iVenture Accelerator, Week 6

A 9-week pilot program for aspiring student entrepreneurs. One small step for a bigger and brighter future.

This week was an exciting week for us! We had an amazing lineup of speakers. We had Ashwin Kumar from Abbott Ventures talk about his story and the venture arm of Abbott.

We also had Gary Durack from the Bioengineering Department talk about the different manufacturing processes and his entrepreneurial experience through TEKMILL.

Last but not the least, we had a “delicious” talk from Ralph Monical of Monical’s Pizza. We enjoyed eating pizza while he talked about the company’s humble beginnings in 1959 and how he led the company to it’s current success.

On Thursday, we took a trip to Chicago for the second out of our three trips there. We went to Matter, a startup incubator for companies focused on healthcare. We talked to the founders of companies, and learned a lot from their entrepreneurial experience through the healthcare industry (which is notorious for a lot of red tapes).

We also went to Insight Product Development to learn more about the healthcare manufacturing processes.

On Friday, we went to Chicago Innovation Exchange (CIE) to connect with our counterpart accelerator in University of Chicago.

The CIE team introduced us to a lot of entrepreneurial opportunities in the Chicago area in collaboration with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other universities.

They also toured us around through their facilities including their newly opened fabrication laboratory which has state of the art equipments for fabrication and rapid prototyping.

Later that day, as our last activity, we had a seminar called “User-Centered Design Challenge” which taught us how to improve our products to be more user-focused.