Innovation Depot, a startup incubator for tech and bio-focused companies, had its largest group of founders graduate from one of its accelerator programs last week.
Voltage is a 5-week program designed to help startup founders sharpen and strengthen their ideas into a feasible business concept. So far, eight cohorts have completed the program, with the eighth being the largest at 26 graduates. The graduation ceremony for cohort 8 was on May 15 at the Innovation Depot.
Ritchie Kruunenberg, the director of marketing and communication for the Innovation Depot, was responsible for recruiting and leading cohort 8 through the program. Cohort 7, which graduated from Voltage in December of last year, had 15 people graduates.
“It was my goal to recruit the biggest class we could get,” Kruunenberg said. “This is the beginning of the funnel in our mind. If you think about ‘How can we get more startups in Birmingham?’ Well, we’ve got to help these people who have an idea.”
The program is five weeks long and consists of a kickoff party, four training sessions and a graduation ceremony. The meetings take place each Saturday from 9-12 a.m. and include breakfast, time to connect and network and two hours of curriculum focus.
As part of graduation, Voltage graduates are required to present a pitch for their businesses. Previously, pitches were around four minutes each, but due to the size of cohort 8, the pitches for this recent graduation ceremony were 90 seconds each.
“Apparently, people fear pitching or public speaking more than death; a lot of people were really nervous about it,” Kruunenberg said. “But I met with everyone individually outside of our pitch practices. It's a lot of preparation, but you could see how people actually improved during that process and got more comfortable, but also formulated their problem-solution story much better.”
According to Kruunenberg, Voltage is designed to help individuals narrow down their ideas into a feasible, manageable business model; ideally before they invest a lot of time, money and energy into a product or service that might not be needed by their intended audience.
“Now, I think, compared to the beginning of the program, they have a much better idea of what they're wanting to build (and) they actually have done their research and gotten the feedback and have narrowed it down and really simplified most of their ideas,” Kruunenberg said.
Kruunenberg said he is excited about all of the ideas that cohort 8 founders worked on through the program, and isn’t able to pick a favorite.
"They're all really cool; I mean, they're all so different,” he said. "What we tell them is ‘Now it's time for you to put in some work. You know, we've given you some frameworks and some tools to work with, but you can only do so much in five weeks.’ We hope that a percentage of these 26 moves on with their ideas and takes it further.”
The next Voltage program will take place in the fall with cohort 9, along with the second cohort of Boost, Innovation Depot's next-step program after Voltage.
