 Written by Elyse Ball
As we kick off our summer I-Corps session next week, dozens of innovators, entrepreneurs and students will find themselves reaching out to potential interviewees via email, LinkedIn messaging or via chat forums. While it may simple, a well-crafted message can be the difference between landing a meaningful interview or failing to connect at all. In service of upping your interview game, here are 7 simple tips for writing better professional emails. These same tactics can also apply to any other written or verbal communication where you are trying to land new contacts.
0 Comments
 Written by Linda Hale TAM, SAM, SOM, Bottom-up, Top-Down – What does this mean… As you travel through your entrepreneurial journey you will inevitably be asked “how big is your market?” Maybe you’ve received a request for a “bottom-up, or top-down market analysis.” or been asked to identify your TAM, SAM, or SOM?
Market sizing is important. Potential partners, investors, and other stakeholders need to know that the overall market opportunity is large enough to warrant their attention and that you understand your product’s specific portion of that opportunity. So, let’s break it all down and empower you to tell your market sizing story in a quick and cohesive way. Written by: Shannon Marshburn  I’ve never been one to stop working until my task is complete because before I know it something else is popping up on my calendar and I am needed elsewhere. I like to “grind it out” and work through my task list, but I am now learning a new way to be productive with less stress, more energy, focus, and creativity all while working just a little bit less; and that new skill is to take breaks.
 Written by Nick Glavan
As we conclude yet another cohort of I-Corps, I wanted to use this week’s blog to reflect on some of the most common follow-on steps for startups and entrepreneurs after they their 21-interviews of our flagship program. Assess Your Idea’s Potential This typically happens informally, but the first activity after wrapping up your cohort experience in I-Corps should be to step back and assess your idea’s commercial potential. Ask yourself critically, “is there a real customer who needs my innovation?” Don’t be afraid to pivot your idea to provide value to your customer and solve a real problem for them. Your initial idea may not have been what’s best for your customer, but as long as you continue focusing on meeting their needs, you can still find success. In most cases, 21 stakeholder interviews will only scratch the surface of truly knowing the wants and needs of your target customer, so you’ll likely end up finding there are more questions to answer before you are ready to develop your innovation further.  Written by Elyse Ball
In 2021, I wrote a blog about why your first product should be perfectly imperfect. The idea was that we don’t actually know what perfection looks like to our customers until they’ve had several chances to interact with our product, so we should get that product into their hands as quickly as possible. This blog picks up where we left off: What do we do after we give customers that ugly, imperfect product? We iterate, of course. Iteration means making small, incremental changes to a product or service, testing these changes, and then repeating the process until it’s grown, and you’ve created something customers love. To get iteration right, there are a few things you need to embrace:  By Shannon Marshburn
In Northeastern Ohio, there is usually one good last snow to get through before spring can bloom. So now starts the season of spring cleaning, and at times spring cleaning and self-care can be work itself. Here are some simple tips to help you stay a little more organized and a little more stress free. Take Breaks! Breaks are an important way to keep focused and stay productive. Breaks help keep you motivated, focused, and help to minimize distractions and avoid over-working yourself. During your break, go on a short walk, or get a snack. Make sure you take your break away from your workspace to reset your focus completely. If you find your momentum and can stay focused on a particular task, wait until you get to a good stopping point to take a break. Written by Shannon Marshburn  My coffee routine is a sacred ritual I perform almost every day. Coffee does not really wake me up though, so when I need an energy boost, I go for a walk or do some yoga, have a nutritious snack, or take a power nap if nothing else works. I have been thinking lately, do I have a caffeine tolerance or is the type of caffeine from coffee not the right kind for me? Caffeine is a natural stimulant that is found in a variety of plants, so is there something else that is better for me?
This question led me to a deep dive on the topic of tea and coffee, where I explored the effects of coffee and tea caffeine on energy levels and help you determine which may be the best option for you. Written by Nick Glavan  As we head into another round of I-Corps for our Spring 2023 cohort, I wanted to highlight one of the opportunities to be involved in our programming, without having to be an entrepreneur yourself: join as a mentor.
A lot of times I get questions about what an I-Corps mentor does, or whether someone is qualified to fill the role. So, I decided to collect a few tips on being an I-Corps mentor for this week’s blog, and hopefully I can convince some of our readers to join in the next cohort as mentors. Written by Elyse Ball  Many companies – particularly those that are developing physical products based on deep laboratory research – may not be a good fit for traditional angel and venture capital funds. For these companies, large corporations that have a strategic interest in the technology (also called strategic investors) provide an alternative source of both capital and technical support.
In 2021, UARF interviewed Akron Ascent Innovations co-founder and CEO Barry Rosenbaum to learn more about how he built a high tech physical product startup, based on university research, into a successful exit. Akron Ascent had recently announced that it entered into an asset purchase agreement with a large, multinational technology company. This occurred after the startup had secured two strategic investments from large corporations. The interview provided great insights to answer three key questions: Interview by Shannon Marshburn and Evan Haugh of LEAF  “I hope I can continue to provide exciting updates on LEAF to UARF for years to come, as this is only the beginning of our vision for LEAF, the Logically Engineered Automation Features company.” Evan Haugh tells us in an interview about the journey of him and his team with the startup, Logically Engineering Automation Features Ltd., or LEAF for short.
The team is focused on solar design applications to aid in the electrical wiring of solar panels and helping to make electrical engineers' lives easier. In this interview, Evan walks us through his journey and how he and his team overcame challenges they faced. How did the idea for your product/service come about? Evan: LEAF was born out of my own frustrations as an electrical engineering intern who spent most of his day doing the same thing over and over. Simply put, every solar array from 10 to 100,000 solar panels in size must be wired together in a well-coordinated method that can only be done by manually drafting every connection between every panel in a CAD program like AutoCAD. Throughout this internship, I spent most of my time drafting these pesky lines and I thought to myself that there must be a better way. Four years later, I'm proud to say that the solution we've developed to solve this problem, LEAF, will be released for beta trials on the AutoDesk Appstore on January 15th, 2023. |
RSS Feed