Speaker 1  0:01  
Hello and welcome to today's webinar entrepreneurial framework to support program design and research commercialization presented by Autumn. My name is Sammy Spiegel, one of autumns professional development managers and I will be your staff host for today. All lines have been muted to ensure high quality audio and today's session is being recorded. If you have a question for the panelists, we encourage you to use the q&a feature on your zoom toolbar. If you have a technical question or a comment, please feel free to use the chat. And I believe our presenters will also be asking you to use the chat to help participate and engage today throughout the session. So keep an eye on that. Should you need closed captioning during the webinar zoom live transcript feature is turned on and available on your toolbar. Before we begin, I would like to take a moment to acknowledge and thank autumns online professional development sponsor Marshall Gerstein, IP, we appreciate your ongoing support. I now have the pleasure of introducing you to today's presenters. In his role at Dalhousie University, Spencer Geffen oversees the state early stage commercialization programming that supports Atlantic Canada and translating research out of the university labs and developing the skills mindsets and resiliency with students to thrive in the innovation economy. Spencer previously managed deal flow and acceleration services at Center for Aging and Brain Health Innovation competitive funding programs. Spencer has extensive experience in Canada's startup scene having provided advisory support to ventures across Canada through his role as managing the health portfolio at Mars Discovery District and developing market opportunity assessments at the University of Alberta Rukmani Ramachandran has a former is a former stem cell bio engineer who has spent the last 10 years in early stage entrepreneurial ventures in her current role as a program designer and facilitator at Concordia as innovation hub. Rukmani supports the training of scientists, entrepreneurs, who are building deep, deep tech startups out of Canadian research institutions. Welcome Spencer and Rukmani. We're so excited to learn from you both today and I will turn it over to you to get us started.

Speaker 2  2:13  
Thanks, Sammy. Hey everyone, I'm just going to set up and get started Give me just one second.

Speaker 2  2:29  
Checking that everyone can see my screen okay. All right. I got an on from Spence, Sir, we're ready to get rolling. Thanks for the intro, Sammy. Just as we get started, just this just a quick check for the room. Feel free to use the chat. I just want to know who we're speaking with. So why are you here? We're talking about on frameworks to help spur program design. Use the chat let me know why you're here. What brought you here? What got you interested?

Unknown Speaker  3:11  
I have another question right after this. So

Unknown Speaker  3:16  
given everyone fair warning.

Speaker 2  3:22  
Yeah, thanks me. You can just say one or two or just share whatever else

Unknown Speaker  3:36  
Ah, there's both. That's good.

Speaker 2  3:46  
What maybe the second, second set of questions is easier. Maybe you want to share that? Are you working with? Are you working with grad students, undergrads, entrepreneurs, somebody else? So again, it sent me say 1234 a mix of everything.

