Validate Before You Automate
Customer discovery, market mapping, competitive intelligence, assumption testing, and AI-assisted research without confusing generated output for evidence.
Output: evidence-backed opportunity brief
Continuing Innovation, Technology and Entrepreneurship Education.
The original 2015 curriculum taught founders to validate an idea, build the company, protect it, find the right people, and raise capital. Those fundamentals still matter. The operating environment around them has changed completely.
CITEE is now a living curriculum for operators building with AI, competing for attention across search and answer engines, managing new trust and security risks, and turning Tampa Bay relationships into pilots, customers, talent, and capital.
Each module produces a decision, working artifact, or operating practice. The examples and tools change with the market; the outcome stays practical.
Customer discovery, market mapping, competitive intelligence, assumption testing, and AI-assisted research without confusing generated output for evidence.
Output: evidence-backed opportunity briefWhere AI creates real leverage, what should remain human, build-versus-buy decisions, workflow design, agents, data readiness, and measurable return on automation.
Output: AI opportunity and workflow mapBusiness models, pricing, margins, model and infrastructure costs, cash planning, unit economics, and the financial dashboard founders need before scale makes mistakes expensive.
Output: operating model and core metricsCompany structure, contracts, IP, privacy, cybersecurity, responsible AI, human oversight, vendor risk, and claims the business can actually substantiate.
Output: trust, risk, and governance checklistCo-founder alignment, equity, culture, hiring for judgment, combining people with AI capacity, advisory boards, and knowing which expertise must never be automated away.
Output: role, capacity, and decision-rights mapPositioning, sales architecture, community, partnerships, content, SEO, answer-engine visibility, customer proof, and a go-to-market system that survives platform changes.
Output: 90-day demand and visibility planBootstrapping, revenue, grants, debt, angels, venture capital, strategic investment, data-room readiness, dilution, and matching the funding instrument to the company.
Output: capital strategy and investor narrativeUsing Tampa Bay's programs, institutions, corporates, investors, universities, and convening spaces to create pilots and partnerships instead of collecting introductions.
Output: local execution and relationship mapCurrent topics are reviewed against operator demand, market shifts, and the HyLo Inno Map. AI is integrated across the curriculum, not isolated in a single trend session.
CITEE was previously delivered as an accredited program at Nova Southeastern University.
That history matters. CITEE was built as more than an event series: a structured learning experience with defined outcomes, applied instruction, and practitioners connecting business fundamentals to the realities of building a venture.
The current HyLo Inno offering is an independent continuation of the CITEE model and is not presented as a current Nova Southeastern University course.
Every CITEE session is led from experience, not theory. The instructors are operators, investors, and builders from inside the ecosystem the Map tracks, which means the content stays current with what Tampa Bay actually demands right now.