McGill University’s Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship is fast approaching its deadline for applications for its LaunchPad startup program, a 10-week initiative for student teams looking to validate their ideas outside the classroom.

The program is, like most of the Dobson Centre’s offerings, free and open to all McGill students, faculty and staff. That means while other members of the team can come from outside McGill, at least one founder must be affiliated with the school.

The deadline for applications is September 9.

The McGill Lean LaunchPad calls itself a “hands-on program that immerses student teams by having them test their business ideas and hypotheses outside the classroom. Inside the classroom, it deliberately trades off lecture time for student/teaching team interaction.”

Both Kiffin andKey2Access went through the program in fall 2015, something Dobson Centre’s Renjie Butalid said the program is proud of.

The program will seek to mimic academician Steve Blank’s Lean Startup Methodology curriculum. In doing so it will cap the program at seven teams.

The action begins on September 29 while final presentations open to the public will take place on December 5.

Those charged with executing the program, wrote the Dobson Centre, will be “experienced alumni and mentors from the Montreal community and beyond, prize winners from the McGill Dobson Cup and graduates of the McGill X-1 Accelerator, and professors from the Desautels Faculty of Management.”

LaunchPad will use the “flipped classroom” approach, where short video lectures are viewed by students at home before the class session, while in-class time is devoted to exercises, projects, or discussions. The program’s video lectures will be available via Udacity: How to Build a Startup, The Lean LaunchPad. Meanwhile, in-class lectures will instead be in-class discussions about the startup/business hypotheses. The facilitator will also help students and their teams achieve milestones and guide them throughout the LaunchPad process.

For those who wish to apply they can do so here.

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