Lingchuan Xu ’21 | Features Editor
This weekend (Oct. 26–Oct. 28), the Western Massachusetts Idea Jam (WMIJ) was held at UMass Center in Springfield. It was an entrepreneurship event cosponsored by Smith College, Mount Holyoke College and Western Massachusetts University; other universities were invited to attend. People from a range of different schools met and got to know each other, exchanging their ideas.
With a passion for entrepreneurship, I have attended a couple of workshops at Smith and am currently taking IDP 155 “Entrepreneurship I: Introduction to Innovation,” taught by the Conway Center. But I have never stepped outside of Smith to connect with entrepreneurs from other schools. WMIJ provided me with such an opportunity.
After we were randomly assigned to groups of four to five people, members of each group started to pitch their ideas and were asked questions. Then, each group, as a whole, selected two ideas to present to all the students. Afterwards, people regrouped themselves by picking the pitch they were most interested in.
Though it sounds a bit over-segmented, I think this process is quite orderly and considerate for adapting to an entrepreneurship environment, being especially friendly to newcomers.
Later, people filled out the lean canvas: a canvas marked by several columns. These columns include value proposition (why your idea matters), problem, solution, key metrics (how to know your business is successful or not), cost structure, unfair advantage (the unique advantages of your product versus others), channels (how to get the products to customers), customer segments (who your customers are) and revenue streams (how to generate revenue). By asking these questions and finding out the answers, you will figure out the basic framework of your business.
The lean canvas was an important step to put your idea into a more practical place and to truly see the possibility of realizing your product.
The product I participated in building was a “heat helmet.” In order to protect firefighters, the helmet aimed to show the wearer’s vital signs through colored lights on the helmet as well as receive and transmit the information about their current health condition.
My group members knew a lot about engineering, so they went into very specific details regarding the technical structure of the helmet. But the problem was that they did not know much about business. However, there was a student who was an entrepreneurship major; she was sending everyone the basics of business and helpful resources and data she found. I knew a little bit about business by then, so I attempted to bridge the gap between business and engineering.
On the second day, there was a keynote speech about specific parts of a business and a deeper elaboration on the business model. At the end of the day, each group participated in the “Dolphin Tank” (instead of “Shark Tank”). The organizers and sponsors sat on the front line, listening to the pitches from each group and giving constructive criticism. The next day, real investors would come and give feedback in a segment called “Shark Tank.”
“It doesn’t matter whether you get real investments or not,” Rick Feldman, entrepreneur and professor at Mount Holyoke College, said. “What matters is that you are going to learn from people having come into business.” He went on to say that the things students learn though the workshop will be incredibly important later in life. The feedback we hear from the “Sharks” will influence our decisions in future projects, and we will remember the feedback when we begin to start businesses of our own. Though unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the third day of the event, I heard that the feedback from “Sharks” was quite helpful.