Speaker 2  4:18  
Okay, so I'm going to give it as another I'm going to let you guys put in the chat as you go. So I'm gonna start. And you are free to post your questions in the q&a at any time, but we will also have time for questions at the end. But it's sort of good to get started. Here's the thing. One of the things we learned at d3, is that this is our analogy. Building a startup is like building a house, you kind of need to go through it in stages. And there are different jobs to be done at different stages requiring different kinds of expertise and different kinds of supports that you're going to work with at each stage of the build. Thank you. If building a startup is like building a house, the entrepreneur, the founder themselves goes through the same journey. They need different kinds of skills and different kinds of support. And each of those stages. And as ecosystem players, as supporters in this founding journey in this entrepreneurial journey, we are able to offer different kinds of support at different stages. So I'm going to, you're going to hear this phrase multiple times, I'm going to call it the right love at the right time. Right? We as ecosystem players need to figure out what stage the founder is in what stage the startup is in, so that we can give them the right love at the right time. And that's not usually easy, because the entrepreneurial journey is not easy. So what we're going to do, what we use what helped us sort of panic less and do this better, was to use frameworks and supporting figuring out what the right love is what the right timing is. So today, we're going to talk about two of those frameworks. One is called the startup journey. And the other is the startup entrepreneur competency model. We've used this a d3 for a fair few years, and we're sort of it helps us. So the startup journey helps us figure out where the individual entrepreneur or the startup is on a spectrum on a continuum. It helps us figure out based on that, to say what kind of support do they need. It also helps us say, Okay, we're in this space, it helps us figure out where on this journey d3 operates. And our other ecosystem players operate so that we can actually work with them and support each other. The entrepreneur competency model, on the other hand, if startups are like building house, you need different sets of skills and different kinds of abilities at different times, it's going to help us figure out, okay, the startup is at a different stage. Here's the kind of skills that the founders need, here are the competencies that the founders need. It's going to help us articulate that to them, it's going to help us figure out what kind of programming we need to design and deliver what kind of support we need to offer. And again, it helps us collaborate with ecosystem partners, that these two are frameworks to help sort of guide us in thinking about the support that we have to offer and the support that the startups need, and how we collaborate with everybody else. So I'm going to start right off with the with the founder journey, the startup journey. It's to help us identify where they are, you'll notice that there are sort of two roundabouts here, I will qualify that this is a very reductive representation. But a founder journey has started journey starts with individual exploration kind of figuring out, do I want to be an entrepreneur? Do I want to take my technology, I have this novel technology do want to take it and build it into a company? Do I have what it takes is that the life for me, it's a largely individual experience for the founders trying to figure out, try it on for size and go, Do I even want to, and then they go through this first roundabout, especially if they're scientists, because their usual options of academia and industry are still available to them. But they can take that sort of path of entrepreneurship. And we help develop programming to support that as well. And then if they've said, Yeah, I think I want to build a company entrepreneurship, maybe for me, you keep going down that path, and you go into the search and execute phase, the pre validation and post validation phase. And then there's another round about a decision point where you go, okay, yeah, this is the company I'm going to build, I'm good. We're going to be using this to figure out what stage an individual or a startup is at, we're going to be using this to figure out what outcomes do we need to deliver for them, for instance, before the first round about, if it's an individual experience, it a lot of the programming, a lot of the support is about helping them figure out their mindset. It's about allowing them chances to explore. It's about the individual experience. But once they've passed that, when they get into the pre validation and post validation space, it's no longer about the individual. It's about the company that they're building. It's about the venture that they're trying to create. And the tone shifts, the content shifts, the skills shift and the kind of programming the duration of programming also shifts. But this is not linear. I will admit it, this is just a guardrail for us to make sure that we're on the right track for them. One of the ways we use this, and I'm going to talk about two three ways that we use this, the first way we use this is to pinpoint with confidence to be reasonably confident that where the startup is or where the business is, we can support it. And when I say simplified, I call it productive. But it's this is the minimum that we can do. It's obviously a lot more complex than this, but it helps us it also helps us and communicate with the startup. What do you need at this stage? What kinds of milestones are you looking for? And when we say milestones, it's easy to say, Oh, I'm Incorporated, and therefore I've achieved a venture creation milestone. We want to take move away from that, and start thinking in terms of, did you have customers? What kind of business traction Do you have? What kind of product traction Do you have? And we're able to list each of these fruit points across this journey. The other way, we are able to use this internally as as ecosystem players who are in the business of building and delivering programming, where I will say, use this journey to ask questions around what is the appetite for the founder or the individual participating in the programming, when they're in the individual exploration phase, their appetite is low, their willingness to give us time and energy is low, so you give them smaller chunks of programming. But as they move along this journey, they have larger appetite for acquiring skills and training and more support. So you are able to devote more of our resources, our programming resources there. Similarly, the startups need for customized or individualized support. Also growth across this continuum, the spectrum. In the beginning, there's not much individualized or customer support that's needed, you can develop a lot of one committee programming, you can develop a lot of one off sessions, and you're probably still serving them really well. But as the startup moves along this journey, and they're talking about their technology, their IP, their customer acquisition journey, that read for individuals, sport goes up, you need one on one coaching, you need one on one mentoring, you need to help them raise money. So a lot of programming time resources go into it. And it allows us to plan for that. The last is around competency acquisition and skill development for the individual. In the beginning, if they're just exploring, they just need to know a few things. But as they move along, they need to be skilled at higher proficiency levels in a lot more competencies than previously. So this allows us to say, okay, the programming that I need to build has to make sure that the participant can acquire these competencies and become practiced and experienced and applying them for their own startup. So this journey, even though it's simple, it's reductive, it helps us answer three critical questions when it comes to designing programming for the right kind of audience. So again, right love at the right time, making sure that we're not exhausting your resources, we're not over taxing the audience, we're not giving them, you know, filling their cup more than they need. Right.

