I will be co-teaching, with Parand Darugar and Paul Kedrosky, a course on starting a company. This 10 week course requires each team to develop a real project, to the level that they can test it with potential customers. (Beta test, approximately.)

Doing this in 10 weeks can be daunting, but it can be done. I used to teach a course on hardware product development, which required working physical prototypes and 2 long reports in 10 weeks. This year we expect little or no hardware. Instead we are looking for web-enabled, mobile-enabled, or other service ideas with little or no associated hardware. What you will sell is some form of a system that fulfills a need.

Part of entrepreneurship is looking for, and “sensing,” unmet needs. Do this in your everyday life, in your courses, as you watch people on screens. Here are a few ideas to suggest how little is needed. Please, add your own. It’s ok to list an unmet need without saying how to solve it.

Classroom feedback using sheets of paper

A visual barcode based version of the teaching “clicker” that many classrooms use to gather real-time student feedback. Students hold up a piece of cardboard, which the faculty member scans with a phone. https://www.plickers.com Why didn’t I think of that?  Get rid of the student-purchased hardware, and probably increase reliability at the same time. (Although I’m sure it sacrifices some capabilities of the electronic clickers.)

Search my many sources of free books

My wife and I read a lot of books, still. In the last 5 years a number of access methods for e-books have come along. I can buy ebooks from Apple, Amazon, or others. I can also borrow them free from my local library, Amazon Prime, scribd,  my employer (UCSD’s library) and probably some other services. Each service has its own catalog and its own ways of searching. Checking each of the free services is time consuming, and half the time none of them has what I want. Solve this pain! There are many ways to solve the pain, and the concept could be integrated with existing book services/systems in a variety of ways.