Name: Start-up for good
Company: University of Sunderland
Completed: 2023
The problem
The University of Sunderland’s Entrepreneurship Development Team sought to run a 6-hour workshop ran over 2 days for University students on designing business ideas for the UN sustainability development goals
The challenge was to consider how might we design a rapid workshop that encourages students to work together in teams and gives them the creative confidence to consider their own ideas for starting a business.
My role
As the innovation coach on this project my role was to help design, lead and facilitate the 2-day workshop, and to develop content to help challenge the students to think creatively, but also work at pace.
My approach
Using the book “Sprint” as the main guide for this project, I designed the whole workshop around the idea of a sprint; where the first day the students would receive the brief, unpack it, consider their target UN development goal, and generate ideas.
The second day would continue this approach, and move the ideas into a finalised concept, where students would pitch their idea.
Results
The challenge I found on the first day was that students found it difficult to understand an open brief or how to answer a “how might we” question.
On the second day, I reworked this challenge statement into a more specific question and lead students through a structured workshop following a custom idea canvas, which they would use to frame their final pitch.
Although there were some challenges, the event was a success. It introduced students to the ideas of research, rapid idea generation and pitching.