Workshop 2: Assessing Opportunities and Value Propositions

On Thursday, February 21st, DifferenceMaker held its second workshop series session! This is a four-part series designed to help student teams gain knowledge to help them move their project forward for the Rist $50,000 Idea Challenge. The theme of this evening was assessing opportunities and value propositions.

The evening started off with dinner, refreshments, and networking. Shortly after, Ha Pho, Entrepreneurial Initiatives Project Manager, gave an introduction and recap about the previous session, which was about identifying problems. She then introduced our two guest speakers for the evening: Faculty Fellows, Professor Brent Shell, Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences, and Professor Neil Shortland, College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences.

Faculty Fellows that led the session this evening:
Professor Neil Shortland, College of Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; Professor Brent Shell, Zuckerberg College of Health Sciences.

After the introductions, Professor Brent Shell presented about assessing opportunities. This allowed teams to think about their problems even further and think about whether their solutions may have a potential market segment. Then, student teams worked with each other to discuss what they learned with their own projects and presented to all attendees.

One of the teams presenting to everyone about the problem that they are working with and identifying the opportunity that their startup project has.

After the presentations, Professor Neil Shortland taught the teams about value propositions. This allowed teams to think about the value their projects will provide for consumers: will it provide the consumers enough value to make them want to buy it? He taught about the psychology of human nature, which is important. Although each project may seem amazing to the team who created it, it may not be the case for future potential customers. Therefore, it is important to talk to potential customers.

Faculty fellows and teams working on their solidifying their project’s opportunities and figuring out the value that it may provide to potential future customers.

We would like to thank everyone that attended the second workshop series session! Another huge thank you to our guest speakers who led the session! We look forward to seeing you at our next sessions: \

Workshop Series 3: Developing Business Models, February 24

Workshop Series 4: Delivering Your Rocket Pitch, February 27

Dinner is served at each workshop, so please come hungry! Don’t forget to also keep working hard to prepare for the $50,000 Idea Challenge!