If you are interested in Venture X1 (MGMT 312H - Challenge X - Discovering meaningful problems worth solving) to begin this journey, X1 will be available again in Fall 2026.
Register your interest in it and stay connected to course announcements and development by registering your interest: Venture X1 pre-reg survey for Fall 2026
Venture X2 (MGMT 313H - Venture X2 | Solution X - Designing and building the product to address Challenge X) is open for registration for Spring 2026.
If interested in X2, please complete the Venture X2 - Spring 2026 - pre-reg survey, and you will then wait to hear back from Prof. Kostas Grigoriou (kostasg@purdue.edu) with his approval for you to register for Spring 2026 MGMT 313H - Venture X2 | Solution X - Designing and building the product to address Challenge, CRN 34797)
Venture X3 (MGMT 314H - Venture X3 | Model X - Attracting and assembling resources for launch) will be available for registration for Summer 2026.
We expect most of its available spots to be filled with students and teams participating in and advancing from Venture X2. We can waive this requirement in very special cases if you meet a high bar of venture concept validation and traction. Please contact Prof. Kostas Grigoriou (kostasg@purdue.edu) with any questions/inquiries. Venture X3 - Summer 2026 - pre-reg survey
Be a sophomore and above, and bring a ton of motivation to engage and learn. That's it. No particular experience or GPA necessary. Don't need to have an "idea" per se either. You may discover one early at Venture X1 or decide to contribute your effort and skill to someone else's. You will need an ownership mindset and a drive to roll up your sleeves and go out there and learn as much as you can to discover problems and solutions. If you are an Honors College student or if you have one in your team, you will have access to all the course's benefits above. If you are not and you don't have one in your team, contact Prof Kostas Grigoriou kostasg@purdue.edu to discuss your options.
Venture creation is a powerful engine for solving complex challenges, addressing pressing problems, and capitalizing on opportunities. Innovators leverage market insights, emerging technologies, and creative problem-solving to develop solutions that drive progress across industries. By identifying inefficiencies, unmet needs, or shifting consumer demands, new ventures introduce products, services, and business models that improve lives. Whether tackling global crises or refining everyday conveniences, venture creation fuels economic growth, fosters resilience, and accelerates transformative change in society.
But where do new ventures come from? How does one go from passion about a problem space to uncovering the clear meaningful problems worth solving or the actionable opportunities to pursue? Once a clear problem is defined, how does one discover and build the right viable and scalable solution for the problem to maximize impact? With a solution in hand, how do they attract and assemble the necessary resources and determine the right home for maximum value creation in a real-world venture?
Venture X is your opportunity to experience this venture creation journey firsthand, exploring a problem space of your choice – one that you are passionate or want to learn about. You will develop game-changing skills, a problem-solving mindset, and the confidence to tackle any complex problem in front of you. Venture building is an ideal platform to develop these future-ready qualities. It offers a hands-on, experiential learning environment, allowing you to identify market opportunities, design solutions, and bring them to life. Ultimately, it’s about creating adaptable, tech-savvy leaders who can leverage design, technology, and business to address challenges. It’s a dynamic framework for mastering the tools, mindsets, and strategies that will define the future of work and innovation.
Every high-impact venture starts with a deep understanding of the landscape — stakeholder needs, customer pain points, and systemic challenges. This requires rigorous observation, direct engagement with those affected, and continuous validation to uncover root causes rather than just symptoms. By deeply empathizing with customers and understanding market dynamics, one can identify opportunities that others overlook, laying the groundwork for innovative, high-impact solutions.
Students identify their Challenge X — a clearly defined, high-potential problem or opportunity that serves as the foundation for impact. No funding in X1.
With a clear challenge in hand, students explore a universe of potential solutions, rigorously testing and iterating to identify the most viable path forward. They experiment with models and products, rapidly prototype, and engage with stakeholders to refine Solution X — a validated product or service concept ready for further development. Funding up to $5K per team in X2.
