OTT Summer 2021 Entrepreneurship Program Recap

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) launched its inaugural student intern program in June 2021. The mission of this program is to train the next generation of entrepreneurs innovating at the intersection of technology and business, as well as recruit talent to the US National Labs to advance commercialization. 

In the first iteration of the program, 14 student interns were matched with 14 lab technologies. Each was assigned a mentor from the National Labs to guide them through understanding and advancement of the technology, as well as mentorship from Energy I-corps (EIC) and OTT teams to develop a business plan for the technology. The EIC curriculum consists of 10 asynchronous videos on important topics in commercialization, spanning market sizing, business models, customer discovery and more. Each of these lectures is also accompanied by a hands-on 1-hour workshop instructed by the DOE EIC Mentors.  

Deliverables from the student interns were centered around weekly homework, which had the students apply the lesson from their EIC work towards their technology. These weekly homework assignments culminated in a an individual presentation on their work and an investment memo detailing their commercialization plan. Additionally, the students were paired into teams to create and deliver 10 minute investor pitch decks around the four most promising technologies in the cohort. These pitch decks were judged by a panel of experts in technology commercialization.  

Get to know our interns and the projects they worked on in the video below!

Thank you to all of our interns for their hard work this summer. Learn more about OTT’s Entrepreneurship Program and updates on the Spring 2022 session here.