Join Nebraska faculty, staff and students for a spring semester program to learn strategies about connecting research innovation with market applications. The online program begins Feb. 8, and participants may sign up individually or in teams of up to five people until Feb. 4.
Learn more and register: https://go.unl.edu/customerdiscovery-spring2021
The free, non-credit program is based on the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps, which helps researchers develop a value proposition and customer segmentation. After identifying and interviewing prospective customers, researchers use feedback to guide decisions about a startup company or technology commercialization.
The program features four evening sessions, all held via Zoom, led by a team of campus instructors and an NSF National I-Corps instructor. It also includes office hours with instructors between sessions.
The program cohort will be limited to 16 teams. Sponsoring organizations include NUtech Ventures, the Center for Entrepreneurship, the Combine Incubator and the National Strategic Research Institute.
More details at: https://go.unl.edu/customerdiscovery-spring2021
Jacob Orellana, a senior undergraduate student majoring in software engineering, is a member of the program. His team included Tyler Jacobson, an undergraduate student majoring in finance. Read Jacob's Q&A about the program below:
Can you discuss your project and your team’s objectives for N-ICD?
ReUnite is a tech startup aiming to solve current and future problems facing recycling. We are developing a community-driven platform that streamlines customer interactions and decreases contamination for collection services. Our platform connects companies that divert anything from the landfill to customers needing curbside collection services. During N-ICD, our team identified and validated problems that were impacting collection services, materials recovery facilities and other key stakeholders in our ecosystem. We also formed new relationships with local organizations to work collaboratively in the future.
How did your project evolve while going through the N-ICD process?
We initially thought that we would market our services to households. As we interviewed more stakeholders in our ecosystem, we shifted our focus to collection services and materials recovery facilities. These facilities are facing high contamination rates and low-end market demand for materials, threatening their operations. We also removed one of our initial services, as it addressed an issue that our target industry does not view as a problem.
One of the key things we learned is that we could utilize our technology to pivot to problems, such as identifying where contamination is occurring. This will allow us to provide a tailored solution to a major problem at the source. Throughout N-ICD, we discovered other ways we could similarly leverage our technology; working collaboratively with collection services is key to our market adoption.
What were some of your biggest takeaways from the N-ICD program?
Our biggest takeaway was the importance of interviewing all of our customer segments before starting to develop anything. We learned new techniques and processes that helped us to do just this. We gained a lot of value from mapping out how our ecosystem interacts and writing the hypotheses we wanted to test; we used that information to guide our interview process.
By better understanding all of our customer segments, we pivoted from our original segment to our current focus. Taking the extra time to do further customer discovery saved us both time and money before we started to spend more of both.
Would you recommend the program to others?
Definitely! This program saved us both time and money before we even started to develop anything. Any team working on a new idea should participate in the program, as it gives you the structure and tools to successfully interview your customer segments. The skills that you learn from this course are needed by any entrepreneur, and it provided us with a solid foundation to continue developing on our own.