Gordon is a professor and director of digital innovation at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Gordon: What’s working is this sort of creating of a community of journo-tech-geeks at the student level. … We’ve had these classes for 30 years, actually, where we, in the MSJ [Master of Science in Journalism] program, we do product development. We call them publishing projects, innovation projects; those are the classes I’ve taught more than anything else. This is what brought me to Medill: the opportunity to work with students to be ahead of the industry—which we were and have been, by and large. Including, we were teaching entrepreneurial journalism before anyone else even talked about it. Jeff Jarvis, who I think coined the term, learned it when he worked on a project with us [while he was at Advance Publications].

The problem is that the classes actually broke down for a number of reasons. One of them was that you couldn’t intellectually justify having a product development class that was linked to a single platform. That meant that you had to have an amazing array of faculty to coach and teach, so it got way too expensive. The students also changed; they did not believe us when we told them, for good reason, that if they did this you will get a job. The general attitude among some students coming into our program is that they don’t have any confidence that there is a deep dive they should make into any one thing, so they learn a little bit about a lot of things. Which, of course, is the wrong thing to do.

One of the things that worked for those classes is we had them eight hours a day, four days a week. Now they resist that; they’ll take another class or whatever. It used to be we had two models of how to come up with the ideas. One of them was for the students to come up with their own ideas, which most of the faculty hated because we got a series of ideas for 20-something women because that’s who was in the class, and we thought we were teaching them principles to do the research that wasn’t about them. We migrated to a model of giving them a target market, sometimes with a client and sometimes not, which the students didn’t like so it kind of tanked.

When you added that up, we had to do something different. I was chairing the committee that was overseeing these projects, and one of the last things we did before [the new dean] came was write a document that says, “Here’s what we think we should do.” The end of it was we need to figure out what the rest of the university is doing in this space and see if we can leverage it for us. I went over and talked to a guy named Mike Marasco, who runs the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation housed within the engineering school.

DL: Interesting that it’s not part of the business school.

Gordon: Exactly. Our engineering school dean is a very interesting fellow. He’s an artist and an engineer. He talks about the two sides of the brain and has a very strong design piece. Anyway, over the past four or five years, the Farley Center, which is highly funded, has been rolling out an ongoing series of NUvention classes. There are now five or six of them. There’s one for nanotechnology, one for medical devices, social impact, etc., and they’re all getting branded NUvention, and the dean of engineering goes out and talk about them all the time. One of the beauties of the model they’ve developed is that it assumes that a significant amount of coaching, teaching and feedback will come from alumni, which is quite brilliant.

One of the classes has been called NUvention Web. It’s actually the one class that Marasco is the lead faculty member for, along with a guy named Todd Warren, who worked for Microsoft for 20 years. He lives in Seattle, but he comes in and teaches classes. It’s a two-quarter class, which is 24 weeks or so in our scenario. He comes in every other week and Skypes in almost every week. He’s on the [Northwestern] board [of trustees], so he’s got lots of reasons to be around. The third guy is a guy named Steve Olechowski, who was one of the founders of FeedBurner, which was sold to Google. He’s now back in Chicago doing a bunch of entrepreneurial investment things. So anyway, I went and sat down with Mike to learn more about it, and we immediately hatched a plan to attempt to incubate out of that very class a NUvention Media class. What we did was find five MSJ students who wanted to be part of the NUvention Web, and I became a faculty member for it, and got some help from some other faculty as well, and next year we will launch NUvention Media.

There are a number of questions right now, in my mind, that I don’t know the answer to, about how does NUvention Media need to be different than this? NUvention Web is doing so many cool things right. First of all, they accept students from any school in the university. Almost every team had at least one Kellogg business student and at least two computer science students on it. Teams are five or six students and everyone from a freshman to a Ph.D. student, although there aren’t any Ph.D. students this year, and MBA, MSCS [master’s in computer science], and MSJ, etc. It’s very much run almost like an accelerator … these students are expected to start with an idea and build something. It’s a “lean startup” model. We use those materials and Steve Blank’s Stanford “Lean LaunchPad” course. Because every team has developers on it, they can build the first week and change it the next week, which is the whole idea. We just had the pitches Tuesday for the 10 teams, and there are pitches the end of the first quarter as well. One of them has $24,000 in revenue. Half the teams have an app in the app store already. Half of them have some revenue already. A couple of them are doing accelerator programs this summer.

DL: What’s the best idea that’s come out of it so far?

