Reverse-engineering the Owen internship from the product we actually want to sell.
Anshi Bhadoria's note from the May 11 strategy meeting was load-bearing: you can't write a useful survey until you've defined what you're selling. This brief consolidates the product work to date — the five buyer categories already validated in the field, the three asset classes that underlie every offer, and the five product lines emerging from the May 11 conversation — then works backward to the survey the Owen team should run this summer.
EC doesn't have a marketing problem. It has a packaging and distribution problem. The assets are real — 189 advisors, 1,348 documented mentor sessions, $256M in alumni revenue, an 85% founder survival rate, an NPS of +85. The problem is none of it is organized into something a buyer can pick from a menu.
Today, Sam walks into a room and improvises. That works when Sam is there. It fails every other time. The Owen project exists to fix that — to turn improvised value into a documented, sellable, repeatable product line.
That sentence is the offer. Workshops, immersions, advisor sessions, train-the-trainer programs, and reverse pitches are the delivery vehicles. The Owen survey's job is to figure out which vehicles the market is most ready to pay for, who pays, and at what price.
Every sellable thing EC has falls into one of three buckets. Every proposal pulls from all three, weighted to what the specific buyer needs.
What only EC can give you. The 189-advisor network. Active cohort founders. The building. Sam. No other Nashville organization has this combination assembled and operational.
What EC knows that no one else does. Which founders succeed and why. Channel performance data. Program outcomes by stage, sector, and source. Currently underused in every external conversation.
What EC can do for a partner. Reverse pitches. Immersion visits. Curriculum delivery. Hosted office hours. Teaching slots. Experiences corporate innovation programs would pay six figures to build themselves.
We are deliberately not chasing Fortune 500 enterprise. BCG already owns that. Our target is the mid-market and SMB layer that has L&D budget but no in-house innovation function.
| Buyer Category | Who Pays | Who Consumes the Work |
|---|---|---|
| Mid-market Nashville employers | L&D budget, HR staff-development line, exec ed budget | Middle managers, biz dev, project managers — the layer between C-suite and entry-level engineering |
| SMBs with budget | Same pot of money currently spent on outside keynotes or sending one employee to Columbia continuing-ed (~$8K) | Cross-functional teams, often 8–25 participants |
| Universities & academic institutions | Provost office, entrepreneurship center director, dean | Faculty (who then teach students) |
| International / govt delegations | Trade development agency, fellowship grant, university budget | Visiting cohort of founders or ecosystem builders |
| Fortune 500 innovation teams | Innovation or corp-dev budget ($100K–$500K range) | Innovation team + relevant business unit |
Working hypothesis on audience: the highest-leverage participant is the middle of the org chart. C-suites are already entrepreneurial. Entry-level engineers are heads-down on tasks. Middle managers, biz dev, and operators are where founder-thinking most changes outcomes — and where L&D dollars actually get spent.
Five product lines, ranked by current proof. Each one is a candidate for the Owen team to validate — but two are already real revenue and two more are active proposals.
The model: A corporate sponsor poses a real business challenge. EC curates and prepares a slate of vetted founders. Founders pitch solutions to the corporate team. Sponsor pays EC; founders get exposure to a Fortune 1000 buyer.
Active proposal with Tractor Supply at $50,000. Format is proven through prior delivery.
Access (founder network) + Activation (event design and facilitation).
The model: A visiting cohort (founders, students, ecosystem builders, corporate teams) spends 1–5 days in Nashville on a structured itinerary curated by EC. Built around the buyer's stakeholder framework. Anchored in access to people most visitors cannot reach.
Delivered free as proof-of-concept for 13 MIT Foundry Fellows in April 2026. Photos, testimonials, and a documented template in hand. Next iteration is paid. Comparable university-run programs charge $20K–$50K+ per cohort.
Pure Access. Lowest marginal cost of any product on this list — the infrastructure is the city itself.
| Format | Duration | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Spotlight | 1 day | Corporate teams, board visits |
| Standard | 2.5–3 days | University cohorts, fellowship programs |
| Extended | 5 days | International cohorts, market-entry prep |
The model: EC licenses its curriculum and trains the buyer's instructors to deliver it under the buyer's brand. EC gets recurring annual fee. Buyer gets a nationally credible accelerator without building it from scratch.
Active proposal with Middle Tennessee State University at $50,000/year. Every Tennessee university with an entrepreneurship program is a prospect.
Customer = the university. Person trained = the professor. End user = the student. Sale is to the dean or entrepreneurship center director.
Intelligence (curriculum) + Access (annual touchpoints from EC staff).
The model: A half-day or full-day workshop for a single company's team. EC resets participants out of the employee mindset and runs them through an entrepreneurial exercise built on the same methodology that drives founder cohorts. The gold-standard reference is IDEO's corporate workshops. EC's differentiator is that it's grounded in actual founder outcomes — not theory.
Twice a year Sam runs four hours with ~20-something young professionals in Lakeland, Florida, mostly working at places like Publix HQ.
The point isn't the idea. It's that participants experience what it feels like to apply their actual skills against an open-ended problem — and recognize the work is more doable than it looked from their desk.
"Today you don't work at Bridgestone. Today you're the founder of a pork rind and lemonade company. What from your day-job experience applies? What from your life applies? Who's your first customer?"
The exercise forces participants to unstick from the security-badge mindset and apply what they already know to a problem with no pre-defined answer. Sales people learn what engineers can do for them. Engineers learn what biz dev needs from them. Everyone leaves with a different read on what their day job actually is.
Intelligence (curriculum) + Activation (facilitation) + Access (advisor or alumni founder may co-facilitate).
The model: EC has 189 active advisors — lawyers, accountants, marketers, exited founders — who currently volunteer their time to mentor founders. Productized version: an advisor spends a paid hour (or half day) with a corporate team on their area of expertise. EC matches advisor to need, manages logistics, takes a margin.
"You already mentor founders for free. Would you be open to a paid (or honorarium-based) session with a corporate team? It expands your visibility, gives you a new audience, and supports EC's revenue mission."
Sam's instinct: ~97% of advisors would say yes to something.
Pure Access. The advisor network is the product.
Naming the soft spots so they don't become surprises in market.
The survey is not market research in the abstract. It is a pricing-and-fit instrument for the product catalog above. Every question should map back to validating a specific product, a specific buyer, or a specific gap. Generic "innovation roadblocks" questions are interesting; product-validating questions are useful.
So findings are sliceable. Captured before the interview begins, from public sources where possible to keep interview time on substance.
What we tell the buyer the survey is about. Generates the white paper's narrative. Genuinely useful in its own right.
The substantive ask. For each product, present a short description and probe for purchase intent, price sensitivity, and buyer location inside the org.
Turns every interview into a pipeline asset for the EC development team that follows the interns.
The Owen team's final deliverable is not the white paper. It is the pipeline. The white paper is the artifact that makes the pipeline credible.
| Output | Who Uses It | When |
|---|---|---|
| 100 documented interviews in Bloomerang, tagged by industry, revenue, and interest level | EC development team | End of summer |
| White paper on the state of corporate innovation in Nashville (co-credited Owen / EC / Chamber / Innovation Alliance) | Sales conversations, media, board | Late summer / early fall publication |
| Go-to-market recommendation: which 1–2 products to lead with, who buys them, and at what price | EC leadership, board | Final intern presentation |
| A segmented sales-ready CRM: warm / interested / not applicable / future | Whoever EC hires as first revenue salesperson | Handoff at intern wrap-up |
| Final presentation to EC executive team and board | Sam, board | End of summer |
This brief is the raw material. The next version reflects your reactions and tightens before the interns start the week of May 25.