Innovation Strike Teams

The RITMO project focuses on urban transportation and mobility. It builds on two key enablers, connected and automated vehicles, and leverages the tremendous progress in artificial intelligence, data science, and operations research to design and operate a new generation of on-demand urban transit systems. RITMO assembles a multidisciplinary team of researchers, from computer science, industrial and operations engineering, medicine, the school of information, urban planning, and the transportation research institute.  One of the main focuses of the project is to improve accessibility to jobs, health-care, and education for all segments of the population.

Applicant Qualifications and Requirements

1. Graduate or PhD student
2. Degree or current student in law, business or engineering preferred
3. Candidate should be able to work independently with weekly check-in meetings
4. Experience or training in analyzing business models is a plus
5. It is also expected that the candidate will conduct phone or in-person interviews with investors, experts, companies, and other relevant people.
6. Ability to communicate technical material succinctly without oversimplification
7. Minimum of 8 to 10 hours per week, duration is January to May with potential for summer work

Legal and Insurance Investigations (1 position, Law School student preferred)

• Undertake investigations in the areas of shared mobility risk, contracting, HR and insurance
• Provide information to guide commercialization of research  

Business plan modeling (1 position, Ross MBA student preferred)

• Develop business plans for multiple scenarios using existing RITMO business plan modeling tool
• Perform benchmarking on inputs to business plan

Marketing Strategy (1 position, Ross MBA student preferred)

• Develop marketing strategies to encourage adoption by transit agencies
• Develop marketing strategies to encourage usage by end customers (prospective riders)
• Develop pricing and positioning strategies
• Update marketing materials

General Benchmarking and Customer Discovery (1 position, open to all grad students)

• Target customers for interview during customer discovery process
• Participate with RITMO team in external interviews

The fund’s goal is to understand and inform what we should be focusing on as we look at deals within UM.  We want to get external feedback from developments and trends outside of UM to create a stronger investment thesis.

In a particular area of interest or project, we will attempt to analyze all of the activity that is occurring. We will be looking at major trends such as:

• Investments that are being funded by venture capital
• Recent acquisitions by larger companies
• Current and anticipated regulatory changes
• Insurance reimbursements and issues with acceptance by payers
• Comparison of approaches:  technology, pathways, MOA
• Customer discovery and export feedback

 

Applicant Qualifications and Requirements

1. Graduate or PhD student
2. A degree in BME, Molecular Cellular Biology, or Medicine would be a preferred
3. Candidate should be able to work independently with weekly check-in meetings
4. Experience or training in analyzing business models is a plus
5. Key skill is the ability to read a lot of literature and identify relevant material. You have to enjoy reading dense, scientific papers and be able to distill that information succinctly.
6. It is also expected that the candidate will conduct phone or in-person interviews with investors, experts, companies, and other relevant people.
7. Ability to communicate technical material succinctly without oversimplification
8. Time commitment is a minimum of 8 to 10 hours per week.

 

Project List

1. Effect of wearable technology on diagnostics
2. Effect of healthcare IT on rising costs of healthcare
3. Genomics: the next revolution?
4. Precision medicine: beyond the hype and hyperbole

The Lean LaunchPad method requires startup teams to conduct customer discovery to validate their ideas.  However, early stage teams struggle to ask the right questions and have a difficult time interpreting (the often negative) answers.  This program uses students in a 3^rd party discovery capacity to identify the key project risks and provide direction to the startups own discovery process.

The Innovation Strike Teams are cross-functional teams made up of students from Engineering, Law, Business and Medicine that act as a team of consultants and help assess companies/projects from a market, technical, and intellectual property perspective. Via primary and secondary research these teams identify the key issues, gaps, and potential roadblocks for projects from faculty, translational programs, or industry clients.

• Teams augment the capability of their clients to conduct market/business investigation saving them time and effort at low (no) cost.
• Teams provide clients with ‘outside’ view of the project and validate assumptions by collecting the necessary data.
• Gives students a resume-building experience in a cross-disciplinary team and making an impact on a real-world project.
• Teams enable granting and funding programs to make better decisions by collecting data from customers, experts, and literature.

Clients along with the Strike Team Program Manager will create a Project-Needs Assessment based on the modules listed below. The Innovation Strike Team will then conduct primary research with customers, experts, stakeholders and collect data from secondary research as necessary to fulfill the client needs.   Modules:

• Technology capability assessment and comparison
• IP Assessment – Patent search, FTO, etc.
• Brainstorming Markets for Technology: finding the problem
• Product-Market fit and Value Proposition analysis
• Competitor and other solutions
• Customer needs assessment and finding
• Business model assessment (Market risk, scale risk, profitability)
• Team assessment
• Investment Thesis
• Eco-system maps (Patient-flow, Value chain, purchase & clinical decision process)

Projects/companies from faculty, translational programs, funding programs, industry sponsors will be accepted based on the specificity of the question, availability and fit with student teams, timeline, and the level of commitment. *Note: Clients are expected to defray the student stipend costs

Proposed clients	Stage	Needs that will be addressed
Faculty project	Very early: idea	Research capability with unclear market
Post and pre-Corps team	Early: market/business assessment	Support pre- and post ICORPS teams with customer discovery and gap assessment
Current Desai Accelerator company	Mature, Seed: customer validation	Seed and pre-Series A due diligence; collecting market and competitor data
Tech Arb – feedback on idea viability, customer discovery	Very early to early: student projects	feedback on idea viability, customer discovery
MBSF teams – Due diligence	Mature, Seed level	Investment due-diligence
Local VC firms	Seed to Pre-Seed, or exploratory work	Investment due-diligence, space exploration and tech deep-dive
Externally sourced projects on specific product or prototype – e.g.: Beaumont	Early: market/business/tech assessment	external sourced projects on specific product or prototype – e.g.: Beaumont
Tech Transfer: licensing &, Venture Center	Early or Seed	OTT  – licensing, Venture Center teams