Speaker 3  12:37  
Now we're going to talk about the mechanics in terms of like program participants, right? Because I know with with our case, for example, not everyone's gonna be a founder, not everyone wants to be a founder, but they might be interested in innovation or entrepreneurship or skill set or mindset, because they're like, oh, no, maybe I don't want to be a researcher. And I've just spent the last 10 years of my life doing my master's PhD, and now I'm in my postdoc.

Speaker 2  13:00  
For those people, and and Spencer, feel free to jump in with your experience as well. First giving when the scientist is going, I don't know that I want to be a researcher, even though it's not the last 10 years of my life doing that, giving them in the exploration place, giving them an opportunity to see if entrepreneurship is for them. What does that entail? What does the life of an entrepreneur look like in comparison to the life of a scientist in comparison to the life if you went off to work for Philips? Or Ge, what does that look like for you? If you went off to work for a university? What does that look like for you? If you want to become an entrepreneur, if you think you might be curious about it? What about your tech? Could you apply just a place a safe sandbox for them to come and try things on a place to play? Spencer? Did that answer your question about how we use it?

Speaker 3  13:49  
It makes it I think it's again, going back to and I'll talk about this in my section on like the programming that we're designing at Dell innovates anyways, is to allow people to take control risk, right risk, that they're not going to have to mortgage their house risk that they're not going to have to quit their job risk that they're not going to have to leave their degree or their research program. So I think it's that exposure, that experience and allowing people to understand what is something before say, Yes, I am an entrepreneur or something that they've never been exposed to or don't have any skills or awareness of, but just heard of,

Speaker 2  14:21  
by the way, the fact that the point that Spencer mentioned like, I don't have to mortgage my house, that's actually something that's a critical question. Don't ask it that way. But in here, say the scientist is decided they want to become an entrepreneur, they now have to decide what's, what's the thing they're going to build? What's the company they're going to build? What's the technology, they're going to build their company around? And in this pre validation phase, we really help them try and suss out if the technology they're thinking of taking to market is going to be viable, because they're going to be as Spencer mentioned, giving up their career probably taking a mortgage or their house taking big loans, getting investments. Is this the company? Want to build and we help them de risk that you can use programming to help the participants de risk that for themselves? Spencer, you look like I want to say something. Oh, good. Oh good. The third thing that the founder journey the startup journey allows us to do and keep calling it summer during startup journey allows us to do is to figure out where we are with respect to our ecosystem as program delivery partners, right? It building a startup ecosystem building an entrepreneurship ecosystem, is not a one university one organization job, it literally takes a village. By knowing by taking off off our blinders looking at the ecosystem zooming out and going, what kind of other support is available to to entrepreneurs in my ecosystem in the Canadian ecosystem and the Quebec ecosystem in Montreal, it allows us to say, I don't have to create programming that already exists, it allows us to find out where these handshake points are between the ecosystem players so that we can support each other so that we don't have to duplicate effort. So we don't have to try and duplicate outcomes, right. For instance, as district three, we purely operate in the startup experience space, we don't we no longer operate in the individual experience space. However, if we're going to be dealing with deep tech companies, the funnel, the pipeline for that is pretty complex. So we have to be aware of what's there in the individual experience. But we don't have to do it ourselves. We support programs like the life science entrepreneurial program, at Concordia, by just helping them deliver it, we don't have to build it. But it serves as a pretty nice pipeline, because that's where our participants come from. We know who we're getting in bed with, not just a Concordia even outside, we know what other accelerators are there. We know how we work with them. Sometimes teams that finish a pre validation stage with our company, District Three is not best suited to help them further along in their journey, we know where to send them, because they have the right kind of programming right kind of support and services to help people along. So this allows not just to position pin the startup along this journey, but pin us as deliverers of programming along this journey, and see who else we can collaborate with and how best we can collaborate. That's what we do with that. Now we I had an activity plan for about a quick five minutes. Depending on who you are in the audience. If you have a program, that you're thinking of designing that you already have that anything, just take a moment and see where along the startup journey, that program might fit. You doesn't have to be perfect, but just a ballpark thing. I work with individuals, I work with students, I work with companies. Just going to I know I said five minutes, but we're going to take a quick two minutes to actually do that. Yeah,

Speaker 3  18:09  
motive days, I know a lot of you are working with tech transfer or any industry liaison officers or combination at Dalhousie, for example, we sit adjacent to our tech transfer office, so the services that we offer more programmatic as opposed to managing the intellectual property, but I would still include them, but it may be a longer spectrum, right? If you're working from anything from, you know, filing that initial patent or copyright or putting in the PCT or something like that through to licensing it out, there's gonna be different conferences at different stages. So your your scope, or your stretch might exist further, as opposed to if you're operating a specific, you know, iCore program at your university, that might sit overlapping with what you're doing. But you need to be aware of some of the knowledge or the the experiences that people are having as part of that, because it may influence your journey as part of it there. So I'd say think about it with yourself, but then also where you situate yourself within the university or within the ecosystem or within the region that has those supports.

