Harvard Innovation Labs

Harvard Innovation Labs is a business development and entrepreneurship accelerator program intended to help Harvard University students with the resources and support they need to grow their entrepreneurial ideas. The Harvard Innovation Labs is considered an example of Harvard University's One Harvard vision and is considered a catalyst for the Allston Science and Enterprise District.

Began in 2011, the Harvard Innovation Labs opened with the i-lab and was expanded in 2014 when the Launch Lab opened. The Harvard Innovation Labs grew again in 2016 with the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab, a co-working life-sciences community.

The Harvard Innovation Labs considers its approach to be different from other entrepreneurship centers. This is in its breadth of acceptance, its operating model, and its governance. This starts with the center's acceptance of any student from Harvard with any idea in order to foster cross-disciplinary, cross-university collaboration. The Harvard Innovation Labs is also student-centered and faculty-enabled, with programming supplied by schools across Harvard to help students. Harvard Innovations Labs is co-governed by the Provost and Deans of Harvard.

The Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem is defined by the main spaces and programs of the program. This includes the i-lab, which is a space for Harvard students; the Launch Lab X GEO, which is a virtual accelerator for Harvard Alumni leading early-stage startup ventures; and the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab for Harvard students, faculty, and alumni working on high-potential life sciences and biotechnology startups.

floorplan of the i-lab.

Built in the former WGBH building at 125 Western Avenue, the i-lab was the original building of the Harvard Innovation Labs, which opened in 2011. The lab occupies the first floor; with the two upper floors dedicated to team-based classrooms and project spaces for students engaged in hands-on business challenges and visits to host companies. Considered a "Grand Central Station for entrepreneurial thinking" by Cherry Murray, the dean of Harvard's School of Engineering, the i-lab is built to promote team-based activities among Harvard students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and members of the Allston and Greater Boston community. This includes a modular environment intended to promote a sense of possibility.

View of the i-lab.

The facility is roughly 30,000 square feet of space intended to be flexible in configuration and furnishing to help ideas be flexible in their ideas. And the décor is intended to be contemporary entrepreneurial, with exposed ceilings, ventilation, and wiring; bare concrete floors; surfaces coated with white-board paint for free-form thinking; and a stocked kitchen and televisions with game consoles. The space offers meeting rooms, classrooms, and workshops to help students develop ideas and products.

Launch Lab X GEO (LLX GEO) is a virtual global ecosystem where Harvard alumni and their ventures can connect with each other, create and deepen relationships, and continue learning to help grow their ventures. The virtual events of the LLX GEO are considered as opportunities to have conversations about what it takes to create viable and adaptable businesses and share ventures with a community interested in innovation.

The LLX GEO method is intended to be adaptive, milestone-based and customized to the needs of a participating team. This includes offering knowledge, expertise, and support through a network of mentors, industry insiders, and learning resources.

• Achilleion
• Adaptilens
• CaviSense
• Concerto Biosciences
• Concord Materials
• Imago Rehab
• Kiwi Biosciences
• Metric
• Naya Studio
• Promakhos Therapeutics
• Rentdrop
• Think Biosciences
• Snapi Health

The Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab is a wet laboratory with co-working space for early-stage, high-potential biotechnology and life science startups founded by Harvard students, alumni, faculty, and postdoctoral students as part of the Harvard Innovation Labs ecosystem. The space offers these startups access to programming and resources to help them grow and succeed.

The building is a 15,000 square foot facility located on Harvard's Allston campus. It offers a fully-equipped wet laboratory, as well as co-working spaces. As well, Harvard Innovation Labs curates community to foster connections with biotechnology experts, academics and investors to offer program members the benefits of a diverse resource pool.

For Harvard students, the Harvard Innovation Labs offers a few different ways to get involved. This includes drop-ins, office hours, workshops, a venture program, and the president's innovation challenge.

For Harvard students, they can drop by any of the labs at any time, 24/7 for the i-lab and accessible to the Life Lab from 9-5, Monday through Friday. Students who drop in are welcomed to use the space to share ideas, meet other students, and work on their own startups or related projects.

The i-lab hosts office hours, where experts and entrepreneurs-in-residence (EiRs), faculty mentors, i-lab staff, legal partners, funders-in-residence (VCs), and other visiting practitioners who can help grow ideas and ventures. For Harvard students, they can book thirty-minute visits with these entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, creative directors, and lawyers in the network, where the student can receive advise, feedback, development ideas, hear their stories, and talk through pain points.

The i-lab hosts a number of workshops per semester, which are open to all Harvard students. These workshops offer various topics and allow students a chance to learn, and connect, with potential team members, founding partners, and experts.

