Harvard Innovation Labs is restructuring its services to bring even more students into its fold.
For more than a decade, the i-lab has supported student teams from all 13 Harvard schools with resources and mentorship to scale their early-stage businesses, largely through its semester-long venture program. The i-lab said its new structure — which it calls the "student i-lab membership" — groups students based on entrepreneurial stage to provide tailored support and includes a new focus on students just exploring the idea of starting or joining a startup.
“As the Harvard Innovation Labs entered our second decade last fall, our team asked the question, ‘How can we deliver our resources in a way that will best serve all of our students — from those just beginning to explore entrepreneurship to those raising capital and scaling their teams?’ In answering this question, we decided to evolve to a more flexible, inclusive membership model in order to better serve students from any Harvard school at any stage of development,” said Matt Segneri, executive director of the Harvard Innovation Labs.
The student membership will be open to individuals or teams led by at least one Harvard student. This includes undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and clinical fellows.
To access the free membership, students complete an intake form so the i-lab can learn more about them and their venture. Then the i-lab suggests one of three stages that ventures can join with resources tailored to their stage.
The explore stage is intended to help students at the very beginning of their entrepreneurial journey. The i-lab team would work with students to sort through business ideas and pick one to pursue or help them join a new startup that fits their interests.
The test stage is for students with an idea for a venture but aren’t sure how to get started. This stage comes with help on consumer research, customer outreach and building a prototype. Teams in this stage can also progress a bit further with resources on talking to potential customers through customer-discovery workshops or connecting with experts.
The third and final propel stage is for ventures that are well established with revenue, investors and a product heading toward the market. The i-lab can offer these ventures meeting space, mentors and help with funding opportunities, including those through Harvard like the Allston Venture Fund, Social Impact Fellowship Fund and the President’s Innovation Challenge. The i-lab will also continue to run Launch Lab X GEO, an accelerator for Harvard alumni-led ventures.
All students involved in the i-lab also have access to resources like its social mixers, subcommunities and affinity groups, newsletter and Slack channel, expert network and in-house staff advisors.
Segneri said the membership application process is not selective. He said the goal of this new model is to meet students where they are and lower the barrier to entry for people interested in entrepreneurship.
“We are fully in service to students so they can be in service to society,” Segneri told BostInno.
Interest in the i-lab has grown steadily since its launch in 2011, Segneri said. The i-lab has gone from supporting dozens of student ventures every year to hundreds.
The i-lab began rolling out its membership application this summer. It said more than 1,100 Harvard students have already signed up to be members. Examples of student ventures include teams building tools like a personal development platform for immigrants in America, a blockchain-enabled platform to protect photos from leaks and abuse and a machine learning-based framework that evaluates anti-aging treatments.
