Miami U. PitchFix helps prepare future entrepreneurs through feedback, guidance
What's a pitch competition without winners? PitchFix works to help everyone make their ideas better
Miami U. PitchFix helps prepare future entrepreneurs through feedback, guidance
From the outside, what happened in the Farmer School of Business last month certainly looked like a pitch competition. Teams of ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs put forth their idea for a business before a group of people who gave them feedback about their plan and gave advice about where to go from here.
The difference from a regular pitch competition? At PitchFix, everybody wins.
“The team and Miami’s faculty feels that it’s more important to ready these young entrepreneurs for the next steps than anything else we can offer. Every team won the prize: The judges believe in them and their ability to succeed,” Entrepreneurship lecturer David Eyman said. “We believe in supporting those who seek to make a difference in their communities."
“This experience, whether you're going on with entrepreneurship, whether you're going on with your business, you learn from getting up in front of people and getting this feedback from this awesome team. And I've already heard feedback from the kids that that's the case,” said.
Meyer is an entrepreneurship/INCubatoredu teacher at Harrison High School, and the “kids” were more than 100 ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs from four area high schools who spent the morning learning about each other’s ideas and getting feedback from John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship faculty members and two dozen ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who were not much older than ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs making the pitches.
, a first-year Business Analytics and Entrepreneurship ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in the Farmer School of Business, was one of those Miami ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs. And as a former INCubatoredu ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, she’s also been exactly where the high school ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs are now.
“It was a great learning opportunity, because you dive into everything, such as finances and marketing, you start to build those like network connections and you really learn how to think through your idea,” she said. “I think it was a great learning process, and an experience that really sparked my love for entrepreneurship.”
Mark Lacker is a John W. Altman Institute for Entrepreneurship professor who, more than a decade ago, was the university curriculum advisor for INCubatoredu. He’s watched the program grow from a single high school in Illinois to hundreds around the world.
“These are ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs that have been taking an entrepreneurship course since last August, and they do final pitches in May and June. Right now, they're at the point in time in their development of their idea where they have a minimum viable product that will solve a real problem. So, they come to ºÚÁÏÉçÇø and get feedback from entrepreneurship faculty and entrepreneurship ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs on how to improve things, how to make things clearer, how to build out their idea,” he said. “This is not a judging competition. It’s to show how they can iterate and approve and perfect their idea.”
“We want to give them a sense of direction and a sense of priority in terms of what to work on. So, what we're trying to help them see is the essence of what they have and what to do with it next,” Lacker said. “They're so far ahead of their peer group that they don't know it, because of the way they're thinking, already conceiving ideas, testing them out, actually having the capability to go talk to people they don't know and get feedback.”
And even if the ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs don’t go on to make their idea a business, Lakota West teacher said the experience they gain is valuable. “It's just a good life skill, real world learning situation where they have to communicate with adults. They must communicate with people they don't know. And there's, there's nothing greater that you can give a high schooler than something like that.”
"Our belief is entrepreneurial education in high school prepares ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs for success at college because ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs learn how to create, how to fail, how to work effectively in a team, how to manage priorities, how to receive feedback and how to solve problems,” Lacker said. “These are all life skills regardless of whether they pursue starting a business or not"
Eyman said that it was important for PitchFix to not give the impression that any of the pitches were better than others.
“What we’ve learned in the past is that a lot of them quit if they don't think that they're on top of the hill. And I don't like it when they quit, because they don't realize that when people don’t win pitch competitions, it does not mean that those people are not going to do something with their idea,” he said. “I think it's important that we're doing something different by helping all of them succeed, instead of telling some of them that they're not as good as some other people. I don't want to compare them because they're all awesome, and I want to be here to do our job, and I consider our job to be helping all of them.”
