Giving Day 2016

The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurial Development (CIED) and Crown College are creating the Summer Entrepreneurship Academy, the first business accelerator class on the UC Santa Cruz campus. The Summer Entrepreneurship Academy will be available to graduate and undergraduate students and the public in the summer of 2016. Based on the Lean Launchpad/NSF Innovation Corps model, students build teams with entrepreneurial leads, and mentors with start-up experience help the students discover and develop their business plan. The course begins with a one-day intensive workshop, continues with six weeks of webinars, and ends with another one-day intensive workshop when students give their final presentations. Each week, students are expected to interact with at least five potential customers, partners, channels, and related experts. Students prepare weekly PowerPoint slides based on the lessons learned from the customer discovery they present during the webinars and receive feedback from the teaching team. When students have an idea they feel solves an important problem, they often fail to test their idea on potential customers until late in the development process, which can result in solving the wrong problem and wasting time and resources. This class is dedicated to helping students identify customer needs, value propositions, key partners, channels, and market early in the idea development process so they can pivot their solution to more rapidly solve the needs of their customer. All Giving Day gifts will go directly to students as stipends to help them develop their innovations during the eight-week accelerator. The class will give them practical knowledge on how to use entrepreneurial skills in their future careers and help move their idea from the research or idea stage to a sustainable business.