Teams will make a poster presentation to a panel of judges and then have a followup meeting with the judges to discuss the finer points of the submission.
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- Poster Pitch
- Prepare a poster which includes the different sections from the application. Posters are limited to 40x30 inches.
- Students have eight minutes to present their submission to the judges which will be followed by seven minutes of Q&A. Remember, the judges have all seen the 5 page summary application and are familiar with your project.
- This is your chance to pitch the judges having had the benefit of multiple coaching rounds and received feedback/scores from the judges after your online application. Emphasize points that may not have been emphasized well, address areas where you were challenged by the judges, etc.
- More is less! Don't try to cram every piece of info onto the poster. The poster should be visually appealing and not an eye chart covered in test. While not a requirement, good posters have common components....short sentences and bullets but not huge long sentences and paragraphs, an emphasis describing the problem you are addressing, who deals with this problem, pictures showing the problem, a clear descriptive summary of what your innovation is and how it addresses the problem, short list of things the customer will be able to do now because of your solution that they couldn't do before, short description of your target market(s), and some business info about how you will capitalize the innovation, and get it adopted. this sounds like a lot, but a well planned poster can easily cover these.
- Know your numbers! How big is the market you are addressing? is it growing or shrinking? How much will it cost to put together and test a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). If you save your customers time, how much time? How many man-days of labor? if you save your customers money, how much money and over what period of time? If your lower the lifecycle cost, by how much? etc.
- Investor Due Diligence Meeting
- This is the final presentation to the judges. The presentation need only be a one minute recap as the judges will have already read, scored and commented on both your pre-conference application and the poster pitch. This is your chance to address areas identified as weak and reinforce areas of strength.
- Undoubtedly there will be things you wish you had done a better job on at the poster pitch, which can be cleaned up with the shark discussions. This is your chance to improve if the sharks identified areas that weren't clear, weaknesses in the strategy or technology, unfamiliarity with important numbers or metrics, etc.
- Judges will treat this meeting as if they were investor performing due diligence (DD) on a potential investment. They will be looking to see how well you know the problem you are solving, how well you solve it, the market you are serving and how you are going to get it out there. Judges may ask you if you considered X strategy, Y partnership, or Z market sector.
- The DD discussion will be 15 minutes in length.
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