Two students looking at a laptop and sitting at a table outside on a sunny day.

Botha Chan Innovation Program

The Botha Chan Innovation Program offers Stanford graduate students an experiential learning opportunity to investigate and validate a for-profit venture idea over the summer.

Entrepreneurship is a journey best learned by doing. And startup ideas are best validated through an immersive process of understanding customer needs, then formulating and testing hypotheses about the product or service, value proposition, go-to-market strategy, and value creation model. Testing these hypotheses requires getting out of the building.

Key Benefits

The Botha Chan Innovation Program provides graduate students the opportunity to:

  • Spend eight weeks in this immersive experience evaluating a venture idea of your own creation. This may, or may not, lead to the launch of a startup company at some time in the future, and that is okay!
  • Gain experience, knowledge, and skills in assessing the viability of venture ideas.
  • Learn about the innovation processes taught across Stanford campus, which can lay the foundation for what you will learn or build upon what have you learned in one of Stanford’s many experiential entrepreneurial courses, such as Startup Garage, Launchpad, or Lean Launchpad.

Who Should Apply

The program is open to active graduate students from any school at Stanford. Students may apply for the stipend as an individual or as a team with novel, for-profit, venture ideas that have the potential to generate economic growth.