Harvard Business School Announces First-Round Winners for Minimum Viable Product Funding
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BOSTON—Harvard Business School's (HBS) Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship has announced seven winners of the first round of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Funding for the 2011-2012 academic year, offering a total of $50,000 in total awards to student entrepreneurs. The MVP Fund was started last year by MBA students Dan Rumennik, Jess Bloomgarden, and Andrew Rosenthal, and funded by the Rock Center. It is based on the premise of the Lean Startup methodology, which focuses on rapid prototyping, a process that brings products to market as quickly as possible. This methodology has been advanced and popularized by Eric Ries, an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at HBS, who advises students and collaborates with faculty members on research and course development. This academic year, the Rock Center is offering two rounds of MVP Fund awards. Submissions for the first round were due September 30 and were open only to second-year MBA students. Forty-eight teams, each with at least one current Harvard second-year MBA student, submitted entries. Submissions for the second round of funding, which is open to both first-year and second-year students, is due January 20, 2012. Funded teams are required to meet with a mentor on a monthly basis, attend a monthly gathering of other MVP teams, and present lessons learned from the MVP program at the end of the semester. "In last year's pilot of the MVP Fund program, we were impressed by the number and quality of entries we received," said Tom Eisenmann, the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration in the HBS Entrepreneurial Management Unit. "We are pleased to be able to double the size of the fund to $100,000 and offer two rounds of awards this academic year, to support more of the extraordinary entrepreneurial ideas our students are generating." The seven winning entries (with their founders) are:
Among the many HBS graduates who have founded successful business ventures are Marla Malcolm Beck (MBA 1998), founder of bluemercury; Michael Bloomberg (MBA 1963), founder of Bloomberg L.P.; Marc C. Cenedella (MBA 1998), founder, president, and CEO of TheLadders.com; Scott Cook (MBA 1976), chairman and cofounder of Intuit; Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss (both MBA 2009), cofounders of Rent the Runway; Rajil Kapoor (MBA 1996), cofounder and former chairman and CEO of Snapfish; Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilson (both MBA 2004), cofounders of Gilt Groupe; Christopher Michel (MBA 1998), founder of Military.com; Tom Stemberg (MBA 1973), founder of Staples; and Jeremy Stoppelman (MBA 2005), CEO and cofounder of Yelp. About The Arthur Rock Center: |
Kristen Raymaakers
617-495-6931
kraymaakers+hbs.edu
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