JAKE DONOVAN: I've always found myself at of engineering and business so I knew
that I wanted to find some graduate
program where I would be able to learn a
little bit of the combination of the two
and I found the Masters of Engineering
Management Program and it's a fantastic
program, so I sort of immediately knew
that I wanted to want it to attend here.
STEVE McCLELLAND: The people we want to sort of opt into
sort of this track around founders is
people who really want to challenge
themselves to sort of find their own
path right. So, we have people ready to
support you, we have people with various
kinds of experience: whether it's medical
devices software, people who have been
entrepreneurs. But you have to be really
motivated to get out there and do it. DONOVAN: The
first semester of the founders track is
all about needs identification, where we
go in and we talk to different
stakeholders. For me, that is people at
Duke University Hospital. Not a lot of
people realize this but every year as
many as a hundred thousand people will
die from hospital-acquired infections in
the US alone. Health care workers
currently do a lot to wash their hands
to combat this issue, but they don't wash
their phones which serve as a
significant reservoir of dangerous
bacteria. Illuminate UV solves this
problem using disinfection stations that
quickly sanitize phones and other
personal items using the antimicrobial
effect of ultraviolet light. The second
semester is focused on solution
definition—what exactly is the best way
to solve that problem. And then the
following summer will be prototyping and
then after that is when we will get in
front of different angel investors and
Duke programs to try to find funding. McCLELLAND: So I
think someone will thrive in this program
if they're curious willing to do sort of
open-ended work and can take feedback
really well, feedback from customers,
feedback from people who've done before, and then also willing to reach out to
their peers and to get help right so you
need to be able to ask for help in all
these areas. You know he's pursuing
something that we've seen you know some
we similarities and people with track
record of doing these kinds of things.
These were sort of natural resources of the university, sort of in line with what
Jake's working on. KEN GALL: Yeah, so I think the vision
is to really create lifelong
entrepreneurs so we're trying to think
about how to have entrepreneurs not just
learn the process for you know one of
the companies they may look at early but
how do they how do they learn that
process in a way that if they decide to
start a company in five years they can
kind of go through the same exercise and
sort of figure out how to build a
company from at that stage. DONOVAN: One of the things that I've found extremely
valuable about the Engineering
Management Program as a whole is that
it's extremely diverse not just
culturally but also in terms of
everybody's experience so you get a lot
of different perspectives.
