Application Deadline:October 1st, 2019.
Watson is a revolutionary new model of higher education for next-generation innovators and social entrepreneurs. We protect the courage of the next generation so they can pioneer their education, trailblaze lives as innovators, and contribute to solving the toughest challenges facing the world.
Watson scholars receive weekly mentorship and coaching sessions, training in the hard skills and frameworks to take their ideas to the next level, and a community of peers that will last far beyond Watson. We aim to be the Olympic training ground for next generation social innovators. Below are four key elements of each semester.
Watson Institute’s Semester Incubator is a 4-month program preparing next-generation innovators and social entrepreneurs to launch social ventures and unleash a lifetime of impact.
At Watson Institute’s Semester Incubator, college students and recent graduates with an early-stage social venture or project complete their Watson experience as a study away/abroad from a home university, gap semester before attending university, or as a ‘pre-career’ semester after their undergraduate degree.
During the 4-month intensive program, you will embark on a journey that includes:
- A step-by-step methodology to rapidly and systematically validate your business model.
- Training in the process of building and strengthening an effective team that can pioneer new innovations and markets
- Testing your cost assumptions, developing a fundraising plan, creating an investors deck, and measuring impact metrics specifically to garner funder support.
- Framing solutions so they expose injustice and speak truth to power, incorporate positive psychology, and create better models and systems.
- Learning and applying entrepreneurial skills and mindset alongside a global community of like-minded and diverse peers.
- Connect with a powerful network of mentors and social entrepreneurs such as Jerry White, a leader of the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines; Tom Chi who helped invent Google Glass and the self-driving car; and Erin Schrode, the youngest person to run for U.S. Congress.
For More Information:
Visit the Official Webpage of the Watson Institute’s Spring 2020 Semester Incubator