Harvard Innovation Labs

This is our third year that our sponsoring deans, in collaboration with the Harvard Innovation Lab, have challenged Harvard students to create and develop solutions that have the potential for meaningful impact for people around the world.

167 total applicants, and our judging committee worked hard to narrow that down to five finalist teams within each of these competitions.

We are Coolify, a micro cold storage startup for the developing world.

ID stands for Internship Database.

We were actually a resident here, really lucky to be a resident here this past summer at the Harvard Innovation Lab.

And what we want to do is to connect students, high school, college, post-grad, doesn't matter, to STEM internship opportunities.

So in universities, because most individual labs, like I'm at MIT, and even the Harvard labs here, they don't have a platform to post any positions open at labs, scientific labs.

And this was not the only time this happened.

Even in the start, when I was talking with the Harvard Innovation Lab, one of the reasons we were able to establish ourselves very, very quickly was because of our mentor at the Harvard University, who actually is the head of IOC, the Institute of Coaching, who really helped us build the first network of coaches that we had as well.

And this allowed us to build trust very early on and very quickly.

Without having that trust as a company, which is four people running out of four desks in Harvard Innovation Lab, it's very difficult to sell something like coaching.

So having that network, that support, really allowed us to again establish ourselves as a business.

So yes, I will say that is actually the most important parts that have been supportive for us in our journey.

And secondly, we've been in the field.

So we were selected into Harvard Innovation Labs Launch Lab X cohort.

So this is a hybrid program that selects Harvard alumni's ventures and they support a cohort throughout the year.

So I was participating in the initiation in Boston last month, but then the rest of the program will happen remotely.

My name is Gordon Jones.

I'm the managing director of the Harvard Innovation Lab.

We're thrilled you're here for the kickoff of the 2013 President's Challenge.

People change the world, dramatically change the world.

My name is Gordon Jones.

I want to welcome you all here to the Harvard Innovation Lab.

And more importantly, I want to welcome you here to our inaugural kickoff of our Innovation in Sports Challenge here at the iLab.

For those of you that haven't been to the Innovation Lab before, we are a cross-university resource where we are pulling together the best of Harvard to help students from across this university who have ideas, insights, innovations, and helping them access the kinds of resources they need, you need, or may want, to develop your ideas further, to grow and scale them, and to do so with viability in mind.