Stanford Technology Ventures Program
Tina Seelig is the Executive Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program where she is responsible for the management, operations, and dissemination efforts of STVP. In addition, Tina is the Director of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network and the co-Director of the Mayfield Fellows Program. Tina also teaches a course in the Department of Management Science & Engineering on Creativity and Innovation.
Prior to joining STVP, Tina worked as an entrepreneur, management consultant, author, and scientist. Tina received her Ph.D. from Stanford University Medical School in 1985 where she studied Neuroscience.
Tina has worked as management consultant for Booz, Allen, and Hamilton, has written several popular science books and has designed a series of educational games. Her books include The Epicurean Laboratory, Incredible Edible Science, and a series called Games for Your Brain.
After Tina's first book was published in 1991, she became interested in how books are marketed. This led her to start a company designed to help match books with buyers. The product was a multimedia system for bookstore customers, called BookBrowser. BookBrowser was a kiosk-based system that allowed customers to identify books of interest. With the help of a team of engineers and graphic designers, Tina built the business and sold the company in 1993.
After selling her business, Tina worked as a Multimedia Producer for Compaq Computer Corporation. In this position Tina led a team of engineers, artists, scriptwriters, and education specialists through the design and implementation of a series of multimedia titles.
Tina's current position as Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program takes advantage of her technical background, in addition to her experiences as a manager, entrepreneur, and educator.
Related Links: stvp.stanford.edu
Last Updated: Fri, Jul 8, 2011
The re-combination of information is critical to developing new ideas, says STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig. This is the same reason innovation flourishes throughout the world in places where different people and ideas come together, such as ancient Alexandria and modern day San Francisco. But how do you teach this? Seelig shares how metaphors can be a powerful key to unlocking creativity through the combination of ideas.
Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, walks us through a life-changing hands-on classroom activity where students are taught to identify opportunities in nooks and crannies. With five dollars in seed funding and two hours of execution, she reports on the success of the exercise, and that many students reaped over one hundred times the initial investment (and others built a business without using any funding at all). Look for problems around you, says Seelig, and convert them into opportunities that create value. Embrace the opportunity to challenge assumptions and identify true cultural, social, or technological need.
Solving problems is an important aspect of entrepreneurship, but it's not the entire solution. Aspiring students also need to learn how to make their own good luck, says STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig. Hard work is imperative, but it doesn't always mean a fortunate outcome. It takes optimism, an open mind, shrewd networking skills, and the ability to find the veiled "million dollars in the room." Seelig cites a personal anecdote where, through perseverance and curiosity, she turned an encounter with a stranger over frozen lemonade in a grocery store into a long-lasting relationship and a helicopter ride to a private ski resort overseas.
This video montage is narrated by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director, Tina Seelig. It documents the diverse events that made up Entrepreneurship Week 2009 at Stanford University. Faculty, staff, and student groups from the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network put together this entire week of panels, workshops, mixers, and fairs.
This five minute video captures the essence of a two hour workshop in which student teams must reconstruct a jigsaw puzzle. Several puzzles are mixed together and the pieces distributed randomly to teams. The teams are urged to challenge assumptions, leverage resources, seize opportunities, pay attention to the market, and to create value. Every ten minutes the "market" changes. The video shows the set-up of the game, the action, and several minutes of debriefing with the teams. In this two hour exercise, students must develop a strategy, they need to collaborate and compete, they must negotiate and barter, they need to be creative, and they must divide the tasks at hand in order to create the most value.
Challenging the first and second wave of answers and assumptions helps creative teams move on to breakthrough ideas that appear in the third wave, says Dr. Tina Seelig, executive director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Here the lecture audience participates in an exercise that reveals a group's willingness to go with the first right answer, which can be major barrier to unleashing full creative potential.
If you had five dollars and two hours, what would you do to make as much money as possible? In this clip, STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig recalls a classroom exercise in creative thinking and entrepreneurship that posed this quandry to student teams. The results were manifold and varied, often taking advantage of locally needed services, niche markets, and valuable time. These in-class experiments contain many valuable lessons on creative thinking in the start-up realm, including skills, ideas, and innovation as assets that always lend value.
This interactive exercise is designed to give participants the experience of identifying opportunities, understanding customer point of view, rapid prototyping, and giving a pitch. In this exercise, participants interview one another about what they like/hate about their wallets. Based upon what they learn, they build new wallets for their customer.
Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director Tina Seelig shares rich insights in creative thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset. Her talk, based on her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20</i>, cites numerous classroom successes of applied problem-solving and the lessons of failure.
Stanford Technology Ventures Program's Executive Director Tina Seelig shares rich insights in creative thinking and the entrepreneurial mindset. Her talk, based on her 2009 book, What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20</i>, cites numerous classroom successes of applied problem-solving and the lessons of failure.
HarperCollins President and CEO Brian Murray discusses the shifting economics of publishing and how his company, which launches 12 new products per day, is working to succeed in this disruptive period. In conversation with STVP Executive Director Dr. Tina Seelig, Murray also talks about issues of digital rights management, his company's willingness to explore new business models, and how HarperCollins manages relationships with other major players in the space.
HarperCollins President and CEO Brian Murray discusses the shifting economics of publishing and how his company, which launches 12 new products per day, is working to succeed in this disruptive period. In conversation with STVP Executive Director Dr. Tina Seelig, Murray also talks about issues of digital rights management, his company's willingness to explore new business models, and how HarperCollins manages relationships with other major players in the space.
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson discusses the empowering experiences of her life and career in academia, government and private industry. In a conversation with STVP's Tina Seelig, Johnson identifies the strengths of each of these areas to affect change and innovation, and offers lessons in leading a life that can capitalize on new opportunities.
Former U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Kristina Johnson discusses the empowering experiences of her life and career in academia, government and private industry. In a conversation with STVP's Tina Seelig, Johnson identifies the strengths of each of these areas to affect change and innovation, and offers lessons in leading a life that can capitalize on new opportunities.
Director of Engineering Jocelyn Goldfein takes us on a trip inside the innovative culture of Facebook. In this illuminating conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, Goldfein explains why code wins arguments, employees must have the right to take risks, and how Facebook strives to remain a hungry, yet humble, company.