Workshops

How do you find your market, tell your story, develop your product and lead? The Startup Launchpad hosts workshops throughout the year to help startuppers create the company of tomorrow.
Bubble workshop

Previous workshops


23 November 2021 with Grégoire Thomas, VP Marketing & Growth of Doctrine.

Do you have a revolutionary product? A great market opportunity? Fantastic! But how do you make sure you lay the foundations for growth? How will your future customers find you? 

In this workshop, we will discuss the thorny issue of Go to Market (Product-Market Fit, Product-Channel fit and Channel-Model fit) and how to conceptualise it to ensure you are laying the foundations for growth.

Bio
Grégoire Thomas has a dual expertise in marketing & growth. He was Growth Marketing & Product Marketing Manager of Infinijob Group and Head of Marketing & Growth of Kameleoon. Today, he is VP Marketing & Growth of Doctrine.

28 May 2021 with Vicky Nef, Global Head of Consumer Insights · ‎Logitech

In this workshop you will learn how to get feedback from the people you are designing your product or service for. You will be given simple tools to help you get started and get into the habit of learning and testing with people. You will spend about half your time learning, and the other half applying this theory to your own challenges with your startup. The goal is that by the end of the 90 minute session, you know who you want to test with and when!

Short Bio
Vicky Nef has been at Logitech in Lausanne for almost 10 years, and has over 20 year experience in consumer and user research fields more broadly. She runs a small team of researchers whose job is to make sure that innovation teams stay grounded in the reality of other people’s lives. With a Masters degree in Psychology, she applies this theory to the tricky business of measuring people’s enthusiasm for new ideas before they are full ready to go to market

03 May 2021 with Malachy Spollen is a Senior Director of Design at Logitech

Prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for. Rapid testing with real users can help you identify what has potential, what doesn’t work and spot ways to improve.

Prototyping isn’t about being precious, it’s about learning iteratively, about focusing on just the critical elements at any stage and about helping you build the confidence that the work you’re doing will deliver real value when launched.

This short workshop will dive into prototyping with real world methods and examples so you can discover the practical benefits of prototyping at any stage of development for hardware, software and services.

Bio of the speaker : Malachy Spollen is a Senior Director of Design at Logitech. With almost 30 years industry experience Malachy has worked for LG Electronics, founded an award winning UX Design agency Frontend and been the R&D Director for Arconics an aviation industry software startup that was acquired by ViaSat.
With experience in Hardware, Software, Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Malachy is currently leading Future.Sooner, an initiative to help Logitech uncover significant product, portfolio and business opportunities at a 5+ year horizon and accelerate them to begin to deliver within 3 years. Malachy is also leading internal Design 3.0 transformation projects that drive towards Logitech’s goal of becoming a “third generation” design company over the next few years.

21 April 2021 with Ilina Catana, Art director at Studio Catana

Wednesday 8 July 2020 with Malachy Spollen
Head of Future.Sooner at Logitech

Prototyping is an incredibly effective way to make ideas tangible, to learn through making, and to quickly get key feedback from the people you’re designing for. Rapid testing with real users can help you identify what has potential, what doesn’t work and spot ways to improve.

Prototyping isn’t about being precious, it’s about learning iteratively, about focusing on just the critical elements at any stage and about helping you build the confidence that the work you’re doing will deliver real value when launched.

This short workshop will dive into prototyping with real world methods and examples so you can discover the practical benefits of prototyping at any stage of development for hardware, software and services.


About Malachy Spollen:

Malachy Spollen is a Senior Director of Design at Logitech. With almost 30 years industry experience Malachy has worked for LG Electronics, founded an award winning UX Design agency Frontend and been the R&D Director for Arconics an aviation industry software startup that was acquired by ViaSat.

With experience in Hardware, Software, Design, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Malachy is currently leading Future.Sooner, an initiative to help Logitech uncover significant product, portfolio and business opportunities at a 5+ year horizon and accelerate them to begin to deliver within 3 years. Malachy is also leading internal Design 3.0 transformation projects that drive towards Logitech’s goal of becoming a “third generation” design company over the next few years.

28 May 2020 with Dominique Ara-Zwahlen

Have you ever felt disappointed by a teammate’s input into a project? Have you ever struggled with how to lead your team? – or how to manage relationships with your stakeholders?

As an entrepreneur, you need to deal with technical matters and people in all sorts of situations. You need to be a leader. It can be difficult to prioritise and pay the same amount of attention to everything. Over the course of this workshop, Dominique will guide and support you in:

  • strengthening your leadership skills
  • setting the ground rules and explaining expectations upfront to avoid misunderstanding and frustrations
  • managing teams and stakeholder relationships outcomes elegantly using the Performance Development Model
  • using feedbacks that energize people to go the extra mile

About Dominique Ara-Zwahlen:

Soft-skills energizer and transformational leadership expert, Dominique is on a mission to bring relationship before tasks in organizations to enhance the quality of business outcomes and personal fulfillment. She teaches how to strengthen soft skills, inspire, and lead teams.

26 May 2020 with Imogen Hitchcock

Do you find communications difficult? Are you unsure on how to describe your project and why it matters? Are you looking for some simple tips to help you communicate in a way that’s engaging and influential to the people who matter?

Don’t worry, help is at hand! Over the last 20 years, the world has changed. The internet, 24-hour news, social media… our customers are cynical and can pick and choose what what they believe. 

But what does that mean for us? It means we have to change the way we communicate. We need to share information that’s relevant, meaningful, and engaging. We need to share ideas. We need to influence and drive behaviour through what we’re saying and how we say it. 

This short workshop will look at the theories around effective communication and provide a step-by-step framework to help you develop a compelling and influential story about your project. 


About Imogen Hitchcock:

Imogen is passionate about storytelling. Her mission is to change the way companies tell their story and help them cut through the noise and influence change. Imogen has over 15 years’ communications experience working in high-profile and fast-paced environments across both the public and private sector. She specialises in communications strategy and planning, message development, and employee engagement.

20 May 2020 with Sharon Tal-Itzkovitch

Finding the best market for your innovation is a tricky one. Start on the wrong path and you’ll waste money, time, and effort. And the, of course, there’s always the worry you’ll make an irreversible decision which’ll lock you in…

Making the right choice about your focus market is not only fundamental to generating sales and creating value, but also shapes the DNA of your venture.

This session presents a structured approach for identifying, evaluating and prioritizing market opportunities. It is based on the Market Opportunity Navigator – a simple and solid framework to help you to reveal your best market opportunities. Together we’ll figure out where to play, and how you can move forward with confidence.


About Sharon Tal-Itzkovitch:

Sharon helps entrepreneurs and managers identify, evaluate and prioritize market opportunities for their business. Co-author of ‘Where to Play’ she helps companies choose a promising strategic focus and move forward with confidence. Sharon is a co-founder and former executive director of the Entrepreneurship Center at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and a senior lecturer on marketing and entrepreneurship.

Contact

These workshops are organized by the Startup Launchpad Team, part of the EPFL Vice Presidency for Innovation.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with us at [email protected] – please mention “workshop” in the subject.