E44: Big Ideas and Bold Beginnings: Building Student Innovators | Ardian Preci | Director of Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programs

Colleen: What do you say when a student walks into an innovation lab convinced they have the next great idea? And what do you say when you know they probably don't? 

Ardian (sound bite) Funny you ask that. Oftentimes we get that. They're trying to mimic Shark Tank. Some are doing it good or some are so-so 

Colleen: Welcome to the WPI Podcast. This episode goes beyond the prototypes and pitch competitions to explore the very human side of innovation. The director of a WPI Student Innovation Lab shares what it takes to encourage ambitious thinking while also helping students navigate disappointment, uncertainty, failure, and the inevitable moments when an idea simply doesn't work. The conversation isn't about how to launch a startup or build the perfect product. It's about how to mentor young innovators, when to cheer them on, when to challenge their assumptions, how to give honest feedback without extinguishing enthusiasm, and how to help students understand that abandoning an idea isn't the same as failing. 

Ardian: My name is Ardian Preci and I am the director of innovation and entrepreneurship programs at WPI, and I'm mostly known for running the i3 Lab here at the Innovation Studio. 

Colleen: Tell me about the lab. 

Ardian: The i3 Lab started about three years ago, and it's called the i3 because it stands for ideate, innovate, and incubate, and it's the three stages or the journey that we take student entrepreneurs through. When they have a little idea, they come to us and we help them develop that idea further, all the way to them starting their own company. 

Colleen: Okay. You weren't just picked off the street and said, "Hey, come run this lab." So what's your background?

Ardian: Random guy. Random guy. Just you look good. Yeah. Uh, so I come from the world of startups, uh, business development, and sales. That's all I'd known all my life, and I was Finishing my MBA here and failing a startup as you do, not my first one, because you can succeed and fail at different stages in your life, and we can talk about it later. When I was approached by Professor Rosana Garcia, and she said, "Would you like to help me? I'm trying to build some entrepreneurial ecosystem here. What are you doing?" And I said, "I don't know. Uh, I'll come and help, see how it goes." And then this fun project of helping her out turned into a full-time gig, and I've been here ever since, and we had a lot of fun. But my background, it's been starting businesses. I've started small businesses, one in Worcester, and then I moved into tech. So my background is risk management, tech solutions. Mainly, I'm a SaaS guy. For people who don't know what SaaS is, software as a service. That was my background. I had to learn legal procedures, how you hire people, how you fire people in different jurisdiction, how do you figure out why we have to care for interest rates and exchange rates, because we're getting paid in dollars and paying our workers in different currencies. It's been a fun journey. 

Colleen: You're still smiling, so- Yep ... we'll go with fun. So your resume backs you up. You have walked the walk, and you can talk the talk. Let's focus on students. The first question I have is, what do you say when a student comes to you completely convinced they have a brilliant idea? 

