Posted: July 10, 2017, 7:25pm
This summer, I was really fortunate to be accepted to the HTE@USC’s Edge Program which is a 4-week entrepreneurial boot camp for students and faculty members with ideas for healthcare devices and software. The course is based on the successful NSF ‘I-Corps’ methodology of linking university engineering with the market place.
The sessions mostly took place at the HSC campus of USC. A total of 12 teams with brilliant ideas participated in this refreshing and eye-opening camp. I, along with my then team members, participated in conducting the customer discovery and solidifying the various hypotheses I made in my project ‘Threshold 5’. Virtual Reality, being a new and exciting as well as relatively unexplored field attracts a great deal of curiosity and my project received its nice share of questioning and interest. In every session, there were speakers from different regulatory organizations as well as companies of students’ interests. Over a span of 4 weeks, we were able to greatly refine our respective Business Model Canvases and some of us pivoted as well.
Speaking to different patients and clinicians was an eye-opening experience for me as I became aware of several different perspectives on the same situation. Interviewing these people greatly impacted my design process also, which mostly only tended to reinforce my original idea. It was a great exercise and I became aware of the possible shortcomings, limitations as well as the rather stronger points of my project design.
Most importantly, the people who organized the camp, namely Nadine Afari and George Tolomiczenco along with Dr. Kenneth Hayashida, were extremely helpful and open to any discussion related to everybody’s project. I feel privileged to be a part of this program and being mentored by some of the best people in USC. I encourage everyone who has a great project idea to get involved in programs like these and refine their ideas to make really worthwhile and impactful projects.
Published on July 25th, 2017
Last updated on August 10th, 2017