Management, Entrepreneurship, Technology and Innovation Academy

• Identify a user need and define a problem worth solving

• Develop a technology-based startup concept with a team

• Build and refine a prototype at the Jacobs Institute

• Test product assumptions and incorporate feedback

• Connect technical decisions with marketing and venture strategy

• Pitch your startup concept to experienced venture investors

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Define a user-centered problem and propose a technology-based solution

• Create and improve a prototype using research and feedback

• Present and defend a venture concept using product and business evidence

You’ll leave with your team’s prototype, venture pitch presentation, and a clearer way to describe your role in developing the idea.

Technology innovation requires more than an inventive idea. Teams must understand a real need, build something that addresses it, and find out whether their assumptions hold up. Prototyping and user feedback turn a proposal into something students can investigate and improve.

A venture pitch adds decisions about customers, value, and how a solution might work as a business. Explaining a design to investors helps students connect technical thinking with evidence, teamwork, and persuasive communication. These skills apply to further study and projects in engineering, entrepreneurship, product design, management, and technology.

If you enjoy exploring how technology works, imagining new products, or asking what makes a startup succeed, this course offers a way to combine engineering and business thinking. You’ll work with a team to solve a practical problem, develop a prototype, and explain your venture in a final pitch.

Be ready for collaborative design work, feedback, and active participation. An interest in both technical and business questions matters more than having a finished startup idea.

Seats in this course are limited. To attend the program, students undergo a selective application review and admissions process:

December 16 - Early admissions deadline; first decisions released by January 15

January 27 - Round 1 admissions deadline; decisions released by February 15

March 24 - Round 2 admissions deadline

Based on students surveyed in Summer Discovery’s 2026 UC Berkeley MET program.

UC Berkeley gives students in the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Innovation Academy a setting where engineering, business, and the Bay Area’s culture of experimentation naturally intersect. The academy’s connection to Berkeley’s engineering and business perspectives makes the campus more than a backdrop: it gives students a credible environment for examining how technical ideas become useful products, ventures, and solutions.

Students learn alongside peers, become more independent, and experience the pace and possibility of university life. The wider Bay Area adds context from research, technology, entrepreneurship, culture, and public debate without substituting hype for the academic work. For families, the value is the combination of serious interdisciplinary exploration, community, and a student gaining clearer insight into whether engineering, innovation, entrepreneurship, or technology management genuinely motivates them.

Over three weeks, students attend class for 6 hours per day, over twelve class days:

• Monday, June 21: Arrival Day

• Tuesday, June 22 - Friday, June 25: Class

• Monday, June 28 - Friday, July 2: Class

• Monday, July 5 - No class, 4th of July observed

• Tuesday, July 6 - Thursday, July 8th: Class

• Friday, July 9: Departure Day