The application can be found here. Accepted students will be notified by August 15, 2025.

Learning Objectives

Most early-stage ventures and new products fail because too few customers want what’s offered. Specifically, either: 1) the product doesn’t address a strong unmet customer need; or 2) the need is real, but the solution is inferior to rival offerings.

This course will employ a learning-by-doing approach to help you to avoid such failures. Through team project work, you will build skills at applying tools and frameworks for rigorous problem identification / definition together with solution development, while using AI tools for both research and prototyping.

Our goal: have you gain deep expertise in your focus area, while ideally uncovering multiple potential opportunities to investigate further.

With respect to problem identification / definition, our learning objectives will include building research skills to facilitate understanding:

• Whether a problem is worth pursuing, including assessment of 1) the strength of customers’ unmet needs; 2) whether the problem can be solved — but hasn’t yet been solved; 3) market size; and 4) whether you are passionate about the problem.
• How to source and conduct rigorous customer and domain expert interviews to explore a problem space; how to synthesize data from interviews; how to develop and use customer personas and journey maps— all with the goal of becoming a domain expert.
• How to use AI to accelerate research in a specific area of interest.
• When analyzing problems, how to balance: 1) desk and field research; and 2) qualitative and quantitative research.

With respect to solution development, our learning objectives will include building skills and understanding:

• How to decompose a problem into subproblems and search for existing solutions to those subproblems — both in and outside of your problem’s domain; how to combine these subproblem solutions into an innovative solution to your problem.
• Approaches for generating alternative solutions to your problem, and criteria for assessing which solutions hold the most promise.
• How to prototype possible solutions and elicit feedback on prototypes from potential customers and domain experts;
• How to use AI to accelerate prototype development and review.
• How to contend with a paradox: successful ventures and new products are often based on contrarian views about what’s possible, but contrarian views are wrong most of the time, due to the wisdom of crowds. How can you know if you are too far out on a limb?

Course Content and Structure

The course will be structured into modules on problem definition and solution development.

Our weekly two-hour class sessions will feature a mix of “how to” lectures by instructors; debriefs of assignments that provide hands-on practice in applying techniques and frameworks; student presentations on work-in-progress; and talks by guest speakers.

We’ll make heavy use of GenAI throughout the design process, including AI tools and HBS faculty clones developed for HBS Foundry. For example, in problem definition, AI tools can be used to: 1) help generate questions for customer discovery interviews; 2) play the domain expert role to provide practice in a simulated interview; and 3) summarize and synthesize interview notes to help create customer personas; and 4) accelerate understanding of trends and changes in the focus area. For solution development, AI tools can dramatically speed up prototype development and can play the domain expert or customer persona roles in providing feedback on solutions. By applying AI technologies in such ways, students will gain skills and deeper understanding of their capabilities and limitations.

A hallmark of rigorous design processes is extensive interviewing of potential customers and domain experts. IPI will build skills for sourcing and conducting productive interviews. We also will provide introductions to potential interviewees.

Students will get frequent feedback on their project work from the instructors, student peers, and mentors we’ll assign to teams.

We will not discuss HBS cases in this course, although we’ll host entrepreneurs, PMs, and designers who’ll describe how they’ve managed the early phase of new product development.

Course deliverables will include:

• Weekly Assignments and Progress Reports – Most sessions will have short assignments that require students to apply frameworks and tools we’ll introduce in class. Teams will also submit updates each week on their progress.
• Prototype and Final Submission – The course’s final deliverable will be a prototype demonstrated during a class presentation, accompanied by a report describing the team’s key findings, design approach, and planned next steps.

Who Should Consider This Course

This field course will apply a learning-by-doing approach to build students’ deep expertise in a focus area and their skills at ideation and prototyping for innovation, leveraging AI tools. The course is designed for students whose career goals include:

• Launching new ventures as entrepreneurs
• Launching new products or new features for existing products as PMs or in other roles within established organizations
• Advising early-stage startups as venture capital investors or corporate innovation teams as consultants

In teams of two or three, students will work on a semester-long project to develop a compelling solution to a significant problem through a process of iterative research, including customer and expert interviews.

By application, we will admit a balanced mix of students who have a focus area they’d like to work on and students who don’t have one but wish to team up with peers. Teams of students can apply together. Solo applicants with a focus area must be willing to work with a peer.

Students who bring a product concept to the course that has advanced to the prototyping stage or beyond must be willing to revisit earlier steps in the design process, specifically, problem and solution validation. If you are convinced you’ve already found the right problem-solution pair, this course is not for you.

Students who enrolled in J-term Startup Bootcamp have been exposed to some techniques for validating venture concepts, but they can learn much more in IPI. We’ll apply rigorous in-depth processes for problem definition and solution development, over the course of a full semester, by leveraging additional techniques and frameworks, using leading-edge AI tools, and providing in-depth feedback from a network of mentors and domain experts.

Students who plan to enroll in Founder Launch, Startup Operation, or Field X will find IPI to be complementary. These courses will help you validate demand for a venture concept, but they also support aspiring entrepreneurs in developing their business model, evaluating go-to-market options, assembling a team, and refining their investor pitch. Whereas Founder Launch, Startup Ops, and Field X have a broad focus, IPI delves deeply into a single, crucial challenge: identifying and validating your problem-solution pair through in-depth research and a structured and rigorous process.