At Watson Institute’s Semester Incubator, college students and recent graduates with an early-stage social venture or project complete their Watson experience as a study away/abroad from a home university, gap semester before attending university, or before ‘pre-career’ semester after earning their degree elsewhere.

During the 4-month intensive program, you will embark on a journey that includes:

• A step-by-step methodology to rapidly and systematically validate your business model.
• Training in the process of building and strengthening an effective team that can pioneer new innovations and markets
• Testing your cost assumptions, developing a fundraising plan, creating an investors deck, and measuring impact metrics specifically to garner funder support.
• Framing solutions so they expose injustice and speak truth to power, incorporate positive psychology, and create better models and systems.
• Learning and applying entrepreneurial skills and mindset alongside a global community of like-minded and diverse peers.
• Connect with a powerful network of mentors and social entrepreneurs such as Jerry White, a leader of the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines; Tom Chi who helped invent Google Glass and the self-driving car; and Erin Schrode, the youngest person to run for U.S. Congress.

All Semester Incubator Scholars complete the program at Watson Institute’s campus in Boulder Colorado located in Chautauqua Park, a National Historic Landmark. The Watson Semester Incubator program is designed to equip the most promising members of the next generation with the skills, tools, and network they need to tackle world’s toughest social, economic, and environmental challenges. Watson Institute works with students on an individual basis regarding credit transfers back to their home institutions.