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Ed. Magazine

A Way to Launch Alumni at Harvard

HGSE students in Harvard iLab (photo by Jon Chase)

Now the alumni. After the Harvard Innovation Lab’s huge success helping Harvard students incubate and launch more than 350 ideas and projects during the past three years, helping them continue once they’ve graduated seemed like the logical next step. As Jodi Goldstein, director of the i-lab, as it’s known, says, “That’s when these entrepreneurs need the support the most.”

This past fall, the i-lab unveiled the Harvard Innovation Launch Lab, exclusively for Harvard alumni. The Launch Lab mimics the i-lab, which is across the street, on a smaller scale, with open co-working spaces and shared lounges, conference rooms, and workshops. Alumni teams are also given what Goldstein jokingly calls a “gym membership” — full access to everything across the street at the i-lab, including the prototyping lab, a video conference suite, a treadmill desk, and all of the social and mentoring activities offered. There are a few differences, of course. Instead of arriving as students with just an idea, alumni Launch Lab teams must be further along with their project and must have some funding. They also pay rent, although Goldstein says the space is highly subsidized.

This fall, the first group of 12 teams arrived, half with female founders, including one Ed School team: Taylor Percival, Ed.M.’14, and Jessica Yarmosky, Ed.M.’14, who fleshed out their idea for ReadSource, an online literacy resource at the i-lab while they were master’s students. Percival says the new Launch Lab is allowing them to take that idea and turn it into a sustainable business.

“Being located in the community provides ReadSource with access to invaluable resources and experienced mentorship that would have otherwise been unavailable to us at this stage of our development,” she says. “Having the Launch Lab as our home base is enabling us to move the idea forward while preparing to introduce our resource to teachers and students across the country.”

Learn more about becoming a launch lab fellow.

 

Ed. Magazine

The magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education

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