ANN ARBOR – The University of Michigan is launching the Mayleben Family Venture Shaping Program through the Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies to teach student teams from across U-M how to transform identified opportunities into business.
The new program is being funded by a gift from Aastrom Biosciences president & CEO Tim Mayleben (a U-M graduate) and his wife, Dawn Mayleben.
“It takes an idea and transforms it into a business structure,” says Tim Faley, managing director of the Zell-Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “We see a lot of ideas.”
The U-M Venture Shaping Program will provide teams of student entrepreneurs with guidance from faculty while going through a three-part process. That process includes directed discovery, value system synthesis, and profiting from capabilities framework evaluation. The idea is to prove that the startup meets a validated market need and will provide a cash prize so they can take the business to the next level.
Breaking through that key wall of building a business (taking it from an idea to a reality) is the major constraint that has been identified by U-M officials. The Venture Shaping Program hopes to help 25 student-led business each year.
“We see it as the big bottleneck in the process,” Faley says. “We’re happy to have a program to handle that program.”
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