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Innovation Abroad: CREATE-X Startup Lab at Georgia Tech-Lorraine

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Innovation Abroad: CREATE-X Startup Lab at Georgia Tech-Lorraine

“The best time to learn how to ‘create your own job’ is not the day you suddenly have to, but instead it is before you need to,” reads the syllabus for Georgia Tech-Lorraine’s CREATE-X Startup Lab, the Gallic version of Georgia Tech’s popular course on evidence-based entrepreneurship.

CREATE-X Startup Lab launched on the Atlanta campus in 2014, and in 2018 the initiative crossed the Atlantic, landing at Georgia Tech-Lorraine. The CREATE-X program is divided into 3 phases: Learn – Make – Launch. Startup Lab is the signature element of the “Learn” phase of the program, and that is the piece that is offered at Georgia Tech-Lorraine.

Co-taught by professors Henry Owen and Paul Voss, the course has been adapted to take advantage of the multicultural Georgia Tech-Lorraine environment. Teams of undergraduate and graduate students work together and are challenged to get outside of their comfort zone to challenge their pre-conceived notions and way of thinking.

Since the course is cross-listed between engineering, computer science, management, and even French, teams end up being multi-disciplinary, which helps to enhance the experience, especially as students interact with the local community in Metz. Professor Paul Voss, who is fluent in French, leads those registering for the French section of the course.

The course covers stages of startup development from opportunity identification and validation to market analysis to intellectual property, giving students a glimpse at the whole process of launching a startup from beginning to end.

Through coaching from the professors and learning from their peers, the students learn how to do customer discovery in a meaningful way. The course covers how to identify people to interview, how to get the meetings and what to ask, and finally, how to interpret the results. Students then take what they learned and create ideas for startups that will solve real world problems.

Graduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Elizabeth Adams, loved the experiential nature of the course and felt that it dovetailed nicely with her post graduate school interests. “It’s cool because we have a startup project and pitch it to people in France to see what they think.

“The Georgia Tech-Lorraine offerings of this course takes the concepts and methodologies used in Atlanta Startup courses and applies them to a multicultural and multinational environment. This provides students with an exciting and dynamic environment in which they experiment with their own passions and ideas for a startup,” said Professor Henry Owen.

We look forward to hearing about students taking their learning through the “Make” and “Launch” phases, and developing the confidence to launch their startup.

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  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:acrain9
  • Created:01/10/2020
  • Modified By:acrain9
  • Modified:02/25/2020

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