup? 80 percent? 90 percent? It’s a bleak picture if you’d like to start a technology venture. All the effort, expense, and grind of hours for months on end you’re willing to put into pursuing your dream. Yet the statistics say that dream has an excellent chance of being a smoldering lump in a few years.

Believe it or not, there’s no better time to jump start your dream than now.
Your first task? Embrace failure.

Not for its own sake. But without failure, success is more difficult to find.

We’ll work with you to be sure you fail time and again. It’s part of the plan.

The Lean LaunchPad methodology was adopted by the National Science Foundation for the I-Corps program, in part, because the hypothesis testing core to the LLP approximates the scientific method applied to technology venturing. It’s this testing in the form of Customer Discovery interviews with prospective customers, users, and influencers that provides the feedback for your idea to fail. The current term is “pivot”. Consider a pivot to be a complete or partial failure of the original idea.

The week-by-week process of information gathering integral to the LLP process provides a framework for your idea to fail multiple times in a very short timeframe. More importantly, you’ll fail in a way that’s much faster, cheaper, and painless – except to your ego -than pursuing a startup on your own.

Once you embrace failure and the Customer Discovery process, something amazing often happens about halfway through the course. The pivots stop. You begin to hear the same things from people you talk to. Conversations and reactions become more uniform. You just may have something! A value proposition. Product-market fit. The elements of a business model. And a potential path to success.

Or not. But that’s OK. There are usually three outcomes that you’ll discover when you engage with customers about their needs and issues:

  • Your original concept works as you thought! (Usually not)
  • Your concept can be adapted to solve a customer problem, but it’s a different customer or problem than you expected. (Often)
  • There isn’t an obvious market for your concept just now. (Sometimes)

All these outcomes are positive. If your concept has a chance of success, you’ll know quickly and have a much better idea of its market opportunity. If no current market opportunity exists, you’ll know that quickly as well, without the personal costs that normally accompany business failure.

The UCF I-Corps program. Failure spoken here.

Written by Eddie Hill