As far as university classes go, NUvention Web pretty much tops them all. Setting undergraduate and graduate students alike loose to form their own teams, NUvention Web allows students build their own startups and pitch to some of the country’s great entrepreneurial minds.
The 38 students in NUvention Web, a part of Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and the Farley Center of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, delivered their pitches Tuesday afternoon in front of their advisory board. The pitches, which included product demos, served as a progress report at the halfway point of the course and as an exhibition of each team’s cross-disciplinary teamwork.
“The pitches Tuesday were not all given by Kellogg students, actually they were pretty evenly divided between undergrad and grad students from Kellogg and the McCormick School of Engineering,” Farley Director Mike Marasco said. “It’s very clear to us that you get something special when you combine different students at different stages with different expertise.”
The interdisciplinary approach and the guidance of Marasco and Northwestern Professor and former Microsoft Vice President Todd Warren have churned out companies such as Groovebug, Sweetperk, walk.by and Adaptly over the past four years.
“Todd and I put a lot of pressure on ourselves, and most of the faculty team did as well, in terms of really trying to stimulate what it’s like to be in a real incubator within our class,” Marasco said.
[ibimage==22983==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-center] NUvention Web students on the CycleTracer team at their weekly work session.
With such a realistic atmosphere that has proven to be a breeding ground for successful companies, just clinching a spot in the course is getting more competitive: this year, only teams that survived the Startup Incinerator competition last fall were admitted.
In addition to screening teams in a competitive atmosphere this year, NUvention Web’s curriculum itself underwent a “radical change,” Marasco said, to incorporate more of serial entrepreneur Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad techniques. To facilitate these changes, students this year are using Launchpad Central, which Blank co-founded, in order to upload presentations and track their customer bases and business plans, all of which mentors can access.
New this year to the permanent NUvention Web faculty is Steve Olechowski, of Feedburner, Summify and blinkfire labs. Olechowski gives experience that is extremely beneficial to students because he is someone “who’s done it numerous times and who understands ideas, people and feedback,” Marasco said.
The real-life entrepreneurial experience NUvention Web faculty bring to the course is helpful to students across all majors. Take CycleTracer, for example, a team made up of two designers, two business people, a mechanical engineer and a computer scientist. CycleTracer, a company developing a keyless bike lock which only unlocks with the owner’s smartphone, just showed off their prototype Tuesday and now is ready to take their model to Kickstarter, CycleTracer team member and Kellogg student Joppe Bijlsma said.
The CycleTracer team won second prize at Startup Incinerator in the fall and has persevered with their same idea ever since. Other teams, however, were forced to start over in the middle of NUvention Web if either their idea or team fell through; at least three teams broke up and reformed throughout the winter, which may be attributed to students forming teams on their own for the first time this year.
The quick turnaround that some teams faced did not affect the quality of pitches Tuesday though; Marasco said he received comments from members of the advisory board that some teams this year were better so far this year than teams were at the end of the course last year.
“It’s fascinating to see how radically things change in one week with students and how students can really pull a rabbit out of a hat in days,” Marasco said. “Last week we did dry runs intentionally forcing students to not do a last-minute sort of thing, but students have a lot going on.”
One such student is Julian Cheng, a part-time graduate student, full-time engineer, dad, and founder of MentorHip. Cheng said he has been working on the concept of MentorHip.com, a site trying to better connect parents and kids with classes, camps, programs and mentors, for about a year before bringing the idea to NUvention Web for execution.
“Not only did I want to build this company, but learn and get the knowledge from entrepreneurs who have built in the past, like Mike Marasco, Todd Warren, and Steve Olechowski who are all awesome mentors,” Cheng said. “The lean startup methodologies are what I really wanted to learn and apply it to this company.”
