Knowing your competitive landscape helps you explain how your product or service is better than existing solutions or good enough to switch customers from competitors or the status quo. You need to show a variety of stakeholders how your innovation is a better approach to pain relieving, gain providing, and the best problem-solving innovation. Studying your competitors lets you know who is trying to get your customers, how your innovation is unique, and how your competitors attract their customers – price, features, market entrenchment or something you never imagined before you looked closely.
After almost two months of hard work molding their startup ideas, eight teams from the Pitt Blast Furnace student startup accelerator pitched their ideas to a panel of five judges. The event, held on June 9th in the William Pitt Union, marked the completion of the third Blast Furnace cohort in its first year of its existence.
Agreement provides Pitt Innovators with access to growth capital targeted to university spin-outs The University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute has joined Osage University Partners (OUP), a venture capital firm established to invest in spin-out companies of its University partner institutions.
Pitt innovators with ideas ranging from an injectable gel to improve nerve injury recuperation, to a data platform for discovering cancer treatment targets, to a non-invasive fetal genetic test, and more, participated in the latest cycle of the Pitt Ventures First Gear commercialization program. The Pitt Ventures First Gear program offers education, mentoring and funding to Pitt innovators seeking to move their research and innovations into the market.
The University of Pittsburgh Innovation Institute will honor Pitt Innovators who have had their inventions licensed out of the University at its 11th Annual Celebration of Innovation on Monday, April 25, at Alumni Hall beginning at 5:30. Also being recognized will be Pitt faculty, students and staff who have received patents or submitted invention disclosures since July 1, 2014.