Lunch pitches
Lunch Pitches are a series of short talks and discussion organized by IceLab as a way to bridge gaps between scientific disciplines and encourage new collaborative efforts for the love of launching and landing new ideas. Lunch Pitches help you bridge gaps between scientific disciplines and encourage new collaborative efforts.
IceLab organizes the Lunch Pitches every year in the spring, inviting Umeå researchers to connect with each other.
Think of the pitches as an idea collider. You’ve been working on a project just recently, or it’s something you’ve had on the back burner but haven’t been able to get off the ground. Take the essence of your work, slim it down to its core question and present that to a diverse, interested interdisciplinary gathering all happily munching on free sandwiches. You take 5 minutes presenting and then the rest of the lunch hour letting the ideas flow in between you and the audience in small group discussions. The most important thing is to reach a broad audience with a question, challenge, or method that will engage as many as possible. The Pitches were inspired by the NABC method to communicate ideas out of the Stanford Research Institute.
Save the dates for 2025:
Dates: 12 February, 26 February, 12 March, 26 March, 9 April, 23 April, 7 May, 21 May
How to prepare your pitch
- Think Big Picture – You want to reach a broad audience with your question to engage as many people in open discussion after your presentation.
- Specific Question – Follow up your big picture question with a more specific question if you need to.
- Lay Off the Slides – Ideally, you should be able to give this presentation with at MOST 5 slides: one slide for a hook, summarising the problem. One slide for a need that explains the basic problem. One slide for where you are in solving the problem. One slide with what you think you need at this stage. A final slide summarising the question.
- 5 Minutes Max – Keep people’s focus and avoid getting too technical by giving a short and sweet pitch.
- Sign Up – Get in touch with Gabrielle Beans to sign up to give a pitch: gabriellebeans@umu.se

Watch past Lunch Pitches
Visit the IceLab Lunch Pitch UMU Play channel to watch past pitches.
Latest update: 2025-01-30