Beginning the Journey to a Tech Startup

In January 2015, I will lead the Humanoid Engineering & Intelligent Robotics (HEIR) Lab I founded in 2012 at Marquette University to begin our search for a tech startup through the National Science Foundations Innovation Corps for STEM Learning (I-Corps L) program.  In this blog, I will focus more on providing the information we learn and sharing the discovery of the tech startup process rather than the specific details of our discovery.  If our nation wants to create more jobs to meet our economy’s vital need for technology workers and to provide high tech job training for all our citizens including women and minorities, we need to share this vital entrepreneurial information and mindset with those who have yet to discover apply this knowledge to starting up a new technology company.

As a robotics, computer science and engineering professor, I’m excited that I will be learning experientially about what is involved in creating a startup using the technology discovered in my robotics research.  What I find very intriguing about the lean startup method that we are going to use, is that it’s based on creating and evaluating hypotheses, a process that is central to my technology research based on the scientific method.  However, I never made the connection between hypothesis driven customer needs research for startups and hypothesis driven technology research for university research.  Stay tuned as I share more on this journey in search of a technology startup that can help kids learn and provide high tech jobs for the poor.

Andrew B. Williams, Ph.D., is a humanoid robotics and AI professor at Marquette University. His recent TEDx talk, Belonging in Technology, What I learned from Steve Jobs, addresses creativity and its relationship to innovation, diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).