Media innovation students make final pitches as NUvention Web+Media class ends
The nine NUvention Web+Media teams presented their final product ideas June 6 at the McCormick Tribune Foundation Center, as the two-quarter course ended. Students, faculty and the class Advisory Board of entrepreneurs and investors gathered to see how each team’s idea had developed since the initial March pitch.
“Today was about proving [your idea] had product-market fit, and I think a number of teams did a phenomenal job of doing that,” said Michael Marasco, the director of the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and leader of the NUvention Web+Media faculty team.
After demoing their products in a trade-show format, teams had seven minutes to pitch their ideas, detailing how their product solved users’ problems and what it would take to build a successful business. Each team then faced rapid-fire questioning from the course’s Advisory Board.
“We critique every aspect of their business from the design elements to the business model to the viability and scalability of the team,” said David Beazley, a managing partner of Purple Arch Ventures and an Advisory Board member.
NUvention Web+Media is an interdisciplinary two-quarter course in which students from across the university develop digital products employing the “lean startup method.” With business, journalism, engineering and arts and sciences students teamed together, the course’s purpose is to give those students the real-world experience of creating a viable startup.
“I’ve been an investor and an operator within a startup, and I would’ve killed to have had classes like [NUvention] teaching me the right methodology [and] the right order to attack these problems within a startup ecosystem,” said Beazley, a Medill School BSJ and MSJ alumnus.
From an experience-based dating app to software that allows people to share their virtual reality experiences, this year’s products targeted more diverse users than in the past, with fewer ideas focused on the needs of college students. Marasco attributes this diversity to the addition of Medill’s Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship students to the course and their experiences in San Francisco last fall.
“People spending time in San Francisco and seeing what the key drivers of innovation are, and what are people excited about there, very much helped inform what we are doing here,” Marasco said.
The Medill media innovation students agreed their San Francisco experience — especially the course “Design Thinking and Research for Media Products” — prepared them well for their NUvention experience. Yet, even with this mindset, they still faced the challenge of learning how to work in interdisciplinary teams and when to “pivot or persist” with their idea. The most rewarding part of the class was the opportunity to collaborate across disciplines and develop a real product, especially learning how to work with developers, said Nikolas Wright, a member of the Teleos team that built a video analytics dashboard for online publishers.
“In terms of the startup landscape and building a company and building a product, I now know how to walk into a place like 1871 and tell a technical cofounder, ‘Here’s the specs, here’s what I’m looking for,’ and speak their language,” said Jessica Buchleitner, a member of the Muse team.
At least two of the nine teams, both including Medill MSJ’s, are continuing to work on their products. ShareVR, a software system that helps people share their virtual reality experiences, incorporated in early June and is continuing to develop its business in the Wildfire summer accelerator program at the Garage. The team behind JUGL, a web service that helps people manage the process of applying to multiple jobs, also continues to develop the product.
Marasco said NUvention Web+Media seeks first to give students the real-world experience of developing a product — not to launch companies, although successful companies such as Adaptly have emerged from the class.
“I think the most rewarding part [of the class] is you get a chance to go through the entire process of bringing an idea into a real product,” said Mengyi “Jenny” Sun, a Medill media innovation student and member of the Breezy team.
As the pitches concluded, Ben Slivka, a Northwestern trustee and Advisory Board member, echoed this statement by applauding students for undertaking the challenge of creating a startup from scratch.
Slivka said: “One of the things [the Board of Trustees is] trying to do as part of our strategic plan for the university is move toward more experiential kinds of learning. This class is a benchmark for that.”
