Frequently Asked Questions

No, the E(I) Lab is not an academic offering. There will be no financial requirements (i.e. tuition) to participate.

Graduate students in their second to third year, professional students and postdocs who have (i) excess capacity and time outside of current academic research, (ii) the ambition to make the world better, (iii) tireless work ethic and drive to make things happen, and (iv) who wish to start gaining experience in innovation and entrepreneurship.

We firmly believe that a successful team requires the contributions of people from diverse disciplines. More importantly, we believe that everyone can acquire the necessary product development and entrepreneurial skills to help execute an idea. As long as you are driven and committed, we believe you have the right skills to participate.

We understand that within the current graduate education framework, participation in the E(I) Lab program cannot interfere with the progression of your thesis or postdoctoral research. Therefore, we emphasize that your participation should not result in a tangible or substantial slowdown in research.  To make this possible, the reality is that you have to (i) learn how to work more efficiently, and (ii) temporarily sacrifice some other activities outside of school (e.g. Hulu/Netflix, intramurals sports, etc). There should be an explicit understanding between you and your research advisor that any lost time during business hours, for example talking to physicians, would be made up after hours, and that any encroachment into total lab time be limited to no more than a few hours per week.

We explicitly require that the students obtain the appropriate permission(s):

• Postdoctoral fellows: permission from the research adviser
• Graduate students: permission from thesis adviser AND thesis committee or, if the committee is not formed yet, the director of graduate students of the department or equivalent
• Professional students: permission from office of student services

Participation in the program for can be revoked if the participation is negatively affecting the student’s research or academic progress.

During the kickoff meeting, you will gain experience in undertaking creative thinking and cross-disciplinary communication in a high pressure, fast pace setting. During the subsequent 6 months of working towards distilling the innovative idea into the minimum viable product, you will gain experience and skills in cross-disciplinary teamwork, multi-tasking, leadership, versatility, idea evolution, product development and entrepreneurship. Specifically, to succeed, you will have to learn how to effectively communicate and work with team members from diverse disciplines, systematically research and vet end-user acceptability of the proposed innovation, define a minimal viable product (i.e. the most important proof-of-concept), quickly pivot when you identify a dead end, multi-task, and innovate against a competitive landscape. We believe these are all integral skill sets that would not only directly impact the quality of your graduate education and research, but also benefit you long after your time at UNC, regardless of whether you end up in industry or academic settings.

Hackathons were traditionally an event in which computer programmers and others involved in software development and hardware development collaborate intensively over a short duration (typically a weekend) on software projects. The spirit of hackathons has since been extended to life sciences, where the events, again typically over a weekend, seek to gather participants from diverse backgrounds to germinate new ideas that could solve health problems worldwide. There are important common elements shared between the conventional hackathon events and the E(I) Lab program. Specifically, we will kick off the E(I) Lab with a weekend-long event where graduate students and postdocs from diverse disciplines will come together to develop innovative ideas to tackle existing challenges in healthcare. However, there are three important differences.

First, although we encourage submission of problems in healthcare to the E(I) Lab in advance, we will not allow pitching of new, unvetted problems at the kickoff weekend. This decision was necessary because we want to ensure that the challenges/problems presented are indeed important and high impact, and more importantly, that the teams are innovating with a thorough understanding of the existing competitive landscape. This requires months of research in advance, which will be undertaken by select fellows of the program and be presented to all participants at the kickoff weekend. Second, unlike hackathon events that conclude with teams giving ‘pitches’ and prize money being handed out, we are raising the bar and challenging the participants to actually proceed with making the proposed innovations a reality. An idea that is not carried out cannot benefit society regardless of how good the idea is. There is also much to be learned from the experience of actually working with people from diverse backgrounds in developing and testing innovative ideas, which for many of you will be precisely what you will be asked to do once you enter industry, especially if you are working in a startup setting. Third, the weekend will not end with the conventional ‘pitch’ to venture capitalists (VCs) that emphasize potential financial return, but rather a pitch that focuses on the uniqueness of the idea and a game plan for how to realize the idea. For all these reasons, we call our program the E(I) Lab rather than the UNC hackathon.

