Georgia Tech MBAs Tap Into The Creative Destruction Lab

Maybe it’s to create the next industry-disrupting start-up. Or take an established business to new heights. Either way, honing entrepreneurial capabilities has long been one of the key motivating factors for people to attend grad school.

And while many MBA programs teach students the theory of entrepreneurial behavior, few offer hands-on experience, much less access to a useful network, that is crucial to actual success as an entrepreneur.

What is Creative Destruction Lab?

Enter the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, where MBA students are actually living and studying in the heart of Atlanta’s booming tech start-up scene. One unique resource that Scheller MBAs get to tap into is Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a global initiative that offers a nurturing ground for seed-stage science and technology-based start-ups. And it’s housed right in the Scheller building.

As an international student, the connection to CDL-Atlanta really set Georgia Tech apart for me. It offers connection to a global network, but it’s also strongly rooted with local ventures. The ability to work directly with these businesses offers a unique opportunity to learn from some of the most innovative founders in the U.S. tech industry.

It’s pretty rare to study at a university with a CDL site. There are just 10 universities across the world that participate in CDL. CDL-Atlanta supports start-ups focused on innovation that will accelerate commerce. The program is held over the course of nine months, in which founders learn from mentors, scientists, venture capitalists, MBA students, and angel investors. A prerequisite for start-ups to take part is that they must have the potential to be massively scalable and do billions of dollars in revenue. They must also be deeply based in or derived from leading-edge technology or science.

The benefits for founders range from receiving help in raising capital to making connections with other founders and industry contacts, to gaining invaluable strategic input to guide their company’s early stages of growth. While it’s easy to see what’s in it for start-ups, the program also creates invaluable opportunities for MBAs who are passionate about entrepreneurship.

What is TI:GER?

Scheller’s Technology Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) program is the educational arm of CDL. It’s open to Georgia Tech MBA and PhD students, along with JD students from Emory Law School. The program is 12 credit hours and runs for 16 months across three semesters. It’s one of the few truly immersive and practical technology commercialization experiences on offer for MBAs around the world. MBAs get work directly with the founders participating in CDL to support them on business strategies such as financial analysis, market sizing, and models for scaling.

Given my interest in driving go-to-market strategies for new innovations, TI:GER offers a true differentiator for my resume, giving me real-life examples to reference with potential employers. The course requires you to take an innovation idea all the way from conception to business model, so by graduation you have all the tools to successfully commercialize innovation in your future career.

What are the three semesters of the TI:GER program like?

The first semester of work is spent developing analytical skills. The teams of MBAs, PhDs, and JDs form around a shared interest in an idea for a new start-up based around technology innovation. Students then work together in their teams to develop analyses of markets, industries, and technologies, along with putting into practice strategy analysis and project management skills. In the second semester, student projects continue, with PhD and MBA students applying business model planning and financial analysis to their proposed start-ups.

My classmate Kyle Winkler, a second-year MBA student and TI:GER participant, said, “Our project is to commercialize a novel financial trading algorithm. Our first semester focused on truly understanding the technology and what steps you need to go through for that technology to be viable. In the second semester, you look a lot more closely at the business model and revenue to determine how this product is going to make money. It’s a great experience of being thrown into the fire and figuring out how to put this together.”

In the final term, students work directly with the high potential start-ups taking part in CDL. MBAs are paired with start-ups they have a particular interest in working with, applying their learnings from projects in the first two semesters to actively help the start-ups scale their business

Jonathan Giuliano, executive director and academic director of TI:GER and academic lead of CDL-Atlanta, described the TI:GER program’s interaction with CDL-Atlanta start-ups. “MBAs match with the CDL ventures and then embed with them in the spring term. They work with the founders in these ventures, applying all of the skills they learned on their projects. These are real ventures raising real capital, with the typical amount coming through CDL being $4 million. Our students are critical to this success through the analyses they perform.”

This year marks the 20th anniversary of TI:GER and more than 700 students have taken part. Many have gone on to found their own businesses, but others have found the practical learning experiences they gained critical to driving commercial innovation in established organizations.

“The program attracts people who are interested in technology innovation, but that takes many forms,” said Giuliano. “Whether that’s in product development with a technology firm – for example, we have students who have gone into successful product management careers at Amazon, Google, and Microsoft – or in consulting, or starting their own ventures, the TI:GER program offers a great training ground to give participants the skills they need for a successful career in technology innovation.”

Learn more about CDL-Atlanta and TI:GER through an episode of The Intersection Podcast.

Leo Haigh is a first-year MBA student at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Leo has a background in marketing and strategic communications. He has a wide range of experience, from working in frontline politics in the UK Houses of Parliament to managing government affairs for a FTSE 100 tech company.

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