Gordon: We just finished ranking them. By the way, there were a dozen high-powered entrepreneurs and venture capitalists at final pitches. We just finished ranking the 10, based on the feedback from them and us. The top two, one of the teams I advised, called Divit. It’s an app to make it really easy and painless for roommates to share expenses and pay each other back with only their mobile phones. The other one is much less well developed and was rated highly because of the merit of the idea and the one clever thing they did. Both of these teams were doing something different at the end of the first term. They did the first pitches, got feedback and decided to do something totally different the second quarter. The other team started off with an idea of one of the Kellogg students had which is a wearable patch that transmits things like heart rate, etc. They discovered there wasn’t a market in that for humans but that racehorses might need it, so that got them interested in veterinary and animals. When they pivoted, they pivoted to veterinary medicine. They discovered that it was nearly impossible to know how much it’s going to [cost] to treat your dog because it’s not published. There’s no transparency in pricing. In addition to that, there’s also information in addition to pricing that’s not easy to get your hands on like certification and Yelp reviews and things. They landed on transparency in veterinary care. They started local calling vets to get pricing and quickly determined that it would take forever. They launched a website called ismyvetrippingmeoff.com and invited people to tell them what they were paying for procedures. Not only was it generating data, but it also pissed off the vets.

There’s not much there yet, but they are going to do a summer accelerator project. Steve Olechowski is putting some of his own money into that one because he thinks the idea is so sound. One of the students on the team is an MSJ studying business reporting who is in this class because she thought learning how a startup works would give her something she could cover, which I thought was smart.

DL: So how are you going to make the media class different from the Web class?

Gordon: My plan for next year is to co-locate it with the Web class like this time. I don’t want to make too rigid of a definition [for media]. And the Web class is building a pipeline that’s making more computer science people want to be in this class, so I don’t want to rebuild that pipeline. Essentially, what I sold the faculty on is for next year, the NUvention Web class will be called NUvention Web and Media and not worry about funding. Computer science students and Kellogg students already have, not a prerequisite but it’s a class that a lot of them take before taking NUvention. We want to do that for our students. We are going to take an existing class and say if you are thinking of going into NUvention, this class will be part of that and you will need to do some things in this class to prepare. They fall into two categories: one is doing research, and the other is gelling some teams to work with in NUvention, so those will be the two goals. The process for idea generation is very informal. Essentially, during the last half of the quarter, there are a series of events like the Kellogg entrepreneurship day and NUvention. They essentially invite any students to come pitch ideas and then rally a group of students around the idea as well as apply to be in the class. The faculty then look at it all and match up the students into teams. They have to understand that whatever idea they come in with probably won’t be the one they end with.

The part that I’m fretting about and the problem I have to solve is that the metrics for assessing success for a media startup are going to look different than a Web or mobile app.

DL: Why?

Gordon: A couple of reasons. One is, most media startups need content, and content is expensive and it doesn’t scale. There are ways to make it more scalable and to prototype content without having a lot of it. A five- or six-person team isn’t going to generate much content while they are developing a business idea.

DL: If you are talking about media in terms of news of information, why isn’t the vet project a news-and-information project?

Gordon: Absolutely correct. That’s the other reason I have to jump ahead of myself. Half the teams in the class, if they were doing everything right, would have a much stronger content piece than they have right now.

DL: There’s data in all this somewhere.

Gordon: Everyone needs content to describe their company and their business, acquire customers and all that. Teaching content in NUvention Web is a piece of cake, and I did that. I don’t want to be too rigid in defining things, but I know for a fact that some of the journalism students are going to come in excited about the idea of starting a publication of some kind. And that’s fine, and I hope we get some of those. They will have to be very smart about how they do that. How much content can they create and curate?

There’s plenty of room there. The bigger issue is we have the wrong investors [advising the student teams]. They are willing to back large numbers of potentially promising startups with small amounts of money because if they get a big home run, they win. That’s how the industry works. The big home run scales dramatically here.

DL: The simpler the better.

Gordon: That’s why they loved the app for roommates to share expenses. Totally understood the need for it, and there’s a huge market for it. By the way, once you deal with college students, there’s a bunch of other people in the same boat and also a bunch of other reasons why people may need to share expenses. It’s a promising idea, and the team was great. What I need to do this summer [summer of 2014] is create the new NUvention Media syllabus….

I have to find some more diverse and media savvy entrepreneur investor types that can play the role that these guys have. I have to figure out what to do with the run-up class to where we will be encouraging students to generate ideas of research for team members, create a syllabus for this that looks like it makes some sense. And the other thing is I have to define what media is.

DL: Can we back up a minute? How did this program start?

Gordon: The original story is a group of students wanted to do a startup and went to the faculty for help. They didn’t have a course or anything, but they went to some alumni who were entrepreneurs and asked them for advice. It just expanded from there.

DL: Is it hard to get into the class? Is it overenrolled?

Gordon: There are more applicants than slots. But again, there are multiple classes. This particular class is the only one I have any understanding of.

DL: So it expands to available resources in terms of students.

Gordon: That’s one of the conversations that we had about the NUvention Media thing is that at some point we just add another section. There’s no reason not to do that.

The other beauty of this, in the fall quarter, which is the run-up quarter to the NUvention, it happens that we have this class where I and a computer science faculty member have journalism and computer science students working together. The fall is for undergraduate journalism students. There could be ideas that could come out of that class that could go straight into NUvention. And there could be teams and things that come out of that class. So, that is a happy point.

DL: Part of what you are doing is you’re leveraging your institution’s strengths. Not every institution has the same access.

Gordon: No, they don’t. And if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me about collaborating with computer science, I’d be a rich man.