Teams will be formed and finalized during the kickoff weekend meeting. You will also have an opportunity to get to know some of the potential program participants in advance during a happy hour gathering that is part of our participant interview process. The names of the selected participants will also be made known in advance and you are encouraged to network via social media in advance of the kickoff meeting.

We expect the problems to be presented to the program participants to come from diverse areas, with a unifying theme that the problems relate to improving healthcare, and that the problems can be tackled within the time constraints of the program i.e. 6-8 months. In other words, the nature of the problems will be quite different than those targeted in graduate research (i.e. we will not ask you to cure cancer or AIDS). Due to the timing and nature of the vetting process, at this time we are unable to discuss more about potential projects other than that they will likely involve overcoming some technological hurdle to tackle problems that, if successful, will likely have a tangible impact on improving healthcare outcomes. We absolutely welcome submission of problems, and if you feel very strongly about a problem, we will very much work with you to vet the challenge and determine if it is appropriate for the E(I) Lab program.

Naturally, we expect some teams will develop ideas that require filing for IP protection. We will utilize the exact same process for filing provisional IP applications as technologies developed by faculty. In particular, UNC will file on behalf of the inventors and own the IP, and a portion of the revenue from licensing of the IP will be returned to the inventors. Inventors, whether they are affiliated with UNC at the time or not, will also have the opportunity to negotiate a license with UNC, a common process with faculty launched startup companies. For more information, please see the UNC Copyright Policy.

Our goal is to remove all barriers that either prevents the participants from innovating, or prevent the participants from realizing their innovative ideas. The participants will be supported by both generous financial resources (we have a budget of $8,000/team, and more can be made available on a case-by-case basis) to enable the development of prototypes of minimal viable products, facilities such as the UNC Makerspaces (or alternative lab spaces if the need arises), and decades of experience not only from the faculty advisers but also other consultants both inside and outside of UNC. Tell us what is needed to make an idea work, and we will do all we can to align the resources to make it happen.

As discussed above, we are challenging all the participants to develop and realize their proposed ideas over the subsequent 6 months following the initial kickoff.  In addition to individual team meetings and time spent on developing and vetting the innovation, there will be two meetings on Tuesday evenings each month, generally ~2-3 hours long, with one meeting focusing on education in innovation and entrepreneurship, and the other meeting focusing on progress reports.

In general, we expect the first 2-3 months to heavily emphasize on customer discovery (click here for the Lean Launchpad methodology) and initial development of the prototypes, with subsequent months focusing on further polishing of the minimal viable product prototype, possible ‘field testing’, IP filing, etc.  Each team will proceed at its own pace, with the most advanced teams potentially in a position to transfer their developmental efforts into startup companies.  At the end of the program, each team will make a final presentation to leaders in academia and industry as well as VCs and serial entrepreneurs, and the top teams will be awarded generous monetary awards.

We believe many of the skill sets that the students can gain in this program, including but not limited to (i) effective communication and teamwork with people from diverse disciplines, (ii) the process of systematically researching and vetting end-user acceptability of a product, (iii) learning how to define a minimal viable product (i.e. the most important proof-of-concept), (iv) time management skills and multi-tasking, as well as (v) intellectual property, are all integral skill sets that would not only directly impact the quality of the students’ research but also potentially their career trajectories of after their time at UNC. To maximize the impact of their training while minimizing potential delays in their research process, we strongly encourage participation from graduate students in their 2nd or 3rd year rather than those nearing their thesis defense.

We strongly emphasize to the participants that their participation in the E(I) Lab should not result in a tangible or substantial slow down in their research productivity in the lab.  Our expectation is that the participation would reflect a temporary sacrifice of personal activities outside of school rather than research activities and that any encroachment into time in lab is limited to no more than a few hours per week.  For this very reason, we explicitly require that the students obtain the appropriate permission(s):

• Postdoctoral fellows: permission from the research adviser
• Graduate students: permission from thesis adviser AND thesis committee or, if the committee is not formed yet, the director of graduate students of the department or equivalent
• Professional students: permission from office of student services

Participation in the program for can be revoked if the participation is negatively affecting the student’s research or academic progress.