Insider Experience: MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp explained

Emre Tiritoglu
Sep 3, 2018 · 8 min read
IED | Istituto Europeo di Design, Rio de Janeiro, August 2018, Photo: Bruno Weler

The Bootcamp was the most intense educational experience of my life. Here is why.

I have attended the 8th MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2018. I’ll try to condense my experience into a brief summary:

What is it exactly?

The MIT Bootcamps give a taste of the “drinking from the firehose” experience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It is an intense new ventures leadership program that challenges participants to develop a sustainable new venture in a week. Though, it is required to take 4 different online MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) before the program, which teaches the same innovation framework and curriculum taught in core entrepreneurship classes at MIT. Therefore the program was around 5–6 months in total for me, as I have worked for the MOOC’s beforehand.

For the Bootcamp, innovators come from around the world to learn from MIT faculty and MIT-trained mentors. They practice critical skills required to be leaders and drive innovation and collaboration: teamwork, leadership, communication, mutual goal reinforcement, and giving feedback.

As a team, we were challenged with finding a scalable solution by applying new technologies and ideas to solve a problem relevant to one of these resource sectors.

MIT Motto: Mens et Manus

MIT — Mens et Manus

MIT was founded on the principle of “mens et manus”, meaning “Mind and Hand’’ or learning by doing. MIT believes the acquisition of knowledge (or truth, light, etc.), is only half the story. Therefore as Bootcampers, we have the responsibility to apply the knowledge and skill from the program in a way that benefits the world. This was one of the reasons I chose to participate in the Bootcamp.

Admission

The Bootcamp generally is a highly selective program. Out of thousands who’ve applied, only 122 made it to Rio de Janeiro.

The credentials, grades, and test scores played a little role in our admission, according to MIT staff. MIT actually hand-picked individuals who demonstrated initiative with follow through, capacity for calculated risk, critical openness, commitment to the community and entrepreneurship potential.

‘’The team at MIT Bootcamps selects the best applicants from all over the world to create a cohort of innovators with the potential to change the world.’’ -MIT Bootcamp Admissions Site

The cohort: Class 8

MIT I&E Bootcamp, Class 8
  • 122 Bootcampers
  • 40 countries; (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, China, Canada, Costa Rica, Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Luxembourg, Palestine, Mexico, Moldova, Nigeria, Turkey, UAE, UK, USA, Venezuela…)
  • Many professions: Entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, designers, corporate innovators, doctors, lawyers, students…

My team

My team! Team Disruption!

My team was made up of a mix of highly skilled, motivated and experienced individuals from 4 different countries; Brazil, Moldova, Turkey, and the USA. I am honored to meet with these wonderful people to mix our knowledge and different expertise together to create a new venture from scratch.

From left to right:

Bootcamp by the numbers

Below is the work and sleep schedule we faced in the bootcamp: (y-axis: hours, x-axis: Bootcamp days from introduction day to final presentation day)

MIT Bootcamp Work / Sleep Hour Schedule

We had an introduction day on Saturday, the 28th of July. This was the last time we could sleep like a human-being just before the program! :-) In fact, Bootcamp mentors recommended us to sleep a lot before the program, since we would lack sleep in the following days.

Our team’s Motto

In total, the workload added up to 120.5 hours, with only 12.5 hours of sleep (for my team anyway!). This is why the bootcamp was so intense! It exposed my actual limits as a human-being, while increasing my self-awareness about working, literally a lot!

Also, before working too hard with my team, we have chose the figure on the right as our motto; to keep reminding ourselves what is our mission here in the Bootcamp!

Bill Aulet’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship

“The book is designed as an integrated toolbox for first-time and repeat entrepreneurs so that they can build great enterprises based on new innovative products. ” — Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship

To distinguish the 2 different types of entrepreneurship; Small-to-Medium Size Entrepreneurship — SME (that serves a local market, like a family business etc…), and Innovation-Driven Enterprise EntrepreneurshipIDE (that serves beyond a local market, at least global or regional). In the Bootcamp (along with the 24-steps of the Disciplined Entrepreneurship book) we’ve focused on Innovation-Driven Enterprise (IDE)Entrepreneurship.

Overall, MIT and Bill Aulet changed the way I think about entrepreneurship and starting a company. Before coming here, I always thought that entrepreneurship cannot be learned, and great entrepreneurs were born with something special. It turns out, this wasn’t the case.

