Entrepreneurship is a collaborative process. I love that. It can fail for so many reasons: the invention doesn’t work, there isn’t adequate intellectual property protection, or no one is willing to buy it.
Coming from a university brimming with technical experts, I’ve always been more concerned about the business side of entrepreneurship. I understand how to design an experiment to determine if an invention meets a technical requirement. What was harder to understand is if that invention embodies a product that anyone wants to buy. Here at UNeTech, if we are going to build more technology startups from university inventions, then we needed a path that connected a cool new invention to a sustainable business model. How can we meaningfully transition the ‘aha’ of an invention into a business that can sell a product, hire people, and grow the economy?
Truth be told, I had been looking to solve that problem for years. Talking with the brilliant faculty at the UNO College of Business Administration, it was just hard to articulate what I wanted to find out. Business faculty talk about business in a way that I just couldn’t articulate. What I wanted felt lost in translation.
Then I met Brent Clark, Ph.D. Brent is the Associate Director of the University of Nebraska Omaha Center for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Franchising and an Associate Professor of Management. Intuitively, Brent knew what I was going for: not quite an invention and not quite a business.
A vision of the business that could be.
Brent collaborated with UNeTech to establish the format for MTVA business strategy canvas report. Utilizing the latest trends in academic entrepreneurship research UNeTech is so happy to make these amazing reports available to the public! Over the next few weeks, we will share MTVA reports. Some reports will be associated with existing startups, like our report this week: MicroWash!
MicroWash is on a tear. A recent addition to the 2022 NMotion accelerator class, the company is on a path to make pain-free covid testing a reality next year. CLICK HERE to find the business strategy report that MicroWash used earlier this year as it planned for this busy summer.
Often, however, we will post MTVA reports for projects that have not formally become startups. Not quite an invention and not quite a business, these reports talk about the projects that will be the next things that UNeTech is going to do. Think of them as startup blueprints (or possibly heist plans) and a little glimpse of what we’re going to be excited about six months from now.
Please also watch this space to unpack what is in this amazing document. Academics have spent a lot of time thinking about startups over these past decades – and it shows. I still have a lot to learn and each week I’ll unpack a bit more of how you can read the MTVA report: what the heck is a Five Forces and a Business Strategy Canvas?
But finally, the MTVA report project fills my collaborative heart with joy. It’s simply a delight to see clinicians, scientists, business students, academics, financial analysts, and entrepreneurs work together to creatively paint a startup on a canvas of academic best practices. Startups take teams – teams with diverse and deep skills. UNeTech, working with the MTVA, now brings amazing business strategy as part of that skillset.
