Update from the Innovation Lab

Dear Friends and Stakeholders of the YU Innovation Lab,

We hope you all continue to be well and artfully thriving amidst these uncharted times. Here’s our quarterly update from the YU Innovation Lab, and we invite you to reach out to us with yours…

The Summer Like No Other

This past spring as students at YU and all over the world began receiving the disappointing news that pandemic was cancelling their planned summer internships, Sy Syms Dean Noam Wasserman had an idea. That idea turned into an alternative summer internship program like none ever imagined, the Consulting Force — Innovation Lab program of Summer 2020.

Teaming with Dean Wasserman, Dean Michael Strauss and professors Dr. Tamar Avnet and Dr. Avi Giloni from Syms, our Innovation Lab team, led by Prof. Thom Kennon, designed a ten-week internship program for thirty select YU students. The first four weeks was a series of intensive bootcamps, workshops and talks led by a world-class team of top-tier consultancies, with Accenture, McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group leading the pack.

This first session culminated with a 3-day business case Hackathon led by the Lab, where student teams developed and pitched their plans to a broad audience of peers, professors, deans and visiting consultants.

The second session of the CF-IL program emerged as a mini capstone project, where student teams were briefed to work on a diverse mix of real-world businesses — not-for-profit organizations and five new startup partners within the Innovation Lab.

Over an accelerated, dizzying and exhilarating 6-week sprint, our student teams developed a range of business and marketing strategies, designed and executed research and presented their startlingly professional-grade plans and work products to critical praise and rave reviews on August 6th.

Dean Wasserman, our Lab director Maria Blekher and all involved agree — what we designed on the nimble and responsive fly this summer was the charter run of a very special educational program. We will be working in the coming months to imagine and plan how this experiment in YU curricula-Innovation Lab integration can be scaled and replicated across the coming semesters and beyond.

Production Notes

We’ll be sharing detailed case studies and some CEO testimonials from our summer 2020 startups in the coming weeks, but wanted to share a topline summary of the high-value work products our student teams developed and delivered in their intensive internships.

· Sightbit… the ace team became intimately embedded in the Sightbit marketing team, and began the development of a rich prospective partner CRM program.

· BrainCeek… our team focused on user-acceptance testing of their beta recruiting simulations, designed landing pages, performed market research for next-best-fit categories and began the foundational work for developing a robust ROMI-model.

· Emnotion … the team was herculean in their ultimately winning attempts to source an available, appropriately robust dataset from a company or category to use as a hero demonstration case for the startup’s AI-powered data as a service platform.

· Imoovo… our scholar marketeers designed and executed a market research program which included stakeholder interviews producing a killer insight around the emergent community of “women truckers in the US”.

· Theiavision … the student team executed a market research initiative which produced a rich survey report along with a prospect database of all the conference and event producers in the North American market.

The net-net for us in the Lab was this: startups need this kind of intensive, fresh, creative and strategic energy to fuel their go-to-market plans. And when monumentally challenged, ten 20-something scholars will surprise you beyond your wildest expectations in what they’re capable of delivering.

Coming Soon, [and by soon we mean now…]

Even as we plan next steps with several of our summer 2020 startups to build upon the incredible work products of our interns in the Lab, we are meeting and briefing with nine new global startups who will be working within the Innovation Lab in this coming fall semester.

Without giving too much away, our hopes are high for a wildly productive session working to help accelerate business value creation for such a unique mix of startups, ranging across a diversity of categories including –

· mental health and well-care

· fitness and training

· fintech (both B2C and B2B)

· learning systems and cognitive development

· adtech / media

· and more…

The Team Expands

This past summer we welcomed the newest addition to the growing Innovation Lab team, SJ Tannenbaum, a double major and double minor senior at Syms who, in a very short period has already been adding immense value to our marketing and operations initiatives. Welcome SJ, you’re setting the performance and delivery bar extremely high for all future interns of the Lab.

That’s the update from here in the Lab. We’re grateful to so many for their efforts, support and contributions — our students, our professors and deans, our startup partners, our mentors and, most importantly, for the love we sustain ourselves on from the broad YU community!

We invite you to connect with us Dr. Maria Blekher the Innovation Lab’s founder and director, and lead consulting adjunct Thom Kennon.

Visit the Innovation Lab here https://www.yu.edu/innovation-lab.