On June 3rd, Lehigh’s Research Translation AcceLUrator (RTA) began their weekly speaker series. The first speaker was Mike Rinkunas, Director of Lehigh’s Venture Lab and instructor for the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps).
Mr. Rinkunas started this conference by introducing resources available through Lehigh’s Office of Entrepreneurship and discussing how to shift from a good job to a good life. His main pitch was the concept of changing one's entrepreneurial technique from assumption-based to evidence-based entrepreneurship.
He shared an anecdote about an entrepreneurial idea he assumed would be critical to stir stews and sauces, with pizza shops as his target audience. This assumption was negated after meeting with his potential customers and finding out they’d never need this device as they used canned, not homemade, sauce on their pizzas.
His takeaway was that you shouldn't make a product that consumers don't need. He was lucky to have gotten some evidence that negated his assumption and proved his entrepreneurial scheme would have been worthless and unhelpful.
“You want to test if people actually have the problem you’re looking at.”
Mr. Rinkunas shared many resources and guides on how to establish evidence-based entrepreneurship. These sources encouraged a mindset of feasibility, viability, and most importantly, desirability of the product you want to create.
He also showed parallels between the Scientific Method and the structure of the “Lean Startup,” emphasizing academia's overlap with entrepreneurship, via hypothesis testing to figure out the solution to what people need.
The seminar included a wide range of examples from Mr.Rinkuna’s life and famous entrepreneurs like Henry Ford. Henry Ford was skilled at identifying unmet needs by surveying the people he knew. From this, he revolutionized the transportation industry and automobiles.
This type of consideration and understanding is what all entrepreneurs should strive for during product development: using evidence to make what people need.