Speaker 3  19:24  
Does anyone have any questions about this? Or want to share an example of like where you see or situated? If you do want to talk, we can unmute you we do have that power, or Sammy does rather. Or if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the chat as well. We're a smaller group so we can take a bit more time as well to talk about things. Regarding maybe Judith, want to add context for this as the Montreal ecosystem. Correct. So Concordia is one university out of how many in Montreal and how many incubators accelerators can just provide some context where Concordia and district three sit within this. Oh, Um,

Speaker 2  20:00  
so Montreal used to be a small startup ecosystem, but now it's thriving. There are several university linked incubators and private accelerator spaces are several investors. District Three Sontag, these tend to be bigger incubator accelerators that are there. However, universities themselves, like McGill has their own Acceleration Program. Polytechnique Morial has their own acceleration incubation entrepreneurial program. The the University of Montreal system has their own program, the hospitals have their own entrepreneurial program. So these are just some of the more common ones. And apart from universities, institutions and research organizations, and there's also well known accelerators in the Montreal ecosystem. CDL operates there TechStars operates their founder fuel operates there, but they cater to a variety of audiences. Well, our mandate is to work with scientists with to work with Canadian researchers to help them accelerate their startup journey. So we work in multiple ways with all of them.

Speaker 2  21:15  
Okay, I think it's time to move on. Are we okay? So, even if you have a question later, try and figure out where you will help. If you're working with ttoc, you could be anywhere on this journey, right? So think about where you best support. And if it's a long spectrum, chances are, if that's your case, we're gonna move on to talk about the second framework that we use, it's called the startup entrepreneur competency model. Remember, when we talked about there being a house and different skills needed a different time first to figure out where in the house building there at. The second is, depending on the place you're at, forget the outcomes, the business, the product, the funding traction that you need, we're also going to talk about individual entrepreneur competencies that they need. Over the years, we split it up into two sort of major chunks. One is in validating your startup figuring out if this is the company that you want to build. And the second is to grow your startup, after the second round about you go yes, this is the company I'm going to build. This is the company I'm going to take to market, you're going to need a different set of skills. So we have about seven categories, categories of competencies, split across two levels into two phases. But then we all know that they're not linear. This is again, minimum viable, very simplified. It's not make it or break here. It's not the be all and now we have categories of competencies. When we have them, we say, How deep do you need to have be skilled in it? Could you know about something? Or do you need to be able to do it really well. So we split it across, we split each competency across different proficiency levels to say, I know what this is, I know what an IP strategy is, I know that payments aren't the be all and end all have an IP strategy for entrepreneurship. The second stage, which is I am skilled at it, I'm able to design an IP strategy for my company with support, I know what I need to be aware of, I know what steps I need to take, I know where to go ask for support. And the third is I know how to do it. I've done it once before I can do it again. You don't need all of them at all times. Combining the two, if you take the entrepreneurial Competency Development map, and you put the startup journey map together, it sort of starts coming together. Now, you need at the exploration stage. If you're just curious about things, you just need to know what a customer segment is, you just need to know what market means you just need to know what an MVP is, you don't need to know what your MVP is. But you need to know what that vocabulary means. You need to know what fundraising means you need to understand what a seed round is. You just need to know them. You don't need to know how to do them. But once you've come to the startup venture creation space, and you're going, I'm going to try and do this but I don't know what company it is I'm going to build, you need to know what your minimum viable product will look like. Right? But you probably don't need to know how to grow revenue just yet. You need to know the language. You don't need to know how to do it. But once you're in post validation, you'll see that a lot of things become you have to be experienced in doing this. You have to have a lot of experience in your product and will give you the kind of support you have. You need to have some experience in building a team and hiring people will give you that kind of support. You need a little into a lot of experience in raising funds will give you that kind of support. So it changes for One off workshops and giving them knowledge to actually helping them do things between these two, it allows us as program designers to go, I know what kind of programming they need, I know what outcomes this program needs to deliver for the audience for the participants. The competency model is, again, minimum viable, it doesn't include everything. And we're not saying that if you do this, you're going to be successful. But it's going to go deeper and focus on outcomes. What can you do the language around it is to say, I can describe the difference between a user and a customer and the decision maker all the way through to I know what my priority customer segment is. It helps the participant also stop spreading themselves too thin, because entrepreneurship can be calm, it is complex, it's challenging, it helps them focus their energy on these are things I need to be aware of these are things I need to do. Now, these are things I need to be really, really skilled at doing to be able to do it because it helps them focus on what they need to achieve. And it helps us make sure we're building programs that allow them to achieve that. So that allows us to build outcome driven programs, instead of trying to throw everything in the wall and hope it sticks. We were talking about how founders will use this. There's one other way the founders can use the competency model. And it's more helpful for later stage founders. They can do a self assessment. They can go I'm at the stage in the founder journey, the startup journey. Here are the skills I need. What do I have? Now this is a self assessment, they're going to self report, they're also able to see this go over time. They are actively able to seek out co founders that complementary skills, know what they need to outsource know what they need to get mentorship on or get coaching on, know what kind of programs they need to seek up know what kind of support services they need to seek out. So these are the three questions the competency model allows us to answer. And I talked enough about d3. But Spencer, over at Dell innovates used these two for his own programming and service delivery. Spencer, you want to take over?