Ardian: Funny you ask that. Oftentimes, we get that. When students come to us, it doesn't matter how convinced they are. We have a framework that we put them through, and through that framework, sometimes they end up even more convinced that the, what they're doing is really great, which is amazing. But oftentimes, they themselves realize that they have to humble themselves a little bit, which is often the case for every one of us, that our initial idea is never usually exactly as it ever pans out. We build our programming and the coursework and the mentorship around it, that throughout the system, y- you have no choice but to humble yourself. And we don't tell them that you're wrong, because our aim is not to discourage them. We wanna encourage them to play around. However, the programming that we have around it It helps them and also helps us not to have to tell them this is not the way you do things. But it helps everybody go through the process, and then they realize for themselves that they have to change something. So everyone, even if you recognize a really good idea, you make everyone go through the steps. Yeah, so we have this three-step process, which the ideate, innovate, and incubate that we keep repeating, and that's how the i3 Lab kind of formed its name. And in the idea stage, we have a, a short course of five modules. What it does is it helps students, and anybody for that matter, crystallize your idea. People come to my office, and not just students, this goes for everybody. They're like, "I'm building something," and then they ramble on for half an hour, and they, they're not very clear. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know what their business model is or what they're gonna charge for this thing or who their customers are or who they think they're gonna be. And this kind of ideation stage helps you crystallize all these things, put it together in a format that now you're able to clearly speak and have some clarity a- about the product that you're trying to put out there. Uh, on, on the innovation stage, we put them through the mill even further, where we take all the stuff that they do at the, uh, at the ideation stage, and we f- not force them, but we do, to go and speak to potential customers. Because your idea is not great just because it's in your head or just because your best friend told you so or your mother at home because she loves you. It has to be proven that there is a need in the market and the potential customers wanna buy from you. So we teach them all these skill sets and all these methods that they then take it out there and they test it against their idea. And then let's say if somebody goes halfway through that and say, "You know what? I wanna change this. I wanna start a new idea," we put them through the, the funnel again. Okay. Because the new idea has different sets of challenges. Sure. So you've gotta put that through the mill again and go through the, the what we call customer discovery again- Mm-hmm ... go talk to potential customers and so on and so forth. So every time they change their idea, and we have-- actually, I have one student in that meeting next week that this, he's on his third thing. And we just put him through the mill again because new idea, different product, different target market, different need, different pricing, different business model, everything's different. So they gotta go through it again. Is that common? Uh, f- for students, yes, because they are s- always tinkering, coming up with new things. They wanna do this, and then they figure out, "Oh, okay, this was great, but I don't wanna do it anymore." And for us, it's important that if they're either building or they're learning. So the beauty of it is in entrepreneurship teaching and in these kind of places at universities, you don't really see the fruits of your labor right away. Mm-hmm. So we could be teaching a lot of entrepreneurship here and having a lot of students that go through our system. We have over 75 teams, startup teams as we call them. Really? Uh, yeah, over 120 students that are in our system, and it's all co-curriculum, so they're not getting grades for it. They just wanna do it because they're interested in it. So we don't know fully how many of these are gonna be a success right away. They might take all this learning, and then five years from now, after they work somewhere, they might go back to it, but they have a toolkit of skills that they can- They have the tools that they can apply then. And if I may add one more thing. Please. Also, entrepreneurship for workforce development, we see that students who tinker with entrepreneurial mindset They get a little bit further ahead even when they get employed because they understand the business side of things, because they understand the headaches of that. They get promoted quicker because they are understanding what it needs to get done to go further. 

Colleen: Sure. It's that soft skills that we talk a lot about, or I think even President Wang says not soft skills, future-proof skills. 

Ardian: Yeah. Future-proof, transferable skills that you can use

Colleen: I wanna go back to one thing- Yeah and you touched on this. You're not teaching a class, a student from any background, any major coming to the lab, to you and saying, "I have this idea." So this is, again, extracurricular activities. 

Ardian: Yep. Uh, correct. The stuff that we do is not graded. We look at it and we give feedback because it's our job and, you know, we have a, a system how we do that, but we're not giving them a pass or a fail grade or an A or a B or a C. We're not interested in that. This is extracurricular. This is all practical. This is all, in WPI's language, project-based. Yeah. Uh. Immersive learning. Yeah. Yeah. Immersive learning, so they doing stuff for their own startup, for their own company, and they're not getting course credit or anything, and they can be from any major. Uh, the i3 Lab is, as a reporting structure, part of the business school. However, we serve all students at WPI, and most of our, let's say my clients or constituents, uh- I like that, clients ... right? Yeah, we have to treat our clients well, right? Most of them are engineering, computer science, so from different schools So we're here to serve anybody that is WPI student working on an idea. Great.

Colleen: Can you talk a little bit about the Shark Tank effect? It's a hit show, as you well know- Mm-hmm ... that's been running for years now, and I've seen so many people that just have that idea and go right in to walk down that red carpet to pitch. Some are great, some are not. Some have a product, not a pitch. Some have a pitch and not a product. Mm-hmm. So are you seeing that in your lab, and has that changed or increased in the presentations over the years? 

