Design Jam: Connecting students with venture capitalists

Innovation-minded students of all majors filled the UMSI Engagement Center recently to create ideas for connecting with University of Michigan alumni investors. 

Design jams are facilitated, interactive, timed events where students are presented with a challenge to solve. This experience aims to build new ways of thinking to help solve challenges faced by organizations. The event was coordinated by the Engaged Learning Office (ELO) and the University of Michigan School of Information (UMSI) Career Development Office. 

During Design Jam: Enhancing the Entrepreneurial Pipeline, 24 students formed teams to create new ideas that might better connect U-M students and their entrepreneurial ideas to the resources of U-M alumni venture capitalists. Students were able to learn and practice the design thinking process, get introduced to the problem area, and identify ways that students could connect with alumni resources that UMSI can further investigate and consider. Supplied with sticky notes, markers and other prototyping supplies students worked together and combined ideas to create a presentation of their ideas.

At the end of the 4-hour event, students presented their ideas to three Silicon-Valley based venture capitalists: Amit Singh, UMSI external advisory board member and chief business officer, Palo Alto Networks; Tarun Bhatnagar, a BSE ‘96 alum and a former Google vice president; and Bradley Horowitz, a BS ‘88 in computer science alum, VP Product, advisor at Google. 

The venture capitalists provided valuable feedback to each group and after a short deliberation, recognized a group that they thought helped solve the challenge the best.