How JP Cooper turned research skills into entrepreneurial thinking
Experience Ventures helped this University of Alberta student learn how to turn ideas into products
JP Cooper first heard about Experience Ventures through a Discord announcement at the University of Alberta’s Student Innovation Centre.
Experience Ventures is a national program powered by the Hunter Hub of Entrepreneurial Thinking and funded in part by the Government of Canada’s Innovative Work-Integrated Learning Initiative. The program’s goal is to enable college and university students to practice entrepreneurial thinking alongside real-world innovators.
At the time, Cooper was an undergraduate student.
“I saw the stipend and the opportunity,” he says. That was enough motivation to gather a team of friends and register for an event.
“We had zero idea what was going to happen.”
What they did have was a diverse mix of academic backgrounds in chemistry, biology, psychology, and computer science.
Their first event focused on a smart-city challenge, asking students to explore how technologies like the Internet of Things could improve urban life. Cooper’s team developed a concept and pitch that ultimately took first place.
“The biggest benefit for me, coming from a more scientific or academic research-based background, was learning how to develop a product and then pitch the product so that judges or potential customers would actually understand what it is,” he says.
Encouraged by the experience, they returned the following year for a cleantech challenge — and won again.
Peter Atrazhev, co-founder and CFO of Edmonton-based startup T-Rex AI, served as a judge at the cleantech challenge and has also hosted Experience Ventures students within his own company.
He says programs like Experience Ventures provide something students rarely get in the classroom: the chance to try entrepreneurship in a low-risk environment.
“The students are actually really good,” he says. “It challenges them a lot because they’re going through a process they’re just not familiar with.”
That process compresses months of entrepreneurial learning into just a few weeks.
“They start with problem-space thinking, then move into solutions and ideation,” Atrazhev says. “And then they’re pushed to do public speaking. For a lot of people, that’s a big push outside their comfort zone.”
“A majority of the work that propelled us to the first-place finish in both years was done probably in the last few hours before the pitch,” Cooper says, attributing his team’s ability to distill complex concepts to their research backgrounds. “We were able to condense papers that took months or years of research into about one sentence on a slide that really conveyed a point.”
Atrazhev believes that most young people should be given the chance to try entrepreneurship. Early in his own journey, a modest startup grant helped launch what eventually became T-Rex AI.
“The only reason I’m an entrepreneur is because Startup Edmonton had a $10,000 program,” he says. “We applied because we wanted $10,000 — and now I run my own company.”
Today, Cooper is in the second year of a master’s program in pharmaceutical sciences, applying machine learning to investigate toxicological patterns in electronic health records. He plans to pursue a career in either machine learning engineering or software development after, but says Experience Ventures has shaped how he approaches new opportunities.
“Entrepreneurial thinking is a requirement to succeed in the AI world,” he says.
To keep those skills sharp while he completes his degree, he still finds time to participate in problem-solving competitions with his Experience Ventures teammates.