The Graduate School of Business’s (GSB) Ignite program concluded its nine-week certificate program in innovation and entrepreneurship in Beijing this past weekend as students presented their final venture projects to a panel of industry leaders and expert investors.

Stanford Ignite began their new international programs in Santiago (which ended in October) and Beijing this year, in addition to a special on-campus offering for 9/11 Veterans. Additional programs will be offered in New York and Sao Paulo in 2015.

According to the Managing Director of Stanford Ignite, Bruce Taylor, the certificate program began on campus in 2006 when President Hennessy and current GSB Dean Garth Saloner, recognized a gap between the research being pursued in the School of Medicine and the School of Engineering, and graduate students’ abilities to translate their work into successful businesses.

“The goal of our program is to give our participants the skills to formulate, develop, evaluate and ultimately commercialize their ideas,” Taylor said. “In other words, the purpose of the program is to give them the skills they need to bring their ideas forward and create successful ventures.”

Ignite’s curriculum is broken down into two parts: a classroom component and a project component. In the classroom, students learn core business skills such as operations and accounting, and applied skills such as negotiation and design thinking. The project component consists of a team venture project in which students are placed in teams of five to seven people to develop business plans for ideas that were submitted at the beginning of the program.

One such business that emerged out of Stanford Ignite is Recovery Record, a mobile app created by clinical psychologist Jenna Tregarthen, a 2011 summer participant in Stanford Ignite. The app helps people with eating disorders monitor food intake and participate in therapeutic assignments. Currently, Recovery Record has over 300,000 users and around 10,000 practitioners.

“I came to Ignite with the will and Ignite showed me the way,” Tregarthen said. “It’s very empowering to know that I didn’t have to have many years of expertise in marketing and business development to actually make this idea succeed.”

According to Stanford Ignite Faculty Director Yossi Feinberg, the program content has evolved over the years into a more experiential learning process.

“We have a more structured process for the team venture projects, and the mentorship component has been strengthened to enhance industry specific guidance for the teams,” Feinberg said.

After running the program on-campus for a number of years, Stanford Ignite piloted programs in Bangalore and Paris in 2013. Luckily, immersive video conferences helped students have face-time with professors.

“[The new Stanford Ignite locations] are essentially the same programs with one slight variation in that for the different global markets that we serve, we bring in experts in local IP [intellectual property] law to talk about the nuances of how IP law applies in their particular country relative to what we have here in the United States,” Taylor said. “We also bring in guest speakers from the local community who are either successful investors or successful entrepreneurs themselves to share their stories of how they were able to achieve their success.”

By 2015, Stanford Ignite will teach its certificate curriculum in seven domestic and international locations. Stanford Ignite has a growing worldwide alumni network of over 1,200 “igniters.”

“[Stanford Ignite does] a really good job at selecting candidates who are really motivated and passionate about the work that they’re doing,” Tregarthen said. “So as long as you have that community and you have the set lectures and same core components, I think the program can be equally impactful whether it’s on Stanford campus or elsewhere.”

Contact Alexandra Nguyen-Phuc at amn17 ‘at’ stanford ‘dot’ edu.