MIT PI: Douglas Hart, Department of Mechanical Engineering
SkT PI: Zeljko Tekic, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
To support Skoltech’s core mission and drive its entrepreneurial development, we aim to frame, organize and execute Skoltech1Million, an annual students’ entrepreneurial competition. It will be developed over two years and with two components – PITCH and LAUNCH. Through carefully designed workshops and mentoring sessions, media exposure, prototyping activities and numerous feedback points, we aim to build a transparent, lean and sustainable support system for Skoltech’s entrepreneurial community. At the end of the project, the Skoltech1Million should emerge as a backbone for developing students’ entrepreneurial activities at Skoltech, and a framework to systematically support and oversee development of students’ entrepreneurial ideas and bring to life every year numerous new ready to launch projects. The competition will be framed, developed and piloted in collaboration with MIT. MIT is an ideal partner for this endeavor as their MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is one of the most successful university centered entrepreneurship competitions in the world. Over the last 30 years, the MIT100K has supported over 160 companies, generating 4,600 jobs, receiving over $1.3 billion in venture capital funding. We will use the MIT100k as a model, learning platform and inspiration for developing Skoltech’s own competition. In the framework of this wo year project (July 2020 – June 2022), we aim to organize and run first a pilot challenge during Year 1 with a PITCH contest and then to organize and run a full competition during Year 2 with both PITCH and LAUNCH competitions.