A great solution isn’t enough — it needs a scalable path to impact. This course shifts the focus to assembling the team, resources, partnerships, funding, and strategy required to bring Solution X to market. Students explore different venture models — whether an independent startup, a corporate venture, or another structure — and work toward identifying the right home for launching Venture X, a real-world, scalable business or initiative. Funding up to $10K in X3.
You will learn the tools, mindsets, and strategies to succeed in the future of work and innovation. You will be asked to engage in complex problem solving. As a result, you will practice: critical thinking, immersion with challenges, teamwork, connecting a million dots, decision-making under uncertainty, adaptability, effective communication, engagement with a lot of humans, mastery of easy-to-use powerful tech tools, and an openness to play with and leverage any and all tools/resources available to you that can help you solve a problem.
You will earn the confidence to tackle whatever complex problem gets thrown in front of you. Having done it and practiced it a couple of times here, you will quickly develop that confidence to seek, uncover, and tackle the big meaningful challenges because you will know what to do with them. This will be perhaps the biggest benefit you will get to keep from this experience as your prepare for your future.
Proven methods and tools: your coach for this experience (Dr. Kostas Grigoriou) has worked with hundreds of founders, venture builders, or aspiring company builders and you will be given access to proven methods and guidance equivalent to those leveraged by premier venture studios (e.g., High Alpha, Alloy Partners, Forum Ventures) across the nation. Your experience in venture creation will be as real-world as it gets.
You will also have access to mentors and experts, as needed, with domain expertise in the specific concepts you are developing or the particular development stage of your concepts (e.g., product design, testing, etc.)
Funding will be available to cover your product development expenses in Venture X2 (up to $5K per team) and your living expenses in Venture X3 (akin to an internship)
Visits to and from Indy-based prominent investors who are active in venture creation, e.g., Elevate Ventures, High Alpha, and support from Purdue-connected mentor networks (e.g., SVBIG)
You will have time and space to explore. Yes, we will hit the ground running but we will not prematurely choose the direction for you. You will have time to wrestle with problems, start with your passion, find and follow leads, find your place in it.
It will be hands-on. Yes, we will equip you with methods and tools but it will be on you to learn and you will learn by doing it, by seeing how others in your team are doing it, by hearing how other teams are doing it.
You will eventually be in a multidisciplinary team, but we won’t assign you to one. Teams will form organically, we want you to gravitate and self-select into things that make you tick.
This will be a discovery journey, no one will know the right answer in advance; to most of our questions the answer will be “let’s go find out!”
Funding: In X2, students receive funding for product development expenses (up to $5K). In X3, they receive financial support akin to an internship (up to $10K).
Progression: Not all concepts from X1 will advance to X2, and the same applies from X2 to X3. Progression will depend on your own power to drive progress and earning traction in terms of customer and market validation to give us the collective confidence that your concept has an increasing likelihood of commercial success. Students may enter straight at X2 or X3 if their concept meets the entry criteria - to allow for students and teams who may have developed promising concepts outside of the Venture X experience.
Student-led concepts: The program prioritizes meaningful, student-driven concepts. While not every student will have their own, teams will form organically around the most promising ones.
Interdisciplinary & STEAM teams: Venture creation requires diverse skills — marketing, engineering, design, analysis, and more. No one person can do it all, so teams should ideally reflect this interdisciplinary approach.
Instructor permission: Enrollment requires approval to ensure motivation, readiness, and a diverse mix of students from all Majors (sophomores and above).
Grading: Grading emphasizes meaningful progress over outcomes. Discovering a concept that progresses will not necessarily lead to a good grade. On the flip side, discovering that a concept should not progress is not an indication of a bad grade either. All grade components will be mini-project-like, e.g., your ability to immerse into your market, validate problems and markets, present your findings with confidence, etc.
Re-takes: Students can repeat any course up to three times, allowing ideas to evolve and mature before progressing.
Learning: Instruction covers fundamentals, but most learning happens through hands-on experience, collaboration within teams, and insights from other teams’ progress and challenges.