Speaker 3  27:27  
Yes. So just give some context. As I mentioned before, we're not the tech transfer office at Dalhousie University. So we're a research intensive university located in Halifax, Canada, for those who aren't familiar. We're a mid sized school, I would say within within Canada, we're the only research intensive university in our province that we're within, we have about 20,000 students, but we thought it med school law school like every professional thing under the sun, I think except for a veterinary college. So we have lots of stuff going on, we have lots of programming that's going on. And we have lots of different faculties and business units, as Melanie was saying that even within our organization are touching, quote unquote, innovation, but it may not be within the same context and things like that, that we're looking for. So doubt, innovate looks to support primarily research translation into practice, right. And we do that through the lens of of commercialization. But I don't want to discount like those mobilization or no translation, implementation sciences, all of those type of things. Our primary audience is the research community, mostly on the grad students side. So masters, PhD postdocs, but we do have some programming for undergrads, we do work with faculty members. But again, the priority for us is getting that research into practice. And given the tenure structure, which I'm sure is similar at your own institutions, not a lot of faculty members typically are leaving their jobs to go become startup founders. It's great when they do but they're the exception and not the norm. And on the other side, we don't expect everyone to become a startup founder. So we want to prepare people for the innovation economy, whether they, you know, go back and they are a researcher, whether they work in the healthcare delivery system, whether they join industry or government or they go into some sort of commercial opportunity going forward. We want them to have those competencies. So we operate at the very early stage. It's a pre incorporation for the most part pre startup, but we're moving into that that startup journey, right? We're from idea validation to business model formation is what I say. But we're marketing with money. Rather, if you want go forward one slide, I can give you a bit of context. So I've been a dowel innovate for about two and a half years now. And like I said, I was moving from a bigger ecosystem in Toronto to Halifax, I was working with later stage companies to typically so about a million dollars in revenue and financing. And it was more on the advisory support side when I was doing program design. So it was more around connectivity, network access, all those type of things which isn't too dissimilar from what we're trying to do. But people don't necessarily have those skills or awareness. When you know, you're a PhD candidate and you all you've been doing is research for, you know, four years. If you're an international student and you haven't come within the same context and things like that, so one of the things that we did when I came in was okay, what is going on in the ecosystem? Right? And I'm not talking like full ecosystem map, or all that kind of stuff. But as Manu was alluding to earlier, it's like, what programs do we run? Where's it within the journey? And where why are we trying to do this? Right? What outcomes are we trying to drive? How does it fit in with other things that exist? Because when I came in, for example, we ran a programming program and somebody's like, Well, why are you doing that somebody else is already running that program, right? But they don't necessarily have the context of where you're designing for the same situation. And I'm saying, Okay, we're focusing on that research, commercialization, that is our goal, you're focusing on entrepreneurship, generally. So you know, the skill set and mindset that I'm looking to build within the constituents is different than what you are from a programming standpoint. And from the experience, right, a lot of it is focused on that individual experience in the database pipeline. And we're really trying to build that skill set mindset, awareness, resiliency, as opposed to building the company, which we lead to some of the programs kind of on the bottom right there. So the creative destruction lab, for example, or both, those are big incubator accelerator, idea hub is another group at Dalhousie, and they do prototyping, so building your actual product, and all of that kind of stuff. We're very much on that left hand side. So the programs you see listed here are what we run it down that we oversee, that we control. So we do run it some additional programs, we run what's another version called invention innovation, but it's run out of Simon Fraser University, for example. So we're not doing program design on it, we are just implementing the programming locally. So these are the programs that we mapped out, and where are they fit. And as I said, most of the programs, as you see are left into that individual experience, well out to market is the Canadian equivalent of Ichor. So that's kind of that one of those main inflection points, and ready to launch is our latest or later stage program, which is really about, okay, I do want to raise my hand and be an entrepreneur, I need to build a business model. I don't know what this is, I don't know how to do it. So we've adopted some of the programming out of MIT. But it really shows again, this is where we're operating. This is why we're doing it. And we want to kind of understand the experience and the startup journey, or the individuals journey rather, to guide the program design, the learning objectives and the outcomes, and to collaborate better with the ecosystem.

