Harvard Business School Announces Second-Round Winners for Minimum Viable Product Award
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BOSTON—Harvard Business School's (HBS) Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship has announced twelve winners of the second round of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Award for the 2011-2012 academic year, awarding $5,000 to each team of student entrepreneurs. The MVP Fund was started last year by MBA students Dan Rumennik, Jess Bloomgarden, and Andrew Rosenthal (all members of the Class of 2012), 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, currently 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 offered two rounds of MVP Fund awards. The first round was open to second-year MBA students and recognized seven winning teams last fall. Sixty-five teams submitted entries for the second round, which was open to both first-year and second-year MBA students. 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. "Now in our third round of this funding competition, we have seen hundreds of student teams participate and continue to be amazed by the initiative and creativity they have shown," said Tom Eisenmann, the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration in the HBS Entrepreneurial Management Unit. "We are delighted to see the high level of interest in entrepreneurship among our students and the high quality of their ideas and projects. The MVP Award is just one way we can support them." The twelve 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: |
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