Med Device/Medtech
Tuesday, September 8, 2020
Generating Sales Via Your Website: A Beautiful Website Is Not Enough
Is your website increasing your close rate or is it just a fancy brochure?
A website is arguably your most important sales and marketing asset. It works around the clock—nights, weekends, and holidays. But many websites don't pull their weight in the sales process. From lead generation to conversion, learn how your website can be your most powerful sales enablement tool. When built with revenue-generation as the primary goal, you won’t need to hire a huge sales team right away—you can let your website do the heavy lifting. Join 25-year industry veteran, Kitty Hart, for fresh takes on how to build a powerful, sales-focused website that drives growth for your business.
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
Harness the Power of AI: Improving Business Outcomes
Artificial intelligence has become a buzz term shrouded in mystery and mystique behind what it's actually being used for. From how it can be helpful to where it can not only improve business outcomes but work alongside job functions and departments. We're taking a peek behind the curtain on where AI is already being implemented and how it can create value within your business.
Intro to Growth Hacking: The Idea Pipeline & ICE metrics
You are an entrepreneur, CEO, CTO, solo dev, maker, shaker, or doer. You have 1,000 things you should be doing this very moment, but what is the right thing to focus on? That is the fundamental question behind growth hacking. Growth hacking is all about prioritizing your activities, measuring results, and taking effective action, which is much easier said than done.
In this fast-paced participatory session, we will cover two critical tools to increase the growth of your business, the Idea Pipeline and ICE metrics. Originally developed by Sean Elis to bring explosive growth to Dropbox, LogMeIn, and many others, the Idea Pipeline and ICE metrics are simple but powerful tools to get your business focused and growing fast. Our speaker Brian Krohn, has implemented these methods for startups, corporations, non-profits, as well as his own businesses and personal projects.
Thursday, September 10, 2020
5 Things About 5 Things That Every Startup Should Know
Join us for a fast-paced overview of the necessary legal steps startups should take in order to be successful. Panelists from Fredrikson & Byron will cover the basics, providing attendees with answers to key questions they face when running a startup and answer questions like:
• Does entity choice matter, and why?
• When raising money, what do you need to do to ensure you comply with securities laws??
• What kinds of rights should I give investors?
• How do I decide who will be an employee and who will be a contractor?
• Why do I need to get IP assignments, and when?
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
Fundraising best practices
Please register in advance for this meeting: Register here
Join us to hear fundraising best practices for early stage startups from an experienced VC sharing some tips and tricks. How to prepare and run your fundraising process? What's the best way to approach investors? How do you secure investment from out-of-town investors? Bring your questions!
Paving a Strategic ROADMAP: An effective business strategy
Andy Shafer
Shafer's Innovation and Business Building Services (SIBBS), Founder, Strategist, Business Builder and AuthorPaving a Strategic ROADMAP™ to Success: The challenge of developing a simple, clear and effective business strategy. There is always more than one way to a destination. Choosing the right strategic path for your business is a challenge. Strategic ROADMAP addresses the seven critical questions your strategies need to answer – in a simple, logical and memorable structure. The questions apply at the company, business unit or project level. Equally they can be framed for core or disruptive business growth. This talk will explain developing your strategy using the Strategic ROADMAP. It will discuss each of the 7 critical questions and provide a clear example using one of the most well-known, and maybe the only, success stories in the U.S. commercial airline business – Southwest Airlines.
Fundraising During COVID-19
An inside scoop from VCs on what's changed, and how to stand out
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 30 minute Q&A.
Unleashing The Power of YOUR Idea
The ILT Academy delivers extensive educational experiences to cultivate problem solvers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. We empower problem solvers and innovators to rethink and redesign problems, solutions, customers, and context. We equip entrepreneurs with the skills needed to commercialize ideas, develop successful ventures, and create high-growth businesses.
Uplifting Founders: Delegate to Elevate
Learn how career, top-level executive assistants integrate into their principal's lives to free up their time and increase their productivity.
Tuesday, September 15, 2020
Mentor Morning: Financing Scaling from Traction to IPO!
Minnesota Innovates welcomes the Founders of five companies as they share insights and their experiences funding the growth of nationally and internationally successful companies.
