Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described the pc as a bicycle for the mind. What the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship just launched has a bit more horsepower.
“Possibly it’s not a Ferrari yet, but we’ve got a automobile,” says Bill Aulet, the middle’s managing director. The vehicle: the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack, a generative artificial intelligence tool trained on Aulet’s 24-step Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework to input prompts into large language models.
Introduce a startup idea to the Eship JetPack, “and it’s like having five or 10 or 12 MIT undergraduates who instantaneously run out and do all of the research you wish based on the query you asked, after which they carry back the reply,” Aulet says.
The tool is currently getting used by entrepreneurship students and piloted outside MIT, and there’s a waitlist that prospective users can join. The tool is accessed through the Trust Center’s Orbit digital entrepreneurship platform, which was launched for student use in 2019. Orbit grew out of a necessity for an alternative choice to the static Trust Center website, Aulet says.
“We weren’t following our own protocols of entrepreneurship,” he says. “You meet the scholars where they’re, and increasingly more of them were on their phones. I said, ‘Let’s construct an app that’s more dynamic than a static website, and that shall be the best way that we will get to the scholars.”
With the assistance of Trust Center Executive Director Paul Cheek and Product Lead Doug Williams, Orbit has turn into a one-stop shop for student entrepreneurs. On the platform’s back end, leaders at the middle are in a position to see what users are and will not be clicking on.
Aulet and his team have been studying that user information since Orbit’s launch. It’s enabled them to find out how students need to access information, not nearly course offerings or startup competition applications but additionally to get guidance on an idea they’re working on or connect with an entrepreneurial community of co-founders and advisers. The team also received advice from Ethan Mollick SM ’04, PhD ’10, an associate professor of management on the Wharton School and creator of a brand new book, “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI.”
Official work on the Eship JetPack began about six months ago. The name was inspired by the acceleration a jet pack provides, and the necessity for a human to reap the benefits of the boost and guide its direction.
“As we moved from our initial concentrate on capturing information to providing guidance, MIT’s Disciplined Entrepreneurship and Startup Tactics frameworks were the proper place to start out,” Williams says.
Certainly one of the earliest beta users, Shari Van Cleave, MBA ’15, demonstrated how one can use the AI tool in a YouTube video.
She submitted an experimental idea for mobile electric vehicle charging, and inside seconds the AI tool suggested market segments, beachhead markets, a business model, pricing, assumptions, testing, and a product plan — and that’s only seven of the 24 steps of the Disciplined Entrepreneurship framework that she explored.
“I used to be impressed by how quickly the AI, with just a number of details, generated recommendations for all the things from market-sizing (TAM) to lifetime customer value models,” Van Cleave said in an email. “Having a high-quality rough draft means founders, whether latest or experienced, can execute and fundraise faster.”
And for those entrepreneurs who might have already got an idea and be well on their way through the 24-step process, the tool could be useful for them, too, Aulet says. For instance, they may want insights and quotes about how their company can improve its performance or determine whether there’s a greater market to be targeting.
“Our goal is to lift the sector of entrepreneurship, and a tool like this could allow more people to be entrepreneurs, and be higher entrepreneurs,” Aulet says.