Ardian: Uh, so yes. I mean, we try to teach beyond that because these students, if they take this seriously and then they become a proper startup, then they have to take this to a VC, and the format is a little bit different than the show. However, what's really interesting is initially when they come in, and we have a really good summer accelerator program, and we do other pitch competitions and pitch preparation for competitions throughout the year, and on their first trial, they're all trying to mimic Shark Tank. Some are doing it good or some are so-so. Even at the Frontiers program, I was teaching it for the first time this year. It was funny because we didn't have a long time, and the minute they went out to present, all of them, they were trying to present it as Shark Tank style. So i- in a way, Shark Tank has done an amazing job on being on people's minds, and then our job is to take it further and teach them, you know, a better methodology and go deeper, and they have to know their finances and so on and so forth. Right. It's great. And, and if I may add, this generation of, of students, and by this generation, I mean, I don't know, people who are, who are 25 and under or something like that, they're really good. I don't know if there's just the students that are here at WPI, but they're driven and Their presentation skills, they're good. They try their best, their hardest, and I tell them all the time, "You know when some grandpa or somebody tells you, oh, the younger generation is not as good as it used to be?" You guys are better. Good boost of confidence there 

Colleen: So as good as they are, how do you tell someone their idea might not work out without crushing their motivation? How not to be a Mr. Wonderful? 

Ardian: I play Mr. Wonderful when I'm talking to my friends. With students, it's a little bit different. Same style that we said when somebody comes in with a... That's convinced it's a great idea. There's couple of things. One, we don't really fully know What really, really, really works. Mm-hmm. We all have our biases, our perceptions, our-- the things that we're used to, the way we're used to do things. There's a lot of people who didn't take a bet in Uber in early days, even big VCs and stuff like that, and, and other companies. So there is that element of surprise and things that are sometimes at the cutting edge. It's also at the level of sometimes you're not fully understanding them. So we're not trying to tell them that this is not too good. My approach i- in here at the i3 Lab, we ask them questions: "Have you thought about this? How are you gonna do that? Have you thought about how you're gonna price this? Who's gonna be your customers? How big your market is?" So we have these techniques, and the same thing, once we put them through the steps of our programs, then at some point they will find out that maybe this is not a big market. Maybe this is a good idea, but the market for it is not big enough that I can go out there and build a big startup. Or I had a case where somebody said, "This is a great thing that I'm trying to do, but maybe it's more of a nonprofit situation- Okay ... than a startup, because now I understand that on this model, for these reasons, the venture capitalists and people who invest in startups are not gonna invest money in it because the formula is not gonna work." We had another one last year that went through our programs, was very good student, very dedicated, and at the end of the, of the summer accelerator said to me, "I wanna thank you and every one of you for all the learning that you guys gave us, but I've realized this is not gonna work out." I'm like, "How come?" He goes, "It's an overcrowded space, and frankly, now I'm convinced there's no need for this." And to me, that was equally good. That's a win. It-- That was a huge win because they understood the process. They understood the elements of what you need to build a startup, what works, what doesn't work, and they got to that conclusion themselves. With the program, the process that you're describing, is it more often that a student comes to that realization on his or her own, or is it you or another mentor having to jump in and say, "You know what? I think it's time to pivot"? We don't tell them what to do. It-- We nudge them to think of certain things, and then they get to the point. We assign everybody a mentor. We have a great alumni network, which they've been wonderful to mentor our students. And As you're doing customer discovery, because that's a big deal for us that we, we push everybody to do it, y- you really get the feeling. Because if you go and interview 15 people that are y- your target customers And all of them say absolutely not. Like, there's no need for this. Mm-hmm. I have zero need for what you're doing. And usually they'll tell you what their need is, and i- it's sometimes not too far off from where you started- Okay ... but a bit different. Yeah. And that it gives them an opportunity to pivot, and often they do that. But if you're not doing that, you'll soon realize yourself. So in a sense, it's, it's very unusual to go through all our programming, all our mentorship, and everything that we do, and still get stuck. Let's say if you have a really terrible idea or the market is too small or whatever- Right ... you'll realize pretty quickly yourself. So we don't really need to kind of, I don't know, hurt your feelings- Yeah per se. Because as long as we're forcing you to talk to real people, to do customer discovery, you will realize yourself that now you gotta pivot. Otherwise, this is nothing. And I have plenty of these cases that they come in halfway through, "I don't think this is working out." I'm like, "Why?" "Well, I talked to 15 people, and I thought it was needed, but people are asking more for something else." 

Colleen: But again, it's that learning experience that's so important. Whether it's a good idea or a bad idea, you learn. 