Unknown Speaker  32:15  
It's your money if you want to advance.

Speaker 3  32:18  
So this, this is a fun chart of one of the earlier slides that Rukmani was showing around the competency models, right. And so this is the competency model, the way we used, it was a gut check. It was a reaction, it allowed us to level set as a team, what our perceptions of the programs were. So you'll see I've color coded here. So blue, I believe was myself when I went through yellow was my program manager for one of the programs. And green is where we agreed on something. So you know, your basic color palettes combining colors together, and says You see, a lot of them are overlapping, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it goes back to the perception of what did we think the programming was doing, how we were designing programs, and what the outcomes that we wanted as part of this, right. So as part of this, let's say I think this is for the lab to Market program, for example, to what level, we're recovering intellectual property as part of this, right. And I don't think that's one of the ones listed here. But I think I said we want them to have a general awareness. We don't want them to be an expert in patenting, or patent protection, and all of that kind of stuff, because we can't cover it, there's too much stuff. So when we initially went through, everything was to a level two, because we're like, we want to cover everything. This is, you know, I quarter, we want everyone to do customers care, we want everyone to have this awareness. But we went through it, we said, We want everyone to have an awareness. We don't want everyone to have a skill. We want them to know where to go after this program, if they identified that they need support, or if they identified that they want to go forward as part of this. So it allowed us as a team to reflect, tweak our language that we're using for the program and understand the objectives and the goals of the program. So we are aligned to say, you know, if you go from path innovation on the previous slide to love to market to rage launch, is are we overlapping? Is that intentional? If it's not, why are we overlapping? Is there a gap? Right? And so one of the things that we hear from our colleagues at Creative Destruction Lab, which is a later stage program, is nobody's done customer discovery effectively. So you'll see in a lot of our programs, customer discovery is a skill set competency mindset that we continually want to build. But it's slightly different within each context, right. So for lunch market is very much focused on that research market fit. What problem is somebody facing that we want to identify when you want to ready to launch is very much focused on the company. Is there a customer segment that we actually think we can acquire? Is there a beachhead market that we can go into as part of this and allows the program managers now to have conversations between the team as opposed to me saying like, No, I don't think this should happen, or that should happen, or yes, this should happen. It should be more the team's identifying those gaps. Because one of my favorite sayings to people on my team is that I want to understand when a program is no longer needed. One has a program that its objective, and it's no longer needed within the ecosystem, or it needs to change because it's addressing a new gap. So if everybody has customer discovery as a skill, do we need to be running the same program for customer discovery? Probably not. Right. So it allows us to reflect from a resource utilization perspective as well. But to remind you, if you want to get to the next one, we are also part of this group called AI Inc. So I Inc is a national consortium, that is a five organizations and growing, running a number of different programs across Canada. And these programs were all developed independently. So again, we've had this conversation internally at Dell, but now we're having it with our community partners. And this is where I got matched up with Rukmani. And where we started having discussions around. Okay, so where do these programs get together? And so for example, with lunch market, we're launching a cohort in Quebec, and we're we're launching a French language cohort in Quebec. So we need to have an understanding that this is new within the ecosystem, where does it fit? Where does it play? What are the local priorities that are going on? Where are some of the local objectives, what is unique, what is different, and because we have a shared understanding of outcomes, it allows us to proceed with those conversations and implementation much more quickly. But I'll use an example again, going forward. So with the lab to Market program, we had the initial pilot in Halifax, Nova Scotia, which has a population of, let's say, about 400,000 people in the city, a million people in Nova Scotia, and Toronto, which Toronto is bigger than all of Atlantic Canada combined, so four provinces, all smaller than the City of Toronto. So obviously, the resources are going to be much different. Toronto is also a third of the Canadian economy just in the city, right. So there might be a few more corporate partners, there might be a few more corporate accelerators, there might be a few bigger universities that exists. So the needs that existed aren't necessarily the same. And the programming that exists in the community isn't necessarily the same. So again, it allowed us to have this discussion as it relates to lab to market and say, Okay, we're generally aligned on a lot of this stuff. But where is their difference? Right. So for developing a business model, our goal at Dell innovate was very much to have an awareness of what a business model is, describe the business model, how you would use the business model, why it's important. Toronto was saying, Oh, well, people already having this baseline competency. People know what a business model is. There's much more startups and trauma, there's much more of a tech ecosystem that exists in tomorrow, we're not as much of a resource extraction economy like it is in Halifax. So we actually want them to have a business model. And we say, Okay, does that mean it's in the same program? Or is that a different program? Or is there additional training that happens? Or is it designed for the individual or for the max, right? One of the important things that came out of this is we aren't designing for the individual. We aren't designing for that individual successful startup, that successful founder that's coming out. We want this program to be approachable, and we want the people to be meeting the objectives on 80% of the time, and things like that

