Just six years ago, Mark Zuckerberg revolutionized the landscape of social media with an innovative concept for a website. In a similar spirit, Northwestern’s year-old “NUvention” program attempts to teach web-based entrepreneurship with real-world experience and expert guidance.
Internet entrepreneurs are the settlers of the World Wide Web, but learning the skills necessary to create a flourishing web business can be difficult. Under the direction of Professor Michael Marasco, the Farley Center’s capstone two-semester course, NUvention: Web, provides students with the tools they need to master the process of conceiving, building and launching a viable web venture.
Two Northwestern alums, Swathy Prithivi (Medill ’10) and Nikhil Sethi (McCormick ’10), continue to run the companies they created for NUvention: Web, Present Bee and Adapt.ly respectively, while other former students have used the skills taught in the course to further their own future business interests.
Real-world application of theory learned in the classroom can be difficult. The Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (FCEI) in the McCormick School of Engineering strives to push their students beyond a mere application of classroom theory to the actual creation of businesses. In 2009, the FCEI created NUvention: Web, a course that integrates both undergraduate and graduate students from all different disciplines into cohesive groups to come up with an idea for a website. Each team of students must build and launch the website within two quarters.
Former NUvention: Web students, Weinberg junior Sandeep Paruchuri and McCormick junior Michael Deem, glorify the program. Paruchuri referred to it as the “best course you’ll ever take at Northwestern,” while Deem called it “a gift to undergraduate students.”
NUvention’s appeal lies in its real-world application of the theoretical knowledge students learn in class. Over the course of winter and spring quarters, students under the direction of Marasco and Todd Warren (Northwestern alumnus who worked for 21 years developing software and websites for Microsoft), actually develop their concept, instead of simply writing business plans like in other entrepreneurship classes.
By pairing undergraduate and graduate students into teams, NUvention: Web gives undergrads a unique experience of working with students from different areas of expertise, ranging from industrial engineering to political sciences.
According to co-teacher Warren, the interdisciplinary teams then “work through the real-world issues of team dynamics, identifying a market and bootstrapping [maintaining a website with limited funding] the product and operations. The classroom environment also provides a safe place for students to explore, without taking the risk of actually forgoing school or a traditional job to see if entrepreneurship is right for them.”
“There are lots of ways to learn about entrepreneurship, but you can only really learn it by actually doing it,” Marasco adds.
***
NUvention: Web provides students with unique real life experience, says Marasco, by teaching through experiential learning “the process of building a business and a team around a common problem to be solved by starting your own company and then launching your application.”
Deem and Paruchuri, former vice president and CFO respectively of on-campus start-up company Wildcat Express Delivery, found the process of inventing an idea and then launching it to be extraordinarily rigorous and rewarding.
“NUvention: Web required a lot of creating and building… which had a much wider and deeper scope than the routine workings of maintaining Wildcat Express Delivery,” Sandeep says.
After being assigned a general sector of the market, like social networking or advertising, the groups identified holes in the market and figured out how best to serve a personal need that consumers have.
Successful businesses that have developed out of the NUvention: Web course include Adapt.ly, a business co-founded by Nikhil Sethi that helps advertisers reach their target audience by advertising across multiple social platforms, and Present Bee, co-founded by Prithivi, which tries to help consumers find the perfect gift for their friends or family.
Apart from her graduate studies at Northwestern, Prithivi is working to turn Present Bee, currently in open beta format, into a viable business. Even after the course was finished, it continued to aid Prithivi. In addition to paying for its incorporation as a company, NUvention: Web inspired her to stay in the technology industry and to “work well with others to go from a basic idea to execution,” she says.
Sethi also continues to be affected by the NUvention: Web course.
“I’m [still] in touch with peers and learning constantly from their experiences, successes, and failures,” Sethi says. “The course helps open up this way of thinking when you start executing on your idea, and attracting your first set of customers.”
According to Sethi, life as a start-up remains “incredibly fun, and sufficiently paranoid. As entrepreneurs we are masters of our own universe, but live by a thread.”
Even if students are not able to create a viable start-up web company, the learning and experience they gain from the course is priceless. Marasco says he hopes his students “learn how to evolve an idea or problem into an actual business by building a solution.” For Marasco, the goal of the course “is not to create a start-up, but to learn the process of building a business and a team around a problem.”
“I came in [to Northwestern] thinking I want to be a consultant,” Prithivi says. “Now I want to create, want to build things. It is the best academic or professional decision I’ve made.”