Ardian: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And the fact that, for example, this is the third year that we did our summer accelerator, and every year, the first week, everybody's trying to get to, uh, learn and all that stuff and get familiar and, and then we tell them we- they have to go and talk to potential customers, and their face drops. For some, it's a little bit more of a struggle, which is understandable- Mm-hmm ... and we teach them the methods and all that. And by week seven, you can see the transformation in them. They're like, "This is the best thing we did. We went out there. We validated. We figured out. Now we know that doesn't matter if we continue with this or we do something else, we always have to talk to people." Sure. "And we never knew that this is so important." So that piece, that element of learning, it's, it's huge for them. Yeah, and it gives them the confidence- Yep ... when you're hearing that feedback. How do students go out and get feedback? Is it a variety of ways? Do they send out surveys? Do they walk around the quad and ask people? Do they go into the city and get feedback? Yeah. So I'll give you an example of one of our student startups that we had in the summer accelerator this year. It's a health tech device. I'm not gonna explain it fully because I'll probably butcher it- ... and they're not gonna like it, but they needed to talk to physiotherapists because those are the doctors that will prescribe this to their people who break their arms. And initially, they just started cold calling physicians. Nobody's picking up. And so I said, "Have you tried walking in?" They go, "We haven't." I'm like, "Well, give it a try." So the week after, they started walking into the, these physicians' offices. They talked to over 30 physicians. Wow. Good for them. Yeah, and they, uh, the minute that they spoke to the first three and they got a little bit of confidence, they were on a roll. They were, like, out there going and talking to them, and, and they found out so much information out of them. So it gave them a huge transformation on how they pivoted a little bit, what to do. It's not an easy thing to always just go out there and talk to strangers especially, but it's a very, very helpful thing. Sometimes when you're building something, you're too emotional around it- Mm-hmm ... and you have to start thinking, "Oh, okay, how do I release myself from the, this burden of emotions of like, 'Oh, but I wanted to build this and this only,' and now the feedback I'm getting, I might need to change." It's sort of a growth process. 

Colleen: How do you build them back up when you know they're onto something? 

Ardian: So it depends on, um... I don't have a psychology degree or whatever you need for this. Uh, yeah, well, with this role, I bet you're probably pretty good at it. Yeah, but it depends on the student, and usually throughout, during the year, I get to know them a little bit better. Mm-hmm. And everybody is different. I had one student who I knew fairly well, and he came in one day. He's like, "I don't know if this is working out." I'm like, "Go for a walk. Go for a run," because he was into sports. "Go for a run. Uh, take a couple of deep breaths. Come back. We talk again. I think you're gonna be fine." Because he was that type of person. He needed that type of encouragement- Right ... where, "You can do this. Just get going." And then you have some others who have different personalities. Sometimes I tell them stories of my failures, how I went from failure to failure until I succeeded, or how I lost a lot of money and I had little children, and I had to feed them, and I didn't know how I was gonna do it and, a- and stuff that was real. And then I tell them, like, "You guys are young. You have no mortgages. You're not married. You don't have to deal with anything. You're not feeding any children. You're on top of the world. Why should you be down for this? And if this is not happening, pivot. Build something else. We're here to help you." And for the most part, once they know that, hey, we're not judging them, and we're not. We're here to help- Right ... not judge. This is their playground. This is-- And I tell them this is kind of like your boxing ring- Mm-hmm ... where you can do your safe rounds, wear gloves on and, you know, helmets and whatnot because once you get in the real world The gloves are off The gloves are off for everybody. Yeah. So this is the safest space you're ever gonna get to, to play around with all these things. And they appreciate that, and then they pick themself up for the most part. 

Colleen: I'm really glad you mentioned that because earlier in our conversation, it seemed very prescriptive. This is how you go, and these are the steps that you need to go through to start with an idea, test it out, get market research, customer feedback. But there's such a personal touch baked into all of this. 

Ardian: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, you have to do that. So the courses and the framework and the process that we put them through, the-- everybody goes through it, but it's not rigid. It's sort of wide enough that depending on the idea they're working on, depending on the industry or the type they're working on, depending on the type of team they assemble together, if they have a team or if there's a team of one, we're trying to take them on that journey. And we're looking at them, okay, this type of personality, this type of student, uh, this type of product that they're trying to build or startup, what type of mentorship is best for them? So you have to do that. Yeah. Otherwise, it just becomes a rigidity of like almost like a course. Exactly. So we have to use a framework to keep things moving, but also we have to be agile enough to look at each individual case and each ind-individual founders and what their particular needs are. 

