Above: Josefina Correa (EdM 2023) and Matt Segneri, the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs, discuss Correa’s venture at the student i-lab. Photo by Susan Young

Startup life can often feel like a solo sport, says Matt Segneri (MBA 2010), the Bruce and Bridgitt Evans Executive Director of the Harvard Innovation Labs: “What the three labs in our ecosystem do is to make building a venture something that happens within a truly collaborative and connected community.”

Segneri explains that being part of this environment gives students and alumni from HBS and Harvard University’s 12 other schools access to a wide range of support systems and resources, as well as the experiences that each participant brings to the table. Being part of a leading university is also beneficial, he notes: “We take the strengths of each Harvard school and help create a whole that’s greater than the sum of the parts by providing opportunities for founders to meet joiners and those from other disciplines and schools working on similar challenges.”

In this conversation, Segneri highlights the broadening of the initial i-lab model as an educational collaborative just for students into a three-lab ecosystem that also engages alumni and life sciences entrepreneurs; encourages the exploration of innovative ideas across private, public, and nonprofit sectors; and supports more than 700 venture teams each semester.

As the Harvard i-lab has evolved, so too has the approach to furthering students’ entrepreneurial journeys. How does the i-lab’s new student membership program encourage the curious, not just those with fully formed ideas for ventures?

When the i-lab opened in 2011, the Venture Incubation Program was a highly selective effort to curate a smaller group of student teams across all 13 schools. Over time, we wanted to build something more inclusive, especially when we found that there was an untapped reservoir of students who wanted to engage either by deciding to become founders or joiners, or just to understand the space. Now, students can enter the i-lab at one of three stages we’ve mapped out—Explore, Test, and Propel—through which we offer resources tailored to where they are on their journey.

Explore is for those who don’t have an idea for a venture yet who might want to delve into design thinking and problem solving. Test is for others who may have an idea but don’t know how to lay the groundwork to build an enterprise. Propel is for students who are further along with their ventures and have revenue, investors, and customers figured out. Some Explore students will progress to Test and Propel, and may want to join an additional venture besides pursuing their own, while others will realize entrepreneurship is not for them. And so, we’ve evolved our mission so that it’s not just about people founding a venture, but also about developing the skill set and mindset for bringing innovative, entrepreneurial thinking to whatever professional and personal endeavors they pursue.

What are the support systems and resources provided at the labs to student and alumni ventures?

What sustains this community is the incredible team here that works fully in service to students and alumni so they can be in service to society. We’re not taking equity or intellectual property rights. We just exist to help these ventures grow and to do that, we rely on our team of staff and advisors, and the roughly 40 entrepreneurs-in-residence, 65 mentors, and 300 President’s Innovation Challenge judges currently working with us, as well as members of the alumni entrepreneurship community.

In terms of funding, we provide Spark Grants and Social Impact Fellowships. Another source is the Allston Venture Fund, which is a syndicate of venture capital firms that invest in some of the companies. Additionally, there is the President’s Innovation Challenge, an annual competition for students, alumni, and affiliates in which winners in five tracks get a $75,000 prize and runners-up a $25,000 prize thanks to more than $500,000 in prize money provided by the Bertarelli Foundation, cofounded by Ernesto Bertarelli (MBA 1993). Additionally, $15,000 is given in Ingenuity Awards to early stage ideas. Teams competing in the Challenge are specifically working to develop solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems.

What prompted the creation of the labs for alumni and life sciences ventures?

During the i-lab’s earliest days, there was a deep student focus, which was critical to what we were doing at the time. Then in 2014, we opened the Launch Lab nearby to support seed-stage alumni ventures using some of the tenets of the student model, also providing them with a below-market-rent coworking space where they could gather. We eventually absorbed the lab, now called Launch Lab X GEO, into Batten Hall. In the beginning, we had about 10 to 12 teams, but because of the pandemic, we shifted to a global cohort and we’re now working virtually with about 25 alumni teams. My hope is that we continue with a lifelong-learning mindset to support the array of alumni interested in entrepreneurship, especially considering that more than half of HBS graduates have gone on to create at least one new venture within 10 to 20 years of their MBA graduation.

The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab opened in 2016 as a fully equipped wet-lab space as the greater-Boston region became a mecca of the life sciences ecosystem. We’ve had about 50 student- and alumni-affiliated teams work there. To be accepted, high-potential biotech and life sciences ventures go through a selection committee chaired by Amitabh Chandra [the Henry and Allison McCance Family Professor of Business Administration and faculty chair of the joint MS/MBA program in the life sciences]. We can accommodate about 10 to 12 tenant teams, which receive below-market-rent space for up to two years. On the first floor, there is general coworking space and on the second floor is the wet-lab space where there’s also committed space for just students to use.

What lies ahead for the Harvard Innovation Labs as Allston expands into a thriving enterprise zone in the near future?

The Harvard Innovation Labs have had an incredible first decade being in Allston. Going forward, I think we will continue to be a big tent for innovation for any industry and any issue. More broadly, with the 2021 opening of the Science and Engineering Complex across the street from HBS and the first phase of the nearby Enterprise Research Campus breaking ground soon, Western Avenue is set to become a vibrant innovation corridor. I think the best is yet to come for innovation at Harvard as Allston activates further. We couldn’t be more excited.

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