The lectures from MIT enlightened me on how to create a successful startup by developing an innovative and/or disruptive product. Most importantly, I had the chance to learn the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework to create a new, sustainable and innovation-based venture. I also had the chance to master these 24 steps (given below), with my background knowledge from the book and the MOOC’s.

I will not go into my team’s project details, but feel free to contact me to learn more about our wonderful project.

Bill Aulet, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, The 24 Steps, Source: disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/

As a summary, I have learned:

  • The everyday obstacles that Entrepreneurs face and the main framework of how to overcome them,
  • How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd (and it wasn’t all about technology or a great product!),
  • For a given idea or a product; how to do a market segmentation, find the right beachhead market, how to find out the right end-user profile, how to find the TAM (Total Addressable Market), how to segment the Persona, how to construct a full-life cycle use case, how to quantify the value proposition, how to find the right customers for a specific venture, how to create a solid company Core, how to look at competitors and how to position to avoid problems, how to determine the Decision Making Unit (DMU) and Decision Making Process (DMP), how to map the customer acquisition process, how to price and choose the right pricing network, how to find LTV (Lifetime Value of a Customer) and COCA (the Cost of Customer Acquisition), how to test the overall assumptions and how to define the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and eventually, how to succeed!

What else I have learned?

Key Takeaways:

  • Identifying a significant opportunity for innovation,
  • Skills to develop an innovation-driven venture,
  • Identify, define, and characterize problems,
  • Spot, segment and analyze opportunities for innovation,
  • Evaluate and choose innovation diffusion pathways,
  • Evaluate and choose models of new ventures,
  • Conduct customer and market research both qualitatively and quantitatively,
  • Design a customer journey,
  • Establish a foundation of product development,
  • Evaluate and choose a market strategy,
  • Develop an in-depth understanding of your customer,
  • Identify and quantify sources of value,
  • Map and influence the customer decision-making process,
  • Understanding stakeholders profoundly,
  • Conceptualizing the solution and position in the customer journey,
  • Evaluating the financial viability and the long-term growth and potential of your venture,
  • Forming and sustaining a high-performing team,
  • Communicating customers with influence, and many more…

Conclusion and other remarks

MIT Innovation and Entrepreneurship Bootcamp was certainly an intense program, and one of the most important part for me personally was networking with people from 40 countries, exchanging ideas, brainstorming together, seeing their vision of the world and the concept of ‘’entrepreneurship’’, seeing the simple and complex ideas through their experiences and perspectives.

At the end of the day, this was an academic experience and I am now very excited to apply the knowledge, vision, mindset and the 24 steps from the Disciplined Entrepreneurship book in real-life.

Lastly, I am honored to meet the world’s greatest coaches from MIT, and my friends from Class 8. I would like to thank again the MIT Bootcamp team for giving me this chance to participate in this wonderful program.

Other details: The Venue, coaches and guest speakers

This wonderful institution was located in the spectacular area of Urca in Rio.

IED | Istituto Europeo di Design, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Photo: https://www.annaramalho.com.br/ied-rio-premia-vencedores-de-concurso/
Sunset from IED, Photo Credit: Flavia M de Castro
  • Bill Aulet: Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Professor of the Practice, MIT Sloan School of Management,
  • Erdin Beshimov: Lecturer at MIT and a Founder and Director of MIT Bootcamps,
  • Vimala Palaniswamy: Associate Director for MIT Bootcamps at the office for the Vice President for Open Learning,
  • Brian Subirana: Prof. Brian Subirana is Director of the MIT Auto-ID lab, Research Scientist at MIT and also teaches at Harvard University,
  • Hanna Adeyema: COO and founder of Tenacity, Jeff Anderson: COO at Manus Biosynthesis, Priyanka Bakaya: Founder and CEO at Renewlogy, Mateo Nakach: VP at Directed Electronics de Mexico, SA at CV & Astus, SA at CV, Ana Luisa Santos: Senior Market Manager at Khan Academy Brazil, Erica Swallow: Founder of Southern Swallow digital strategy consultancy, Ingrid Toppelberg: Founding Partner at Kanda Growth Consulting, Nasir Yammama: Founder / CEO at Verdant Agri-Tech.
Bill Aulet and Ana Luisa Santos
Brian Subirana and Erdin Beshimov
  • Maurício Antônio Lopes: The president of Embrapa (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation),
  • Vitor Olivier: Leader of NuConta and a partner at Nubank, Brazil’s largest and most influential financial services startup with over 4 million customers.
Vitor Olivier, partner at Nubank

Emre Tiritoglu

Written by

Engineer | Entrepreneur | emretiritoglu.com

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