Unknown Speaker  38:00  
decline if you want to keep going.

Speaker 2  38:07  
While we're talking to as Spencer mentioned, we're not talking about the individuals, we're talking about making sure that all participants in the programs are approachable to all participants, depends on the ecosystem that you're playing in. While it allows us to think about these things. We and d3 also started thinking about how could the founders use this? We're talking about how we internally use this? What are some of the things that the founders could do? How could we use this to better understand our own audience, right? We help our participants, right. And participants in Toronto are different from participants in Halifax, we help them figure out where are they starting? Where would they like to end? Where would they like to go to? We help them do a self assessment on all of these seven, map it out. But help them answer questions around what do I need? What kind of understanding do I have for business milestones, especially after they've gone past that individual experience that self selected into entrepreneurship? Now they want to take their intellectual property and turn it into a company. What do they need for that? What is the next milestone that they have to achieve? Far I would say program in multiple places. What is the starting point? Where are the participants actually started? Where do they believe they're actually starting? And along the same business milestones that we mentioned before customer traction, funding, traction isn't right. But as companies go along that continuum of the startup journey, when they're getting closer and closer to the growth phase, right, they're gonna need to start building teams. They're going to need to start figuring out who to hire, how to manage them. They're going to need to find co founders, they're going to need to find partners, so participants can begin to start understanding what that CO founding team looks Like, where they all align where their gaps, what they need to fill, how they can complement each other, and so on. Then once they start hiring people, they can go, who do I need to hire? Where are my gaps? They can also the founders themselves can also go, what kind of support do I need? What kind of skills? Do I need to double up? And where can I go get them? So out of these two frameworks, not only help us figure out better programming for ourselves within our ecosystem, helps us talk to other partners and figure out how you can take smaller programs and launch them on a national scale, like I Inc is trying to do. But even at the participant level, and the founder level and the startup level go, what kind of team do I need to build? Where do I need? What kind of help and resources do I need to seek out and get for myself and my company? So they are able to do this even for themselves through self assessment through a group activity? To figure out why co founders and I all have the same skills, we're gonna go need different kinds of co founder, we're gonna go need get different kinds of help. So this is the last way that Spencer, last? We use it really well. Yeah,

