Case Study

Building an Innovation Lab From Nothing: $325K Raised, 200+ Students Shipped

Founded and scaled a university innovation lab from zero, bridging academic research and commercial productization for over 200 students.

Lab Director & Visiting Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University September 2018 to December 2020 University innovation lab, founded from zero Program BuildingUX Research
$325K
Raised to found and scale the lab
200+
Students mentored in applied research
$22K
First sponsored capstone secured

Situation

There was no lab. Just an idea: students build better AR/VR and mobile products working on real problems with real constraints, not academic exercises. No budget, no space, no industry relationships to make it happen yet.

What I Built

  • Founded and scaled an innovation lab from zero, raising $325K and mentoring 200+ students through AR/VR and mobile prototypes that shipped, not just demoed.
  • Applied product-led growth experimentation to student-facing platforms, treating the lab's own tools as products worth measuring and iterating on.
  • Bridged academic research with commercial productization, securing $22K for the program's first industry-sponsored capstone project, the deal that proved outside companies would trust student teams with real problems.
  • Championed composable service design, building reusable components multiple student projects could leverage. No team had to start from zero.
  • Taught across the full stack of the discipline, Mixed Reality, Advanced HCI, Senior Capstone, Intro to UX, UX Studio, Intro to Networking, and Applied UX, mentoring students who went on to careers in SaaS, EdTech, and cybersecurity.
Zero budget 2018 $22K first sponsored capstone proof it worked $325K total raised 2020 200+ STUDENTS MENTORED
One $22K deal built on trust, not a track record, opened the door to everything that followed.

The Hardest Problem

Getting the first outside company to trust a brand-new academic lab with a real problem and real money, with no track record to point to. That first $22K sponsored capstone happened because the pitch was built around what the company would get, not what the students would learn. Everything after that got easier. There was finally proof it worked.

Outcome

$325K raised to build a program that didn't exist before. Over 200 students mentored through applied research and real product delivery, many moving directly into SaaS, EdTech, and cybersecurity careers. The composable service design approach outlived any single cohort. It became infrastructure the next group of students built on, not something they had to reinvent.

Skills Demonstrated

Program building from zero, fundraising and sponsor development, mentorship at scale, curriculum design bridging theory and practice, AR/VR and mobile product development.

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