Venture CaféAs August continues to throw heat and muggy weather at us, we at the Venture Cafe are supplementing our vast supply of cold beer with events that explore alternative tools that start-ups can use for their own success. To that end, cafe visitors Michael Davies, Senior Lecturer of Systems Design and Management at MIT, and Rudi Seitz, creator of WhimWords and other projects that combine software and words, will be in the Cafe this week.
Michael Davies is running the second year of a course within the SDM program that lets students apply skills learned in the classroom with issues that real companies have to help students develop a more well-rounded approach to problem-solving. Davies’ course, called the Systems, Leadership and Management Lab (SLaM Lab), seeks to:
…tie together the lessons of system architecture and technology strategy while giving students practical experience working with real clients on problems of significant strategic importance. [...] Students would work together in small teams for outside companies on projects that involved real-world ambiguity and noise and that required them to discriminate between the problems as presented and underlying reality, rather than on neatly packaged problem sets or case studies. Perhaps most importantly, projects would be selected based on their potential to make a real impact for the client organization (SLaM site)
Think you might want to get SDM’s help for your business? You’re not the only one. The Venture Cafe was one of SLaM Lab’s premier projects, and helped to shape the curriculum for the lab. Michael will be in the cafe from 5-7pm to answer questions and to accept proposals from businesses for the opportunity to pitch the SLaM Lab class.
Rudi Seitz, an entrepreneur himself, will be helping the Venture Cafe development team test out a ‘social hack’ or icebreaker called WhimWords. This concept, also used at the Mozilla Drumbeat event in late July, lets people get to know each other by stimulating conversation through words. Cafe-goers are encouraged to put words on their name-tags to encourage the start of a new and interesting conversation. Words can carry any extent of normalcy or whimsy, depending on your choice. This ‘social hack’ experiment both encourages people to express themselves through new and interesting words and provides “a way of cutting past the aimless small talk and starting a conversation about something interesting,” says Dharmishta Rood, a Venture Cafe team member and organizer of Drumbeat Boston. Be sure to stop by the cafe on Thursday and learn more about Whimwords, and a thing or two about other cafe-goers, based on the words they choose. 
Finally, Bain Capital’s Virtual Innovation Center will be open at the Cafe on Friday from 3-5pm. Right now the BCVIC is operating as appointment only, so make sure you sign up and get your access to Bain’s great services. All slots for this Friday are booked, but contact them for a future date here.
Hope to see you in the cafe this week! Remember, we’re always open Thursdays from 3-8pm — be sure to stop by for fresh and useful conversation over a cup of coffee or a local craft beer.
