Develop a Sustainable Business Model
Incubation Experience Program
If you have a business or social venture idea or concept and would like to develop a sustainable and scalable business model for it, apply for our Incubation Experience program!
The Incubation Experience program is a 10-week program providing real-world, hands-on learning on what it’s like to start a company. It’s essentially an experiential lab. Our goal, within the constraints of the program and a limited amount of time, is to create an entrepreneurial experience for you with all of the pressures and demands of the real world in an early-stage startup!
How the Incubation Experience Program works:
The program uses the Lean LaunchPad® developed by Steve Blank in 2011, introduced at Stanford University, Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley and currently taught in more than 200 universities worldwide.
The method is core to the U.S. National Science Foundation Innovation Corps program, which is the standard for commercializing science in the U.S. and applied in a variety of sectors, including non-commercial areas such as Hacking for Defense and for Diplomacy.
You will validate that you have created a repeatable, scalable business model through the combination of experiential learning with the three building blocks of a successful lean startup:
- Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas
- Steve Blank’s Customer Development model
- Agile engineering
You will also receive support through one-on-one mentoring throughout and after the 10-12-week period to address challenges and start operations.
All in all, you will be getting your hands dirty talking to customers, partners, competitors, as you encounter the chaos and uncertainty of how a startup works. You’ll work in teams learning how to turn a great idea into a great company. You’ll learn how to use a business model to brainstorm each part of a company and customer development to get out of the building to see whether anyone other than you would want/use your product. Finally, based on the customer and market feedback you gathered, you would use agile development to rapidly iterate your product to build something customers would use and buy.