This workshop will provide an overview of the customer discovery process and then delve deeper into how to conduct customer interviews and how to iterate on your business model or lean canvas.

Led by a team of caseworkers from Compass Startup Legal Clinic, this workshop provides startup founders with a clear path through the legal landscape, offering insight on issues such as incorporation, governance, fundraising, and selecting the ideal legal structure.

This workshop will demystify and explain the various forms of intellectual property (IP), namely, patents, industrial designs, copyright, trademarks, and trade secrets, and when they are used. We will then do some actual patent searching with our librarian April Colosimo using the DERWENT worldwide patent database.

This workshop will provide an overview on the customer discovery process and then delve deeper into how to conduct customer interviews and how to iterate on your business model canvas.

Managing interns may seem like a simple activity for researchers, but this is less the case when it comes to working with people who have different skill sets. How do you determine the quality of the work? How to ensure the intern is motivated and engaged? What are some red flags that might be missed when dealing with non-technical positions? This session will help MIF teams get the most from their interns. To guide teams through this exercise, we have enlisted the support of two experts: Professor Niels Billou and Frances Arthur.

In this workshop, you'll learn how venture capitalists (VCs) typically value an early-stage innovation-driven venture. To do that we'll go through and give examples on how to forecast sales and how to set pricing, how to forecast expenses and how to figure out the amount of capital needed to finance your business. We'll also explore some of the more common sources of cash from both public institutions and private organisations.

Now that you have a grasp on how much money you need, this workshop will focus on the "deal". You'll learn what a venture capital fund is, its structure and how they operate, and what venture capitalists (VCs) look for in an early-stage innovation-driven venture.