The i-lab offers a Venture Program for Harvard student-led teams whose ventures have progressed. The program is open to teams that are led by at least one matriculated, full-time and degree-seeking undergraduate or graduate Harvard student and runs during the spring, summer, and fall of each calendar year.

The Venture Program combines a supportive community with resources for Harvard students actively building an idea into a venture. From workshops to one-on-one advising, participants in the program are offered access to opportunities tailored to a venture's stage and venture. The program offers two tracks. The first track, Start It, is for teams with a new idea. The second track, Build It, is for ventures who have real world demand and are ready to grow.

Whether meeting in-person or online, the Venture Program offers various ways to help students and program participants to connect with each other in order to encourage unexpected collaborations. This includes social mixers, in which participants are offered a chance to get to know other members of the program in a more relaxed setting; community pitch swaps, which offer experience in pitching a venture in front of peers and staff; networking events, which offer founders, experts, and staff a chance to network with each other through structured networking activities; and a slack channel, in which users can share information, ask questions, and stay connected with each other.

For program members, the Venture Program offers expert guidance to help participants navigate the challenges of developing a venture into a startup, including help with messaging and marketing to connecting with a customer and discovering potential funding opportunities. The Venture Program works to offer students access to a variety of industry experts, include experts in strategy, product, legal advice, marketing, and funding.

The Venture Program also offers participants interactive programs to help give them hands-on learning, with experts in a variety of topics, such as crafting a value proposition or understanding a customer. The series of workshops and industry advice offers program participants a chance to develop a growth map and trajectory for their venture. As well, these experts offer targeted, industry-specific advice for program members.

For participants in the Harvard Innovation Labs Venture Program, there are certain funding opportunities for student-led ventures. However, the Harvard Innovation Labs does not offer funding to any venture, and these opportunities include the President's Innovation Challenge, the Allston Venture Fund, the Social Impact Fellowship Fund, and Spark Grants.

The President's Innovation Challenge (PIC) is an invitation to participating ventures to propel their ideas forward. It also offers a chance for those ventures to win a share of $510,00 in non-dilutive funding. This funding is possible due to a gift from the Bertarelli Foundation to Harvard Innovation Labs. The challenge is a six-month process in which teams develop their ventures with Harvard Innovation Labs.

The challenge requires ventures to apply by January. From January to March the selection process occurs, and finalists from that process are then given a chance to pitch to judges, with the winners announced at an award ceremony held on May 5 in 2022.

The Allston Venture Fund was formed in 2019 and is an investment collaboration focused on providing pre-seed funding and equity-free grants to ventures from the Harvard Innovation Labs Venture Program. The fund is backed by six firms:

• Bain Capital
• General Catalyst
• GETTYLAB
• Highland Capital
• Polaris Partners
• Underscore VC

This is also an independent enterprise and, consequently, not associated with Harvard. The fund invest approximately $700,000 per year, over three investment periods: fall, spring, and summer. These investments take the form of a SAFE and range from $10,000 to $100,000. The opportunity is open to any Harvard student or Harvard student-led teams whose ventures who have a founder currently enrolled at Harvard, have achieved material traction with their venture, are incorporated as a C corporation, and are actively raising capital.

The Social Impact Fellowship Fund was created to help recipients accelerate and advance venture creation in social impact sectors. The fund at the Harvard Innovation Lab was established in 2019 through the generosity of Alexander Navab, in honor of The Harvard Business School Campaign. The fund awards $200,000 per year in grants to Harvard student-led ventures over five years.

Over the course of five years, the Social Impact Fellowship Fund awards $200,000 per year in grants to Harvard student-led ventures focused on social impact, awarded over three periods: fall, spring, and summer. The fund supports both for-profit and nonprofit startups in the Harvard Innovation Labs Venture Program. The fund requires a Harvard student be a founder and a committed leader of the venture, and those ventures are expected to have achieved material traction, in order to be eligible.

Offered through the Harvard Innovation Labs, the Spark Grants are intended to help eligible Harvard students and their ventures reach the next stage of their development. These eligible students are expected to work with Harvard Innovation Labs to test key assumptions and achieve key milestones, such as customer discovery, low-fidelity prototyping, demand validation, and business planning.

These non-dilutive grants are distributed by the Harvard Innovation Labs in increments of up to $5,000. Funds are distributed based on demonstrated need and impact of funds. Eligible participants have to be a part of the i-lab Venture Program, must have previously participated in another i-lab Venture Program over the past twelve months, have a concrete proposal to use the money for demand validation, low-fidelity prototyping, MVP testing, or a similar approach, and ventures can be used for profit or for nonprofit.