In her latest op-ed for Forbes.com, Harvard Innovation Labs Executive Director Jodi Goldstein shared a few thoughts about how to create work environments that nurture inspiration.
She wrote, “Nurturing inspiration is a key first step in building an innovative product or service… More often than not, inspiration strikes when engaging with in a topic outside of your industry.”
If you’d like to engage with ideas from outside your industry that could spark inspiration, take a moment to read about the newest Harvard Innovation Labs Venture Incubation Program (VIP) cohort.
54 ventures are participating in the fall semester VIP. The teams represent a broad diversity of industries: 20% are focused on social impact, cultural entrepreneurship or education; 32% on consumer products or services; 22% on health and sciences; and 26% on enterprise or high tech. The startup founders come from every Harvard school — an excellent expression of the One Harvard vision to foster collaboration amongst the entire Harvard community.
You can read more about the wide-range of problems that these ventures are working to address below:
Consumer
Bundle
We provide back-up/flexible child care as an employee benefit for working parents, helping employers reduce absenteeism and attract and retain talent.
Content Opinions
Creating conversation between unfamiliar perspectives.
Dystrophic
Dystrophic is a game development studio creating Hexile, a surreal puzzle game based on themes of environmentalism and social awareness.
GoPay
GoPay helps international students convert currency cheaply to pay directly to their university or any foreign bank account.
Gumshoe
Personalized restaurant recommendations for individuals or groups.
Hellofriend
Hellofriend is a decentralized social networking platform for people to buy and sell social experiences around the globe.
Honeybird
Honeybird is a consumer products company taking on stress, anxiety, and poor sleep. Our first product is a weighted blanket.
Lesson Squad
Music lessons in the comfort of your home.
LeverEdge
Decrease student loan rates by negotiating on behalf of large groups of potential borrowers.
MixTape
Mixtape combines the ease of music streaming with the sentimentality of mixtapes to help you share music more meaningfully with the people you love.
prettychill
We deliver frozen plant-based mini-meals in convenient resealable bowls straight to your door. Always gluten-free, dairy-free, and delicious.
ReMana
ReMana is reinventing how women pump, store and feed breastmilk. The system reduces the chance of spilling, requires less cleaning and is sustainable.
Settlyt
Settlyt is a real money peer-to-peer platform that facilitates challenges and arguments between friends in a social way.
Spruce
Spruce & Co creates simple products that encourage a healthy lifestyle through everyday routines. Our first product, Sprucies, are gentle, natural, disposable screen cleaning sheets designed to keep your mobile devices clean and bright.
The Key
We are a location-based, professional networking and career-management tool for the youth, helping them build relationships and find job opportunities.
Venuefly
Venuefly makes it easy to find event spaces — our platform allows bookers and venues to find, communicate, and transact with each other.
Voodles
Voodles is the first-ever vegetable-based dry pasta. It’s organic, allergen-free, and most importantly, unexplainably delicious.
Health and Sciences
bio.x
bio.x provides a cost-efficient individual-tailored therapeutics platform for human diseases.
Epigene Medicine
Smart aggregation of genomic data for drug discovery in oncology.
Flotherm
Flotherm is a novel thermal-compression device for perioperative warming of surgical patients at risk for inadvertent perioperative hypothermia.
Green Screen
Passive cooling screens designed for the slum communities of Delhi and made of agricultural waste, which would have otherwise been burned by farmers.
g.Root Biomedical Services
g.Root is a biotech company using algorithms and artificial intelligence to help people interpret and understand complex genetic testing results.
Koldchain
Koldchain has developed a solution that combines big data and thermosensitive polymers to monitor vaccine & biotech cold chains and prevent fraud.
Manifold Bio
Creating a new paradigm of protein engineering for therapeutics and diagnostics through high-dimensional data generation and machine learning.
Memora Health
Memora Health builds workflow productivity software for health care organizations to automate and scale outpatient communication.
MindMics
We build earphones that help to achieve healthier and happier life by providing mind and body monitoring system.
Nivien Therapeutics
Nivien Therapeutics finds and develops innovation from tech transfer portfolios at top hospitals and universities.
PionEar Technologies
Revolutionizing the treatment of ear infections with low-cost, minimally invasive, and selectively permeable ear tube implants.
Umbulizer
Umbulizer is developing a reliable, low-cost, and portable device that can provide continuous ventilation to patients in resource-limited settings.
Social Impact, Cultural and Education
A Better Future
We mobilize volunteers to provide pro-bono consulting services for nonprofits on a national scale in China.
AfyaKit
AfyaKit exists to drive high quality care management by providing actionable, right-level analytics to health managers across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Boost Finance
Boost Finance is a financial data platform that empowers employers to expand smart cash transfers, the worker benefit for a better future of work.
CareerCombo
CareerCombo is an online platform aimed at helping young adults both discover and plan for real careers that combine their different passions.
Chord
Chord allows people to buy a home in increments, building ownership at their pace, and unlocking a new vehicle for institutional investment.
Coding it Forward
Coding it Forward empowers students to use their tech skills to create social impact in fields like healthcare, education, nonprofit, and government.
Conversational DC
A way to learn languages through immersive, social, cultural activities (e.g. wine tastings, cooking classes) as if you were living abroad.
Growing Communities
Working to improve nutrition and health worldwide.
MDaaS Global
MDaaS is providing healthcare for the next billion by building the largest network of health centers in Africa.
The American Immigrant Project
The American Immigrant Project joins documentary filmmaking and investing to empower immigrant entrepreneurs across the United States.
Thrively Health
Thrively Health designs, evaluates, and scales community-driven initiatives that solve health, economic, and social problems facing women & girls.
Technology and B2B/Enterprise
AirCrew
We develop advanced catalytic materials to address global needs for air purification for residential, industrial, and automotive sectors.
ArchSpike
ArchSpike aims to streamline the process of building design and development by integrating real estate market analytics with design software.
DeepRE.ML
DeepRE.ML is a real estate technology firm that is looking to redefine how critical functions of commercial real estate investments are completed.
Elios
Elios provides an alert service for early signs of employee and customer risk.
eudios
We use machine learning to help companies understand and reduce their economic vulnerability to infectious disease outbreaks.
Inkrypt
A decentralized journalism and media content hosting platform that ensures content authenticity, resilience and censorship-resistance.
MyToolbox
Labor marketplace for skilled blue-collar workers, offering them a place to keep licenses up to date, find jobs and access basic financial services.
OZÉ
OZÉ is the business advisor in the pocket of every African entrepreneur. It’s a mobile app that turns transactions into business insights.
Sensii
Product ID system based on material recognition.
STEMgem
STEMgem is a device toolkit that allows learners to build real, useful, and relevant technology. Our mission is to engage teenage girls in STEM.
TalentLab
TalentLab helps companies quantify the ‘cultural fit’ of their job applicants.
Translo
Translo is a privacy-preserving, decentralized, and secure biomedical data sharing platform.
Vikas Birhma
Vikas Birhma provides farmers and buyers a platform that empowers them with transparent price discovery and agency to sell and buy from anyone across India.
Weave
Weave enables rapid prototyping and management of cloud applications through a simple platform agnostic API and user interface.