It’s a Saturday afternoon in late August and a group of business students is out on a roof terrace at Microsoft’s New England Research Development Center alongside Boston’s Charles River.
The entrepreneurs, a mix of individuals funded by the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, a not-for-profit organisation that encourages entrepreneurship, and winners of business plan competitions, are holed up for Venture Lab, an intensive five-day boot camp. Each of the 21 teams is from an existing early-stage business that has a technological innovation, funding and a market, and is attending the workshop to help turn a good idea into a better commercial proposition.
Venture Lab is part of a wave of entrepreneurial boot camps that aim to provide founders with a way to step back from the daily grind and assess their business. These workshops are often focused on tech start-ups that may benefit from strong product innovation but have a weak business model.