The Dry Dock Takes a Quantum Leap in Entrepreneurial Education

You might have the horse, but not the jockey. Or you might have the jockey but not the horse. Either way,  you’re not winning the Kentucky Derby.

The same principle applies to business. A great founder with a bad idea won’t yield the next unicorn, nor will a great idea executed by a bad team.  It’s a conundrum, and Baxter Webb, director of Vanderbilt University’s  Center for Entrepreneurship at Owen Graduate School of Management, may have found the answer in Owen’s newest program, the Dry Dock.

The Dry Dock is a new weeklong event in Nashville designed by Webb and the team at the Center for Entrepreneurship, sponsored by Lorimer Ventures and Cooley, and directed by Vanderbilt faculty across schools including Owen, the School of Engineering, the Law School, and the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Science. Directors include Webb; Kalman Varga, vice chair and professor of physics; Yesha Yadav, associate dean and Underwood Chair of Law; and David Hyde, assistant professor of computer science.

The Dry Dock aims to do more than simply teach the principles of entrepreneurship. The goal is to foster the type of entrepreneurial skillsets needed to thrive in this rapidly changing business landscape. Student teams participate to launch enterprise-ready, scalable companies that tackle real-world, market-demanded problems. And, ideally, to launch the next $1-billion startup, or what’s known in business terms as a “unicorn” (over 20 of them exist in the Vanderbilt ecosystem). To do this, Webb dreamed up a platform optimizing not only student teams, but also the challenge itself. A top jockey (the teams) paired with a top horse (the venture).

The strategy behind the Dry Dock is to enlist high-profile, high-value companies looking for solutions to real-world problems that they are already motivated to pay for, essentially guaranteeing built-in market demand. The companies tapped for the spring 2026 edition of the Dry Dock include globally recognized industry leaders Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, NASA, IBM, Xtremis and EPB. Each company submitted a challenge, and then student teams from across Vanderbilt undergraduate and graduate schools—all assembled using AI to carefully match students based on skills and track record—self-selected which challenge they wanted to build their venture around. From there, they jumped into a six-day marathon of entrepreneurial innovation, employing quantum software, robotics, drones and machine learning to accomplish their task.

Eleven teams competed, each building a venture around one of six corporate challenges. The six-day event kicked off with keynote addresses by Elizabeth Rossi of Google and Seun Omonije of Stealth Startup. The students then split their time between work on their projects and talks given by a selection of entrepreneurs and Vanderbilt alumni, including Scott Weaver of Akamai Technologies, Taffy Kingscott of IBM Research, Vandiver Chaplin of IonQ, and Oliver Luckett of Inkwell.

The speakers helped inform the student teams on how to comprehensively build and bring to market enterprise-ready technology. Further assistance was provided through Vanderbot, a proprietary AI tool by Inkwell—founded by Vanderbilt alumnus Oliver Luckett, BA’96—that did everything from performing deep research, to advising teams, to building pitch and sales decks, to coding.

For Webb, it’s this sort of depth that elevates Dry Dock above the traditional business school entrepreneurial competition, most of which employ the “hackathon” model. In Dry Dock, competitors brainstorm, build and pitch functional prototypes for startups using artificially shortened timelines (often 48 to 72 hours) and scopes that are often too wide to yield anything truly enterprise ready. These corporate challenges force students to build ventures with “product-market fit.” The scope is focused, the teams are optimized and the ideas are market driven.

The inaugural edition of Dry Dock was an enormous success, with student teams innovating impressive solutions to highly technical, real-world business challenges. And, most importantly, they set the table to potentially launch viable, real-world companies, maybe even the next billion-dollar unicorn.

See photos from the Spring 2026 Dry Dock Challenge and learn more about Dry Dock. For those interested in sponsoring a future challenge, contact Baxter Webb at baxter.webb@vanderbilt.edu.   

The Dry Dock: Spring 2026 at a Glance 

The Challenges

Lockheed Martin : Physical Outlier Problem

Using quantum computing, the challenge is to find the “one of these things is not like the others” in a real-world scenario. In this case, it’s a look at traffic, and how you identify the self-driving car among human-driven ones, or spot the car built with an unusual mix of materials. It’s essentially a high-powered pattern recognition/anomaly detection problem, done with quantum tools.  

NASA: Nontraditional Aviation for Wildfire

For this challenge, the team built a system that helps fight wildfires more effectively using drones, satellites, and aircraft together. It needs to track fire conditions in real time, coordinate ground crews and air support across multiple fires at once, work even when internet and cell service are down (which is common in remote wildfire zones), and let all the different teams—pilots, firefighters, commanders—share information with each other seamlessly and instantly.  

Northrop Grumman: Closed Door Defense Challenge

This was a closed door challenge without public-facing details. 

Xtremis: Bloomberg Terminal for Spectrum

Radio airwaves (the invisible highways carrying your phone calls, GPS, and Wi-Fi) are worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but nobody has a proper stock-market-style system for buying and selling access to them. This challenge is to build that system—a live pricing and trading platform for airwaves—similar to how traders buy and sell stocks. It’s timely because new legislation is pushing the government to put a dollar value on this resource.  

Xtremis: Quantum Routing Brain

Quantum computers are powerful but finicky and expensive, and you can’t run everything on them. This challenge is to build a smart traffic controller that automatically decides, task by task, which jobs should go to a quantum computer and which should run on a regular computer. It’s like a highly skilled dispatcher routing calls between different types of workers depending on the job. The target use case is military systems that process sensor data in real time.  

Challenge Winners

Overall Winners:  

• 1st: Discovery (Xtremis: Bloomberg Terminal for Spectrum)
• 2nd: Beagle (Lockheed Martin: Physical Outlier Problem)
• 3rd: Leif Eriksson (Northrop Grumman: Closed Door Defense Challenge)

Individual Challenge Winners:  

• Lockheed Martin Physical Outlier Problem: Beagle
• NASA Nontraditional Aviation for Wildfire: Resolution
• Northrop Grumman Closed Door Defense Challenge: Leif Eriksson
• Xtremis Bloomberg Terminal for Spectrum: Discovery
• Xtremis Quantum Routing Brain: Atlantis