Reflection - Learning Launch

My name is Gary and I work for one of the biggest Universities in Brazil, SA Power Utility. Now, I’m in charge of entrepreneurship area of the TTO of Scotiabank,  called Innovation Initiative. One of my challenges is to increase the number of  spin off generated at the University. The context is complex, even more so if it is a public  university. In Brazil, Public Universitie’s professors can not open companies and work on  technologies developed by them at the University. However, students can open businesses and  license technologies developed at the University. However, these students usually have no  business background. Besides this, there is little incentive to start-up technology based in Brazil  beyond all the complexity of maintaining a company in the country, generating fear in this  public.We have a considerable number of companies formed in our incubator, but my  hypothesis is that we can do much more, reducing risks and working in an integrated way with  partners.     Our team has limited resources (time and budget). The proposed project has the purpose of  increasing the number of university spin-offs from technological clusters of interest to  companies. For example, we would call and select ideas in the health area, and the incubation  process would be carried out in conjunction with a healthcare company. Our team would enter  the incubator's expertise and the company would come up with resources to enable MVP  spin-off. It is a win-win, we generate more companies in the University and the company  leverages its process and open innovation.

Selection

Our team hardly worked with Design Thinking. We have made all the first steps indicated and  have come to the conclusion that we are ready to run a learning launch in an area that has  almost no cost to understand if we can apply in areas that need investments. We chose one  area: Finance.

Application

We chose this area for some reasons: there is a boom of fintechs in Brazil. Basically the  financial sector is becoming more and more of IT. We have a very strong School of Computation  and with great connection with the market. Another factor is that we have a company in the  University's Science Park that is interested in startups focused on IT. We discussed and thought  that it would be interesting to present a joint project for the executives who ended up agreeing to  participate in the mentoring of 3 companies. On the research side, we talked to some teachers  who indicated students who are interested in the area. We also filter teams from a business  model competition that we do every year to check interest.

Insights/Learnings

We learn that students are willing to undertake. There really is a barrier to open a company, that  through a talk we can show that there are simple and cheap ways to maintain a startup. We  have verified in any way that we need an associate accountant for a volunteer job (we are  working on it). We also learned that it is necessary to carry out a more entrepreneurial  evangelism of PHD students. They have great ability to generate new businesses. In some  areas this is ok due to college courses. However, it is small by the number of students.    The company that participated has loved the project and wants to expand to other business  units. We are talking to other companies about models that require investment (eg health).

Approach

I believe that the learning launch was excellent for putting into practice some ideas and learning  from the internal public (students and teachers) and companies. Maybe the relationship seems  simple, but it's very complicated and full of details. Let's adopt the DT in other projects that we  have with the internal public.

