Business Incubator Series: Art Boni, Donald H. Jones Center For Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Mellon University — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Art: Our business accelerator is wrapped in the academic program. The people who participate in it are either spending three months in the program between the first and the second years of their MBA program, or they do it after they graduate with an MBA when they are launching their company.

We consider the accelerator to be a university program. Students come here with the intent of starting and launching a company when they graduate, that is, creating jobs for themselves. What we are trying to do is provide a lot of education on that as part of the academic program. Students are basically working on developing their businesses as part of their class projects. However, our students have asked us if there a way for them to spend a more in-depth period working on their venture outside of the classroom? That is what the accelerator is intended to do.

Irina: Does your accelerator program have any particular industry preference?

Art: Not really. We see a lot of students who are working on projects that are loosely grouped under the IT space. Some students are working on projects that are more hardware oriented – medical devices, for example. We also see students who are working on biotechnology-type projects. What we are trying to do is to incorporate the use of an agile innovation approach so that they can pursue these projects in a capital-efficient way.

In fact, we have just been awarded, within the past few months, a significant program from the Department of Commerce and its Economic Development Administration [EDA] which they call the i6 Challenge. We won this award competitively.

[The i6 Challenge seeks to identify and support the nation’s best ideas for technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in six different regions of the country. The winning team from each region will receive $1 million from the EDA to support its project and may be eligible for additional awards. Projects include efforts to drive innovative technologies in the medical and bioscience industries to market more quickly by bringing experts in science and academia together with public and private sector businesses and entrepreneurs.]

What we are doing under this program is developing “Agile Innovation System,” which could be applied not only to software companies but also to companies in other industries as well.

So, we are working on the methodology and also applying it. We are planning on investing in approximately 20 to 25 opportunities that would translate in the companies over the two years of the program.

You can think of the i6 Challenge program as the front end of our accelerator and the Alpha Lab accelerator of Innovation Works Inc. because the program was awarded jointly to Carnegie Mellon University and to Innovation Works, which is our partner.

Irina: At what stage do you suggest students apply to participate in your program?

Art: It depends upon which program we are talking about. For the i6 program, they apply for it at the time when they can convince us that they have  a business idea that has a self-sustaining competitive advantage. So, it is at the idea stage. The next step would be to develop a prototype, get customer feedback, and iterate several times toward a solution. At the end of that program, they will be ready to apply to the accelerator, which will give them the opportunity to actually launch their company.

The other program we have, in addition to the i6 and the accelerator, is a series of competitions here that we call new venture plan competitions. They are targeted at developing commercialization strategies and business models for these early-stage ventures.

For example, we just ran our McGinnis Venture Competition over the weekend, where we had 30 teams from around the world come in and pitch to panels of successful entrepreneurs, angel investors, and venture capitalists to get feedback on their ideas. That is another program we have that targets early-stage company formation.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Art Boni, Donald H. Jones Center For Entrepreneurship, Carnegie Mellon University -- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
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