Speaker 3  41:10  
that was gonna add, I think, and then context is important here, right? Because Mani is talking about district three is that that venture creation standpoint, we're typically pre venture creation. So you know, going through a self assessment, we haven't done it, to be honest, because our teams don't have or our individuals don't have the skills or competencies. So we don't want them to be breeding themselves levels, you're on everything, because that's not gonna be helpful for them. They don't know what they don't know. So context is important to say this tool needs to be used in a specific way, within a specific context, depending on the stage of development, because the startup founders want to correct me if I'm wrong, they want to know this information. They want the self assessment. Whereas, you know, if you're dipping your toe in the water, you don't know if you're gonna go down this path, but you haven't raised your hand and said, Yes, I do want to be an entrepreneur. Yes, this is the pathway, I'm going to take it forward. So we've used it much more from a program design perspective, as opposed to a participant evaluation perspective,

Speaker 2  42:07  
are two things that Spencer mentioned that I should reinforce. One is even a district three, we don't use it for all our participants, we only have it for participants, we're at the later stage towards the end, that they figured out some kind of problem solution fit some kind of product market fit and they're in business, they're ready to raise big amounts of money in their need bigger teams, they're ready to hire huge teams. We don't use them for earlier stage teams where they're trying to figure out is this the company that I want to build? They don't use this. And the second thing is, we also do not use this for evaluation. It's not an evaluation tool. It's a self reflection tool. It's for teams to figure this out for their own. We don't use this to say Did our program work well or not? It's not an evaluation. And it doesn't reflect on the founders progress are the entrepreneurs progress? It's a self reflection and a self assessment tool. I think that was it. I just want to open the floor for questions if some phone there were other frameworks that you were using the you found helpful other comments are our Go for it last year. Chat q&a

Speaker 1  43:29  
Thank you both for such great information attendee while these attendees while we give you a few moments to ask some questions. I know we covered a lot sponson remind Do you think that there's like one huge takeaway that you would say if you remember nothing else from today, what would be the the key thing that would be helpful for our attendees to walk away with?

Speaker 3  43:53  
I think being intentional, like that was the big thing. For me, it's like being intentional in program design, improve the quality and the outcomes and the experience of the people that are going through it. And yes, there's always constraints from funders and things like that. But this is a tool that allows you to very quickly evaluate and design programming that meets the objectives of the outcomes that you're looking for. So again, all of this will be shared slide decks, have all the links to all the frameworks and things like that and adopt it and make it your own and let us know what works and what doesn't and it's like I said, there was one he said, there's there's lots of other things that exist out there. This is a way that we found that that is approachable and it's easy. And again, it's our team seem to have gravitated towards.

Speaker 2  44:38  
I agree with Spencer, it allows us to be intentional about what we're doing. It allows us it has allowed us to not like spread ourselves too thin and try to get distracted by everything.

Speaker 1  44:53  
That is always key because I know that all of us are all too busy all the time. So anything that streamlines and allows you to be intentional is always always a great thing. Spencer, were you going to add Sunday? Yeah,

Speaker 3  45:03  
I was gonna say that the good point is this has allowed me to say no to my boss a lot more and be specific about why I'm saying no, as opposed to let's do another program. Can we do this? Can we do that? Can we accept this team into it? So it gives me a backing to say no. And it gives it like, guidance to my managers on my team for what is their programming and what is not, because if it's outside, that's not your responsibility anymore. So we're like, it's up the intentional and the resource perspective is helpful. Fantastic.

Speaker 1  45:37  
Gonna give it another minute to see if anything else came through. But I know that we gave a lot of information to digest. And I think that just kind of processing and thinking through this framework is really helpful for everyone. Sometimes just take some time to simmer. So attendees, obviously, you can always follow up if needed, as well, reminding, we're gonna go back to another slide, just linking

Speaker 2  46:02  
the two things we talked about, we'll set up links for people to access it. Yeah, absolutely. Perfect. Well, that sounds great.

Speaker 1  46:14  
It looks like no questions are still coming through. So I think we're okay to give everyone a little bit of time back this afternoon, which I know everyone always appreciates. So on behalf of autumn, I just want to say thank you so much, Spencer and Rodney for sharing such informative details and information. I know this will be a huge help to everyone who is participating today. And attendees. Thank you so much for joining. As a reminder, a recording of the webinar will be available for viewing on the autumn Learning Center. And that is also where the slides will be posted. So please be sure to check that out. And a certificate of attendance can also be accessed there. And please remember to complete the webinar evaluation which will automatically open when you close out of this session to help us serve your needs in the future. So with that, I will say thank you again so much to everyone for being here. And I hope that you all have a great rest of your day.

Unknown Speaker  47:05  
Thank you all right. Bye

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