Making Dreams a Reality
What does it take to turn an idea into a real, commercially viable, and impactful product? Hackathons are ideal venues for testing new technologies, learning, and building relationships, but teams rarely reach the market after the event. The medVR Medical Accelerator addresses this gap, going beyond the initial excitement and caffeine. We’ve piloted a process that brings together technical talent, quickly introduces them to new technologies, and pairs them with clinical experts. In this talk, we will share our process and what we learned through guiding our first cohort of teams to develop practical, tangible prototypes to solve real medical challenges.
About the Speakers:
Y. Jenny Wang (PhD, MIT) is a multidisciplinary builder, strategist, and educator with a knack for turning nebulous ideas into actionable strategies and concrete products. Her experience spans early-stage business development, education, and product development. She has designed go-to-market strategies, organized and led VR and electronics workshops, and founded two companies. She is especially interested in helping people and teams move from idea to reality, whether that means translating complex concepts, designing processes, or creating new products.
Jenny is currently the Director of Innovation at medVR, where she leads program development for the medVR Medical Accelerator and guides teams in creating commercially-viable products to address real-world medical challenges. She is also a consultant and co-founded Clever Rock Labs to build products that blend software, hardware, and human interactions.
Steven Max Patterson is the Executive Director of medVR, a 501 (c) 3 non-profit that provides catalytic education in medical XR to the medical and technical community. Steven’s life experience is in engineering, project management, and technology journalism. He has written for leading tech publications Ars Technica, Quartz Fast Company, and IDG. He has organized technical open source and mobile technology communities for over two decades to educate and improve industry cooperation and communications. He has worked to expand the application of AR and VR into new fields and educate designers, engineers, and developers in spatial computing since 2014. He founded and led the AR and VR hackathon in 2015 at the MIT Media Lab.