Big Bang! Workshop: Define the Customer and Market + Customer Calls

Define the Customer and Market + Customer Calls

Understanding the needs of your customer is one of the most important first steps in any new venture. Learn to identify your market segment and customers, and evaluate whether (and how much) those customers value your product, service or business solution. This session will help you develop questions to ask a potential customer in order to better validate your market, competitors and customers. You will be able to observe a real-time customer call in action.

Our guest speaker: Benjamin Finkelor is the executive director for the UC Davis Energy Efficiency Center (EEC), managing the organization's general operations, including establishing and ongoing oversight of strategic research collaborations between key faculty, staff and students at UC Davis. He also maintains and grows relationships with industry partners and informs the program's sponsors of RD&D progress.

Finkelor previously served in a variety of roles in the clean technology sector, including director of business development for a local clean energy startup, interim executive director for CleanStart (a Sacramento-based business incubator that supports local clean energy technology ventures and entrepreneurs), and as a cleantech analyst for the private equity arm of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). He earned an MBA at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, where he studied technology management. He also earned an emphasis in corporate environmental management through the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara.

This workshop will be livestreamed at https://livestream.com/UCDavis/BigBang2017-18.

This event is free but registration is requested.

About the Big Bang! Business Competition

The annual UC Davis Big Bang! Business Competition provides free workshops and other events from October through April and concludes with pitches from five finalist teams at an awards ceremony in May.

The competition is open to everyone and provides a forum for college and university students, faculty, staff and the the public to collaborate, develop and test business ideas. You'll find resources for mentorship, team creation, education, networking and financing — and the winners receive cash prizes!

Participating in the Big Bang! provides a rich immersion in starting your business venture. But...you don't have to compete to attend our workshops and build your entrepreneurial skills and network.

Learn more about the Big Bang!

Hosted by the UC Davis Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Big Bang! is the largest annual business competition in the Sacramento region.