Sharing value through an interdisciplinary approach
IDEA is Northeastern University’s Venture Accelerator. We provide entrepreneurs the support, in-kind resources and educational experience of developing a business from core concept to launch.
IDEA works with a number partners that provide in-kind services to our ventures. However, as a University Program, we have the benefit of working with student organizations around campus that support ventures in some capacity. In recent years, Northeastern University has invested heavily in a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem.
IDEA’s core competency is business planning. What we do best is provide our ventures with a structured approach to early stage growth. As IDEA frequently works with other organizations within this larger ecosystem of organizations, how do we maximize value for our ventures?
I recently came across Marco Iansiti & Roy Levien’s, Creating Value in Your Business Ecosystem. They claim that by observing ecology and biological ecosystems, we can learn to navigate a business environment and how to maximize value for all stakeholders. They investigate how “keystone species” — A plant or animal that plays a unique and crucial role in the way an ecosystem functions — are able to thrive.
For example, when we observe a sea otter’s behavior and eating patterns, we notice that they strictly control the population of sea urchins. Unbeknownst to most, this allows the Pacific Northwest to flourish with kelp. Crabs, snails and geese all depend on kelp for food and shelter. Sea otters are a cornerstone and integral member of its ecosystem — its a keystone species.
Iansiti and Levien find that first and foremost, keystones have to create value within the ecosystem — efficiently. Failing to do so will not attract or retain members. Second and more importantly, they must share the value with other members in the ecosystem. Failing to do this may lead a species to become temporarily enriched, but left to fail in the long term.
“it is not enough to simply create value, one must share it with others in the ecosystem”
For IDEA to maximize our support to ventures, this value sharing ideology must be integral to our ethos.
First, we identify members of the ecosystem that we belong to and see how they are related.
Entrepreneurs Club is Northeastern’s largest student organization, with a mission to inspire and educate the community on entrepreneurship. They invite high profile speakers for their weekly Speaker Series, connect students to the Boston start-up community, as well as run the “Husky Startup Challenge,” an eight-week program which concludes with a University wide Demo Day.
Social Enterprise Institute Student Association is a group of students with a mission to educate the community on how business can be used for social good. Spun out of the Social Enterprise Institute, SEISA hosts speakers and works with IDEA to run design-thinking social innovation workshops for students.
Biotech Entrepreneurs is a group of biotech graduate and PHd students who are passionate about the intersection of biotechnology and entrepreneurship. They bring in guest speakers and put on bootcamps for members of the University.
IDEA is Northeastern University’s Venture Accelerator. We provide entrepreneurs the support, in-kind resources and educational experience of developing a business from core concept to launch.
ARC is the Accounting and Tax Resource Center. ARC educates founders on tax planning and run workshops on best practices for early stage venture accounting. They work directly with ventures to support them in navigating their accounting and tax work.
Scout is Northeastern’s student run design studio. Design students take on clients from around the university including IDEA ventures to provide design, branding, UX/UI, and digital campaign strategy support.
Generate is Northeastern’s student run product development studio. Their mission is to educate engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs about product development and the integration of business and engineering. Generate takes on clients to help ventures prototype and develop their products.
Nu.io is Northeastern’s center for student led learning. They enable students to teach other students skills. Courses include web development, rapid prototyping, and product management.
In aggregate, we have an interdisciplinary collection of organizations that make up a complete stack of entrepreneurship education and activities. We see organizations within the College of Engineering, College of Arts Media, Design, Northeastern Law School, and the D’amore-Mckim School of Business come together to solve interesting problems.
At Northeastern, this initiative to promote interdisciplinary collaboration for venture incubation is known as Mosaic.
The venture experience can be fulfilling, as moving up the stack progressively introduces more granular support to some aspect of their business. There are organizations that educate our community on entrepreneurship and generate interest at the top of the funnel. We have IDEA, which provides founders with the platform to accelerate early stage planning and growth. Lastly, there are a number of student run service providers, ranging from design, legal, product development, and accounting services that produce outstanding work for their clients (ventures).
At a high level, we see tremendous upside and support for the venture experience. Each organization provides incredible value to the venture by specializing in their respective discipline.
For example, take Scout: Northeastern’s Student-Led Design Studio. They take on IDEA ventures as clients each semester. They have previously worked with Blurr to revamp their mobile app design and UX, as well as the branding and packaging for Commonwealth Cold Brew.
Or Generate, Northeastern’s Student-Led Product Development Studio. They worked with Knightly to develop two prototypes of their hardware device complete with housing, electronics and firmware. They also prepared for them a product development roadmap with technical recommendations, initial PCB design and in depth technical reports.
These services provides an incredible immediate value to ventures and allow them to continue growing their business. However, what’s sustainable, scalable, and most beautiful about this model is how value is shared between organizations.
Students studying design, engineering, and accounting have the ability to source clients that give them an opportunity to refine their skills and expand their portfolio. Negotiating scopes of work, cultivating client relationships, managing large cross functional teams and projects, and delivering on expectations provide a valuable and experiential way to practice the skills they are learning in the classroom.
Experiential learning is at the heart of what we do here. This multi-disciplinary approach in which students are improving skills from their own field of study, while coming together to solve problems and work on start-ups is in essence what drives such deep collaboration. Over time, this has even led IDEA to become more product and design centric in its business coaching to ventures.
Team members are not only able to provide value to our ventures, but to other students from around the University, helping them advance their personal and professional goals.
So in many ways, IDEA must continue to be like the sea otter. It is increasingly clear that continuing to collaborate with other organizations to help our ventures is a pathway for success. Not only because it helps our ventures, rather its the best strategy and rather essential in sustaining a growing, thriving ecosystem that IDEA and our partners will continue to benefit from — both institutionally and individually.
This interdisciplinary approach to problem solving and entrepreneurship gives me hope and optimism for much more to come, where we put the problem and impact at the core of what we do. In continuing to do so, the best is surely yet to come for our ventures, the team, and our community.
To learn more about IDEA, see our latest impact report here.
For more information visit northeastern.edu/idea.
