Join the PSU Center for Entrepreneurship for Kickstart Weekend, a market research intensive that will help you develop your big idea. Working with a team of fellow students, mentors from the Portland startup community, and PSU faculty and staff, Kickstart Weekend will guide you along your first step toward entrepreneurial innovation.
Over two weeks, we will help you launch your big idea with coaching, research into your market, and exclusive interviews with local professionals who are working on the cutting edge of consumer targeting.
Big ideas need guardrails and guides, especially at the beginning. Kickstart Weekend will start with an exploration of the major buckets of ideas, and participants will join project teams. You will learn IDEO brainstorming and work together to come up with problem statements and potential solutions.
Budding entrepreneurs also need resources and connections, and you will get to connect. As a participant, you will form teams and ideate potential solutions. Kickstart Weekend culminates when teams put their research into practice with presentations to industry experts who will lend their expertise during a rigorous round of review that will help you understand how your insights will guide your business into the future.
By the time you finish Kickstart, you will be certified in conducting primary and secondary market research on your big idea. We will help you understand the problem that you’re trying to solve and the market that you’re trying to serve.
And we’ll stay with you all the way. When you graduate Kickstart, you’ll be eligible to join the Cleantech Challenge and Invent Oregon, innovation competitions that guide students toward their first prototypes and prize winnings that could propel ideas into reality.
Kickstart Weekend is open to current university students and high school seniors. We are accepting applications and facilitating the program on a rolling basis. This program is $300, but a limited number of scholarships are available.
To apply for the program and the scholarship, please use this link. Requests will be reviewed in the order received.