Colleen: What about student wellbeing? How do you make sure they are having a healthy work-life balance? Yeah, I mean, that's hugely important for WPI, for us as an extension, too, and not just because it's policy, but it’s humans we're dealing with. Yeah. I had a student last year that was trying to get to Go Tank. Go Tank is the undergrad competition that we do in, in, in- Shark Tank February. Shark Tank stuff. Go Tank. Yeah, yeah. And, uh, he, he comes to me three days before. He had applied for it. He goes, "Look, I, I'm struggling to get ready for it because I have some courses that I'm behind." So I told him, "Look, Go Tank will come around next year." He was a freshman. "Go finish your courses. Go take a-- Go breathe. Go have a cup of tea. Do you want me to buy you a coffee at Dunks or whatever?" "Uh, or a donut? Uh, let's go for a walk. Deal with your studies first, deal with your health, and then we build the business afterwards, and we work on it." And he's been working on it this summer, actually, doing good progress. Because we build businesses and startups for us and for our families and for our passion and for our-- We wanna change the world, but our wellbeing has to come first. And I tell them all the time, "You have to love yourself." And then to some of them, they laugh at me. They're like- ... "Look at this old man telling us this stuff." And we're like, "You wake up in the morning, and you look yourself in the mirror, you gotta love yourself first before you love anything else, and stay good to yourself." The startup is pointless if their wellbeing is not Induct. Sometimes we're sort of not pushing them, but we encourage them to do certain things. But when we see that, okay, they're struggling... And school comes first. Right. This is very highly important. They're here to get an education. They're here to get the degree first. I had people come in and they're like, "I think my idea is gonna do great. I might drop out," because they hear these, these Bill Gates style dropout stories or Harvard- Sure. Mark Zuckerberg stories ... yeah, that type of thing. Yeah. I'm like, "No, no, no, no. Nobody's dropping out of anywhere. You're here for school first, then you can slowly build your business." So that's our sort of well-being, school, and then the rest. 

Colleen: Great. Great advice. As we wrap up, what advice would you give to anyone looking to try something new, an innovation or a startup? 

Ardian: There's a lot of reasons why a startup fails or succeeds: team, product, money, timing. Timing often matters. But my one advice that I tell everybody, do not ignore the power of customer discovery. Oftentimes, people, especially in STEM schools like ours here, can go to a lab, they can prototype and build something pretty quickly, and they can spend a lot of money doing that and building something that the market doesn't need. So doing customer discovery first, making sure you don't ignore that, and assembling a good team, it's such an important thing to have those, at least those two things together. That's great.

Colleen: Do you believe, especially in this role, that failure can be a success eventually? 

Ardian: So I've learned this in America. As you know, I'm international, and I come from Europe, and failure is, in Europe is... It's changing now, but it's not seen as a good thing. And one of the most amazing things that the United States has going for themselves is they celebrate failure in business because they treat it as learning. And it's oftentimes, and for me, now that I can reflect in my sort of- Past lives. I've learned more from failure than from successes because, and for me, I've succeeded early in my earlier startups, and then I failed later. And you learn some stuff from success, but also you build a certain level of maybe you don't know it or you know it later, a little bit of, not arrogance, but kind of like, "Oh, now I know it." Mm. "I know how to do this." But every business you start has different components to it, and then when you fail, then you realize, "Why did this one fail and the other one succeeded?" And sometimes it's the team that you assembled, and then you draw your lessons. "Oh, I read three books about teaming, but I never really fully understood until now that I've got the, you know, the scars for it." Or, "I thought I knew about customer discovery, but I actually didn't know really well until I lost X amount of money not doing customer discovery properly." And you learn more from failure in that respect. 

Colleen: Absolutely. Well, you are the right man for the position you're in. Well, thank you. Thank you for joining us today. I don't have a product idea, but if I ever do, I'm coming to you. 

Ardian: Yeah, please do. Thanks again. Thanks for having me. 

Colleen: This has been another edition of the WPI podcast. If you'd like to hear more podcasts, check them out at wpi.edu/listen or wherever you get your podcasts. A special thanks to Varun Bhat, our audio engineer in the Global Lab, and a very special thanks to you for listening. I'm Colleen Wamback.