On Thursday, June 30, DifferenceMaker teams, faculty fellows, alumni, and mentors gathered at the UMass Lowell Innovation Hub for the 2016 Demo Day. Demo Day presents an opportunity for student teams to network with potential mentors and other interested parties. After the networking session, each team presents their project to the audience consisting of many mentors from all different backgrounds and careers. After each presentation, there is also a Q&A period where student teams answer any questions from the audience to help them learn more about the goals of each team. DifferenceMaker staff then help to pair up student teams with willing mentors to help further the DifferenceMaker projects.

As the summer boot camp series comes to an end, student teams spent the last session participating in in-depth discussion on capturing value and cost consideration. Teams discussed questions like

• What are the costs to find customer?
• What are the costs to make the solution? To deliver the solution?

Teams also had the chance to learn from and speak with a past DifferenceMaker team, Nonspec, who won the Campus-Wide DifferenceMaker award in 2013.

A big thank you to this session’s special guests!

• Yi Yang, Professor, Manning School of Business
• Nancy Saucier, Director, New Venture Development
• Tom ODonnell, Director, Innovation Hub

The last boot-camp session also yielded great results for teams and advisors. Teams participated in an in-depth discussion about the presentation of their “Solution”, the third step in the DifferenceMaker Method. Each team presented their findings from their homework on Customer and Value Proposition and received comments and suggestions from advisors and fellow DifferenceMaker teams for improvement.

There was also a “Round Robin” Advisory Session where each team was able to spend 10 minutes with each alumni mentor for advice and comments on their project’s business model so far.

We look forward to next week’s session with all of our DifferenceMaker teams, faculty fellows, alumni, and mentors!

A big thank you to this session’s special guests:

• Yi Yang, Professor, Manning School of Business
• Rekha Paleyanda, Director, Office of Technology Commercialization
• Ainat Koren, Professor, College of Health Sciences
• Anshuman Chadda, Global Entrepreneurship in Residence
• Josh Entner, Entrepreneur, UMass Lowell Alumni