Helping Startups Take off at Cornell Tech
The Runway Startup Postdoc Program teaches postdocs how to be both scientists and entrepreneurs. Offered within the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, it is part business school, part research institution, and part startup incubator. Along with the robust financial and strategic benefits of the program, Strategic Design offers these startups critical ground support they can use to take flight. The skillset I employ as Strategic Designer in Residence has been refined over years in both hi-tech environments such as AT&T Labs Research, Sarnoff, and IBM, and high-end experiential design firms.
What is Strategic Design?
Strategic Design provides a strategic bridge between startup ideas and market execution. It is a visual process that helps founders zero in on inventive applications and service concepts, develop meaningful end-user experiences, and deliver value to investors and their company.
When I sit down with founders, I key into three things:
- the underlying passion/motivation they have for their business or technology
- their core invention
- how their vision aligns with what they intend to build
Here are 4 ways that Strategic Design has supported the recent cohort of Runway Startup Postdoc Program startups
- Helping them refine and articulate their vision
Determining product market fit requires a soft touch — equal parts generative (what if?) and analytical. Strategic Design uses visual tools that broaden the opportunity space and then help companies narrow in on a concrete vision. In the case of CEO Sophie Zaaijer’s F!ND Genomics startup, Strategic Design first provided divergent thinking at the intersection of mobile DNA sequencing, algorithmic analysis, and program development. And later, as F!ND Genomics began to zone in on their vision, we helped illuminate how on-site DNA sequencing could facilitate time-sensitive field identification.
2. Identifying the needs of end users
Addressing a problem or unmet need for a well-defined user group is central to the success of a startup. User personas and use-case scenarios are tools that allow for iterative exploration. Through their use, product implementations can be visualized and various marketplace implementations vetted. CEO Niamh O’Hara’s Biotia startup used a use-case scenario to refine their thinking and communicate how their methodologies and algorithms prevent the spread of dangerous contagions in hospital environments. This is even more important when offering this capability to third world countries where communication is challenging.
3. Facilitating the generation of ideas for new product implementations
Strategic Design embodies the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words.” By generating context-setting visuals, teams are better able to target their thinking to real-world problems. At the same time, “visual” brainstorming enables much broader interpretative solutions than language, while making features and ideas far more visible to casual review. For example, to facilitate thinking about NYC entrepreneurial tech opportunities, cityscapes were populated with current and future robotic solutions along with prompts to drive ideation.
4. Providing visual artifacts that support pitches and partner communication
Sometimes the underlying technologies themselves are difficult to describe. And without them, there’s a risk that a pitch will get lost in abstractions and go into free fall. For CEO Tomer Morad’s Concertio startup, the challenge was to describe an AI-enabled, network optimization system. For CEO Neel S. Madhukar’s One Three Biotech startup, it was to describe a system that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate drug development.
Strategic Design is offered cross-organizationally within Cornell Tech, as part of Cornell Tech’s Foundry — a multi-disciplinary team of visual, product, and GUI designers, and software engineers. Beyond working with the Runway Startup Postdoc Program, we work with the university’s Product and Startup Studio, the Digital Life Initiative seminar, and the Hubs around which Master’s degree programs and research are organized.
Below is a visual checklist of Strategic Design services to help you determine where our work can fit in.
Please contact Gary Zamchick at gz83@cornell.edu to arrange an initial meeting or for more information.
