How does the Venture Lab help you?

It gives teams hands-on experience in the world of high impact entrepreneurship. This means that their ideas have been thoroughly developed to the point where there is validation data (metrics) that shows customer interest, user engagement, and revenue potential from future clients.

Who can be part of the Venture Lab?

IE’s Venture Lab is a program that is open to all IE students and recent alumni (last 6 months). It is also an elective within the International MBA program. The ultimate aim is to complete the program with a short list of fully engaged users of your product/service. The entire focus of the Venture Lab is market validation and obtaining enough data to be ready to move from Pre-Launch activities to Launch.

A successful Venture Lab experience is not necessarily the launch of a company, but one in which each team completes the program at best with a business idea developed sufficiently to be prepared to launch and at a minimum with an understanding of what is truly required to launch a startup.

You can expect your original idea to morph, change, and evolve over the duration of the program – which is also a key aspect of the entrepreneurial process. Validating a market opportunity is about trying to get the right product-market fit, offering a solution that people not only want but for which they are willing to pay.

Ultimately, the goal of the Venture Lab is to prove that your idea is more than an idea and that through Manual Simulation, short of charging customers for the product or service, you can show that the idea has real traction.