Scaling Customer Success Through Growth
When companies are small, customers often receive personal attention support. But what happens as a company grows? How can a business continue to serve and support their customers in a personal, but scalable, manner? Hear from some of today’s leading customer success executives on how their businesses are serving thousands of customers using data analytics, segmentation and specialists to deliver customer value.
Thursday, September 17, 2020
Using Cloud Providers to Achieve HIPAA Compliance
Learn how to Achieve HIPAA Compliance for your Software Company Using Tools Provided by Major Cloud Platforms like AWS, Azure and GCP. We will briefly define the challenges you face to be HIPAA Compliant as well as the tools made available by common cloud providers. This is also relevant if you have other forms of compliance requirements, such as PCI or SOC 2.
Development Stage Strategic Investments with Acquisition Rights
While early stage healthcare companies may seek resources from established healthcare companies, they often want to remain independent while they pursue their healthcare-related vision and build value.
Established healthcare companies expand and enhance existing product portfolios by acquiring early-stage technologies. They also want certainty that, if they help nurture an early-stage company, they will be able to acquire it once it is ready to exit without risk of being outbid by a competitor.
To balance these issues, companies often use a structured acquisition, in which the established healthcare company invests in the early-stage company, often obtains some degree of commercial rights and negotiates an option to acquire the company at a pre-agreed price. Join attorneys from Fredrikson & Byron, P.A. as they explain the rationale for, structure of, and pros and cons of a structured acquisition.
How Youth Entrepreneurs are Building the Hospitals of the Future
Join us for this panel discussion with youth CEO's that are building the future of hospitals, Government and non-profit leadership building the world's fair for 2027 around health, Mayo Hospitals, and AI tech entrepreneur's. They will each share their experiences with how the future of our hospitals and health care systems will be changed through the innovations they are helping bring to the world. Understand through this how youth are engaged to solve problems in new and innovative ways and leveraging design thinking.
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
Executive Compensation for Start-ups
We will cover important topics such as entity structure, options and equity compensation, pre-transaction (acquisition or IPO) planning, and more! Whether you are just starting to form your company, looking to optimize equity awards, attract and retain talent, or have your eye on a potential exit, this session is for you!
Kendall Qualls: From Harlem to Healthcare
Kendall Qualls will discuss his early life in poverty and a broken home, career in the healthcare industry, and experience launching a data analytics and artificial intelligence startup to help cancer patients. Kendall will also discuss how we can promote entrepreneurship through our regulatory environment, cultural values, and education system.
Non-Dilutive Federal Research Funding for Technology Commercialization
Taxpayer investments (non-dilutive funding) is critical to startups in the technology commercialization arena! In this two hour session, you will learn the basics of the annual federal $3.7B Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs; two sources of non-dilutive funding to move from the lab to the marketplace. This is an ideal session for scientists, engineers, innovators with novel ideas, concepts, and projects that possess strong commercial or societal potential, domestically, and internationally.
The Current State of Medtech and Healthcare: A Fireside Chat with JPMorgan Chase and Medical Alley
Join Michael Gietl, Industry Executive - Healthcare, J.P. Morgan Securities and Shaye Mandle, President and CEO of Medical Alley, as they discuss trends in medtech and healthcare — plus, how to fundraise during COVID-19.
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
The How and Why of Designing Connectivity into Your Start-up
Designing your new medical device or system is challenging all by itself. In today's rapidly changing world, connecting that device to the larger medical infrastructure may be a critical part of your success. We will discuss the importance of developing and implementing an integrated connectivity strategy as part of your start-up plan.
Bringing Healthcare Home through Connectivity
Digital health solutions enable physicians to monitor chronic conditions remotely, increase patient compliance, and enable us to move healthcare out of the clinic and into the home. A panel of digital health investors and entrepreneurs will gather to discuss the challenges and the opportunities with digital health and what is next for healthcare. Hosted by Nextern.
