Should you mentor a team in I-Corps? (The answer is likely YES!)

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. ​

​Be a Guide Rail 
The biggest need from a mentor when participating in our I-Corps program is to act as the sounding board for the participating team members. Most of our program participants are first time entrepreneurs, and many of them are first time mentees. They don’t know exactly what they are doing and will make mistakes along the way. Mentors can help by keeping their team on task and moving forward, especially when the team runs into challenges along the journey.  

To do this, you don’t need to be an expert entrepreneur yourself. What an I-Corps team needs most is someone to offer the outside perspective, and to encourage them to persevere. The instructor team will swoop in to help any team going too far off track, but we rely on mentors to keep each team chugging along in between check-in weeks.  
 

Carve Out Some Time 
The I-Corps program is pretty short at 7 weeks and is intended to move swiftly so that participants can make guesses, test them out, and pivot if they are wrong. Having a mentor present with the participants along this journey is integral for the individual team members’ success. Mentors who can schedule even just 15 minutes of time to connect and get updates from their team members see a huge difference in the outcomes their team generates and will build a much better bond, compared to those who only touch base via email. 

We choose host our I-Corps cohorts on Friday afternoons, hoping potential mentors can ask their bosses for a long lunch for the several weeks of the program. We love when I-Corps mentors show up and participate fully in our weekly meetings. Often, they walk away from our sessions with a new tip or trick to be passed along to many of their mentees, even ones outside of our cohort. And while the schedule of our meetings may not fit every mentor’s calendar, we can make arrangements to record lectures or fill in for an occasional absence. What’s important is that the mentor make the time to connect and converse with their team, to share experiences back and forth, and help their mentees talk through all that they are learning. 
 

Question Assumptions 
Another key element for an I-Corps mentor is to question the entrepreneur’s assumptions. We ask our mentors to be extensions of the instructor team, meaning we want them to be the reminder to their teams of what we instructors preach in weekly lectures. Entrepreneurs tend to lean into confirmation bias, and only see the positives in their investigation of their customer segment. We want our mentors to question these conclusions, poking around for areas of uncertainty. As a mentor, you don’t have to have any of the answers that your team is searching for! Instead, you can help by guiding your team to develop the right questions and identify the right customer who will have the answers.  

It's important for the mentor to keep the communication and questioning supportive and avoid veering into combative or authoritative territory. Leave it to the instructors to be the “bad cop” with your team. If you think your team members aren’t being responsive to the advising you are providing, notify one of the instructors privately and we will intervene, so that you can maintain the supportive mentor-mentee relationship without friction. 
 

No Expertise Required! 
A common concern for many potential mentors is that they don’t have the ideal background or network connections to support a team in a highly technical or niche market. It certainly is nice to have some prior experience area of your team’s innovation, but it is not a requirement. Providing contacts for your team to interview in the relevant market is also not required. In fact, we really want the participants to develop the skill of seeking out interviews themselves. We want to push them to think creatively to build their own interviewing process that improves a little each time and can be repeated long after our program finishes. As a mentor, you can help your team organize their thoughts or question their assumptions, but you shouldn’t feel the need to hand them solutions on a silver platter. 

The curriculum of I-Corps will give participants and their mentors all the tools they need to complete the program deliverables. Mentors can really help out by reinforcing the I-Corps teachings and providing the emotional support to encourage their team to keep putting in effort when things don’t come as easily. Our instructors will check in with the teams throughout the cohort, but the dedicated mentor on a team provides the consistent guidance that keeps a team moving through each week. The connections formed between our mentors and participants in I-Corps often continue for years beyond our 7-week class. Every cohort consistently ends with unprompted testimonials of gratitude for all the help along the way, and we know it would not be possible without our mentors. 
 

Now armed with the tricks of being an I-Corps mentor, we hope you’ll consider joining us in our next cohort. Email uaicorps@gmail.com to learn more about the upcoming cohort schedule and sign up to mentor today!