Resource:How to Create a Student-Run Venture Accelerator
How to Create a Student-Run Venture Accelerator
What is an on-campus venture accelerator? Why is it important?
For many students, resources already exist to help them explore design thinking and the innovative mindset. However, once these students become skilled in applying this knowledge to their work and their studies, it becomes extremely difficult to engage themselves in the professional development they should experience before graduation. Student-run venture accelerators allow students to receive advice from other experienced students and professional connections as well as access to the funding necessary to bring their ideas to fruition.
How to tell if your university is ready for an on-campus venture accelerator
Not all universities are perfectly equipped for a student-run venture accelerator. To properly address entrepreneurialism on campus, the university must first have the resources to inspire an aura of innovation, through pop-up classes, makerspaces, student innovation unions, etc. Establishing an effective venture accelerator on your campus can be a lot of work, but without the proper conditions, it will likely fail due to low retention or funding. Venture accelerators are often the last step necessary to establish an environment on campus where students can freely explore and pursue their business ideas or products.
How to structure a student-run venture accelerator
The goal of a venture accelerator is simple: give students the funding, guidance, and resources they need to take an idea from the whiteboard and put it into the marketplace. As such, the organization should be structured to minimize internal costs, maximize separation from the institution, and streamline access to the accelerator’s benefits so that students with great ideas may get the resources they need.
In order to minimize the cost of the accelerator, the success of the organization hinges on the voluntary work of the members. This is best accomplished by having a very small crew of dedicated individuals with experience in in VC or business development initially, and slowly expanding the group as the organization grows.
Venture accelerators often may incite political issues from within your university, by frightening pre-existing organizations, creating I.P. conflicts, etc. Thus it can often be a good idea to ask for forgiveness, rather than permission, when creating a student-run accelerator. The separation that your organization will get from your superseding institution will allow you to have much more freedom for further development, but also can create funding conflicts, so connections to corporate sponsors is often essential. So long as you end up with a well structured organization that shows potential, your institution will be plenty approving.
Issues you will face down the road
The largest issue that founders will face is, as with most education-oriented organizations, student retention. A mistake many over enthusiastic founders make is assuming everyone who comes out to their events will have the same eager interest in the material as they do, and often this assumption leads to overworking the students, who subsequently drop out. Individual motivation can easily decline over time if left unregulated so it is very important to talk with students as to why they may be losing interest. Balancing workload and results is a very tough game to play, but as a general rule, it is better to have large projects accomplished over the course of a quarter or potentially even the whole year than to force things to be done in a week’s worth of workshops. This structure encourages the most eager students will work above and beyond the call of duty, and thus gets students naturally involved and intrigued to help lead as the years go by.
Another major conflict such organizations will run into is students’ fear of failure. Promoting a business pitch or product idea is frightening enough on its own, but taking the next steps and putting in a large amount of time and effort into developing your own idea that certainly may, and statistically will fail… now that is a frightening prospect, especially to college students who already have plenty on their plate. In order to keep your students involved regardless of the potential of failure is to encourage them to live by the motto that failure is, in a way, success- you will learn and succeed from those failings. One way to do this is to have meetings focused around failure, where students can learn from professional examples of failed ventures to break the ice, and learn how to embrace their own failures and discuss them with the larger group, in order to identify their shortcomings and learn how not to run into those roadblocks next time around.
Working with your administration
The University Innovation program encourages its fellows to pursue Stakeholder meetings, wherein fellows will learn how to properly address the top tiers of authority at their university, including the provost, president, board, deans, etc. Through these meetings, fellows will develop connections with people who have a strong influence in making institutional change; for instance, if one would like to get their accelerator access to an entrepreneurial fund on campus, it may be imperative to reach out to the dean of the business school and devise a deal. It is also often a good idea to get valuable insight from faculty who may have experience developing similar programs in the past. They have also learned from these developments, and will apply their new knowledge of how to deal with shortcomings when they assist you in development as well.
Ultimately, by bringing the shortcomings of your institution straight to the higher-ups whose best interest is none other than the best interests of the university they represent, showing how and why this change is necessary, you will have the best luck convincing your administration to help you along the way. Talking with your administration at the most basic level and inquiring as to where and why there may be a disconnect will improve their degree of utility and can fundamentally increase your venture accelerator’s success.
