The Purdue Foundry focuses Purdue’s vast resources to accelerate and improve advancement of Purdue ideas and innovations that are changing the world. My podcast guest next week is Juliana Casavan a Training Manager at Purdue Foundry where she creates and facilitates workshops that concentrate on first step of looking at a business and helping them identify their value proposition.
Related Podcast and Transcription: The First Step of Looking at a Business
Excerpt from the podcast:
Joe: What do you find is the biggest light bulb that comes out for someone? Is it different for everyone or is there something like that ‘aha!’ moment that they experience when they go through your training?
Juliana: You know I think it’s really different for everyone, but I would say it’s really in the first two weeks. The program is six weeks long, and it’s a once a week session that’s three hours at a time and then they have a lot of homework and validation they have to go do afterward. But in those sessions, I think it’s those hard realities that we kind of face when they maybe realize that the customer that they thought they were going to go after first is not the best fit, or maybe not even interested. Sometimes we find out that they’re just not even interested in what they have, that’s when we have to really pivot and figure out who the next available customer is or the best customer. But yes, it’s really those first two weeks just kind of changing their train of thought because they’re researchers, they’re technologists, they’re academia, their focus is more on that aspect. So really getting them to just kind of change their brain in the way that they think and bringing more about the commercial value versus the technical value.
Joe: And when they see that, do you find that they scale down from this idea that they’re going to save the world or solve world hunger and all ones that they’re looking, that they really have to concentrate on that guy across the street and then sell the one person?
Juliana: It’s very much that realization that you have to be laser-focused on that customer, and you have to gain that first customer before you can go anywhere else. A lot of times from that actually, we have technologists that find out that maybe this business aspect is not for them and they become the chief technology officer instead and we help them find a CEO to come and fill that role, because they find that they’re really just not interested in that part. They want to focus on the big picture of what they’re trying to do versus focusing on just that one specific customer.
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