This workshop will provide an overview of the different types of market research, how to analyze the competition, and the resources available at McGill to perform market research. Our market research librarian Amanda Wheatley will walk us through some of those resources using a market research canvas tool.
Wednesday, October 1, 2025 16:00to17:30
Wednesday, October 8, 2025 16:00to17:00
In this workshop, participants learn how to avoid the pitfalls of building slides that have too much information, take too long to process, and compete for audience attention. By understanding the limits of human visual and auditory language processing, participants learn how to work within them.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025 16:00to17:30
Led by a team of caseworkers from Compass Startup Legal Clinic, this workshop provides startup founders with a clear path through the legal landscape, offering insight on issues such as incorporation, governance, fundraising, and selecting the ideal legal structure.
Wednesday, October 29, 2025 16:00to17:30
This workshop will demystify and explain the various forms of intellectual property (IP), namely, patents, industrial designs, copyright, trademarks, and trade secrets, and when they are used. We will then do some actual patent searching using the DERWENT worldwide patent database.
Learning outcomes:
- Describe the various forms of IP, their protection, and use.
- Explain the patenting process.
- Use DERWENT to do your own patent searching.
Wednesday, November 12, 2025 16:00to17:30
This workshop will provide an overview on the customer discovery process and then delve deeper into how to conduct customer interviews and how to iterate on your business model canvas.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025 16:00to17:30
In this workshop, you'll learn how venture capitalists (VCs) typically value an early-stage innovation-driven venture. To do that we'll go through and give examples on how to forecast sales and how to set pricing, how to forecast expenses and how to figure out the amount of capital needed to finance your business. We'll also explore some of the more common sources of cash from both public institutions and private organisations.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025 16:00to17:30
Now that you have a grasp on how much money you need, this workshop will focus on the "deal". You'll learn what a venture capital fund is, its structure and how they operate, and what venture capitalists (VCs) look for in an early-stage innovation-driven venture. You'll also learn about the typical elements of a term sheet in connection with equity investments and simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs), and caveats when raising money. Finally, we'll explain how a capitalization table works and finish off with a brief overview of minority shareholder rights.