Disrupting the Medical Supply Industry: A Fireside Chat with Medinas Health and Precursor Ventures
A chance visit to a relative in the hospital left Chloe Alpert fascinated by the amount of medical supplies wasted. At this session, join Chloe, Founder of Medinas Health, and Charles Hudson, Managing Partner of Precursor Ventures as they discuss how she used her skills as a serial entrepreneur to launch Medinas Health and disrupt the $250B medical supply industry.
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
Food Fights: entrepreneurs fighting COVID with science & nutrition.
While COVID is a biggest issue of today, its death toll pales by comparison to Heart Disease, Diabetes, Cancer and countless diseases caused by food. The entrepreneurs in this session tell the tale of two battles: just being entrepreneurs and fighting the unpopular fight of nutrition in a world with adverse interests to health. Over $3 trillion is spend in “sick care”, caused by unhealthy food. Imagine what we could do with that money and how the affected people would thrive in absence of those diseases. We’ll explore the issues, uncover the dichotomies, tell of trials, tribulations and triumphs, and pose solutions to the gargantuan problems of wellness and wellcare.
How Healthcare is Using Impact Measurement to Promote Equity
The microscope on the structural and systemic issues that have been laid bare and/or exacerbated by the realities of COVID and racial inequity have never been more important in our communities or in our healthcare system. Join us for a panel discussion to hear about strategies, challenges and innovations from policy, payor, provider, and community perspectives. Opportunities for entrepreneurs exist as vendors and service providers, changemakers, and community supporters. Connecting entrepreneurs to the accelerator and investment community will be critical to driving change, increasing equity and expanding opportunity along the way.
Celebrating Minority Owned Businesses in MN
Forget the "New Normal": Design Something Different
We live in a rapidly changing world and cannot rely on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. We have our tools ready to aid us. However, unfamiliar situations will come up, and to survive we will need to drop our familiar tools.
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.
FemTech, Female Founders, and the Future
This conversation will focus on the founder experience, trends in FemTech, funding challenges and the future of this space. Interested in launching a FemTech startup? Get advice!
Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a Happy HALF Hour of Q&A.
Happy Half Hour
Mix up your favorite cocktail and join the speakers of the FemTech Panel for Q&A!
Tuesday, September 22, 2020
Founders Panel: Lessons Learned in Growing Your Social Enterprise
Join us for a panel discussion to listen and learn from three social enterprise founders their lessons on bruising shins, empathy and humility, and harnessing the power of outcomes and impact and the value it provides in ops, strategy, and marketing & communications.
Disrupting the Status Quo in Your Organization and Community
Are you trying to move your organization, or even your community, out of the status quo? Are you looking for effective ways to disrupt while keeping your credibility and social capital? If yes, join us for practical strategies on how to successfully move toward more innovation and more modernization. That is, how to disrupt without being disruptive.
Building a B Corp: A Panel Discussion
Are you building a business as a force for good? One that balances purpose and profit? B Corps are driving a global movement of business as a force for good. Join us for a panel discussion with three Minnesota B Corp founders and hear about their journeys becoming B Corps, benefits and challenges, and their recommendations for businesses considering B Corp certification.
MN Cup Final Award Ceremony
Join the Minnesota startup community as we present live pitches from 18 of the top businesses that emerged from the 2020 MN Cup competition season. They're vying for a share of $500,000 in prize money that will be awarded live during the event. You won't want to miss this!
MN Cup is a startup competition for early-stage companies hailing from anywhere in Minnesota. Thanks to an incredible group of sponsors and the time and talents of our volunteer mentors and judges, we are able to offer all programming and prize money completely free for participants. We take no equity in exchange for the seed capital we award, and are here to connect Minnesota founders to the education, resources and capital they need to build and scale successful companies.
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-16th-mn-cup-final-award-ceremony-tickets-117138096199?aff=TCSW
Thursday, September 24, 2020
Answers to 10 of the Biggest Employment Law Questions Facing Startups and Emerging Companies
A complex patchwork of federal, state and even local employment laws applies to startups and emerging companies. While early stage companies are focused on growing revenue and visibility, increasing headcounts, and securing funding and new investors, they are not immune from these laws. In fact, non-compliance exposes even the smallest employers to serious consequences such as audits, litigation, and investor trepidation, and can delay or derail acquisitions or other critical transactions.