KEYSTONE
I&E 352: Strategies for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
description
This course covers the component elements of developing the skills needed to launch a venture, including both commercially-oriented startups as well as social entrepreneurship ventures.
reflection
What I Learned From I&E 352.
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Prior to taking I&E 352, I had experience with human-centered design through a student organization called Design For America that focuses on solving problems for community partners through innovation. I thought I had a firm grasp of what it meant to design with users in mind and to focus on not the solution, but the problem that needs to be solved through extensive research on the users. However, through I&E 352, I realized that there were still many gaps to my understanding. While I understood strategies on how to design with the user in mind, such as interacting with users to empathize, I lacked the understanding of how to validate that an innovation actually met their needs. Throughout the course, we learned many more important concepts centered around the quote from Scott Berkun, “Simply dedicate yourself to solving problems. It’s solving problems that matters,” that taught us the importance of problem solving in order to meet customer needs. Through our detailed case analyses, we explored many real-world examples of when ventures were able to validate that their innovation met customer needs.
Our study of the venture Design That Matters particularly stood out to me as it reminded me of our work in DFA and taught me a lot about how to pivot from an original design based on customer research and feedback. In this example, we discussed the venture’s approach to solving the problem of millions of babies dying each year due to improper incubation in low-income countries. Design That Matters designed an intricate device made from old car parts that received accolades for its innovative product design. However, they got caught up in designing the solution and failed to actually solve the problems with a clear understanding of their users. As a result, the device was barely used because mothers did not feel comfortable putting their babies in a device comprised of used car parts. Despite this initial setback, Design That Matters was able to pivot from their initial innovation based on user research and feedback by immersing themselves in communities, including midwives and medical workers, that could give them valuable insight into designing a successful product that solves a problem with the users in mind. This example taught me the importance of not only designing FOR the users, but WITH the users by actively incorporating their input and expertise throughout the design process. In doing so, we will know that the product or service meets their needs and will actually be utilized. In my opinion, the best practices in order to validate that an innovation meets customer needs is to immerse yourself into the communities you are designing with and make a collaborative effort to design the product, then iterate on your product design based on extensive testing to gain insights through user feedback. Do not make yourself an outsider when designing for a community! Even if you cannot fully relate to your users’ situations, there are plenty of strategies to increase your empathy to better understand their problems that will lead to a more effective product!
Another important aspect of innovation and entrepreneurship is effective teamwork and collaboration. One of our first class discussions was centered around the concept of psychological safety where team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable with each other. My team for case slides was able to achieve this by framing our assignments as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Instead of asking ourselves what we can accomplish to get a good grade, we asked ourselves what we can do to learn the most out of the case and how we can best exemplify our learning through our case slides. In doing so, we were able to foster a judgment-free zone where we felt safe to ask any questions and give each other plenty of time to think through information. Our team also started meetings with an ice breaker to engage each other in conversation and improve our team dynamics. By learning more about each other, we felt safer in our team environment and thus, improved the psychological safety within our team. In the future, I hope to apply these learnings when searching for professional opportunities. For instance, I mentioned the importance of psychological safety within a team for a recent interview and was able to learn more about the team’s dynamic through hearing about how they foster psychological safety in their team and determine whether or not I was the right fit for that position.
Psychological safety can also cultivate an ethical culture which is crucial for the innovation and entrepreneurship process. Psychological safety creates an environment where team members are not afraid to take risks or make mistakes as they know that their peers or leadership will be understanding. Through taking risks, we are able to step outside of our comfort zone and voice our thoughts and opinions without the fear of being judged. If we make mistakes along the way, we are able to learn from them and iterate on our thoughts. Our class did a great job in fostering an ethical culture where students were not afraid to get things wrong. Professor Amato played a large role in motivating this ethical culture in the ways she led class discussions. Throughout the semester, if a student gave an incorrect answer, she would reframe the question or direct their thoughts towards a better answer, giving them the opportunity to iterate upon their answer and learn from their mistakes. During the venture simulation in class, each team engaged in friendly competition to generate the most revenue for a frozen treats business. The leaderboard was public and all the students could see who ranked first to last, but the class atmosphere remained judgment-free and the teams that ranked last were encouraged to openly share their thought process. Thanks to the positive and ethical culture in our classroom environment, we were all able to learn from each other’s mistakes and saw the experience as a learning opportunity.
My learnings and experiences from I&E 352 has impacted my life through multiple avenues. Through our weekly case assignments, my interest in business analysis grew and I hope to learn more about finance and other business subjects through my future education. I learned a lot about how to foster better teamwork within class projects, and I plan to utilize these skills in team settings in future classes. I also gained valuable career advice through class learnings and my conversations with my mentor. I heard about the steps my mentor took to be a successful entrepreneur and about the value of risk-taking and curiosity in fostering an innovative mindset within the workplace. I intend to apply these ideas to my future internship roles and career in order to be a proactive, valuable member of any team. Through our class discussions and interactions with my teammates, I learned more about what my role is within a team and what I look for in a positive team environment. I made sure to actively think about these aspects when looking for a team to intern with this summer. In conclusion, this course has overall shaped me into a more human-oriented person and taught me to put other people at the center of many of my decisions. Whether it be when I am designing for users or working in a team, I have further realized the value of listening and learning from the diverse perspectives of the people around you.
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Mentor Reflection
As I am most interested in adopting an entrepreneurial mindset over actually starting my own business, I learned a lot from hearing my mentor’s thought process on how he navigated challenging moments in his professional endeavors. We got to hear about his journey as an intrepreneur under a large corporation and how that motivated his desire to obtain more freedom to practice his ideas through entrepreneurship. As an intern in the Film Technology department at NBCUniversal this past summer, I worked closely with the Technological Innovation team and gained experience with innovation in a large company. The experience gave me insight into what intrepreneurship was like, and hearing about my mentor’s own experience gave me further insight into signs to look for when deciding my future career path. For instance, he detailed the limitations, such as restrictions in autonomy, that he felt under a large company and how he approached the issue once he felt these limitations were becoming an obstacle to his professional life. Learning more about the differences between working at a large company and a startup also gave me insight into the pros and cons of innovating within these spaces. We also learned about his routine for team interaction within the startup he works for and how they have been navigating team building during the era of social distancing. As we learned in lecture, it is most ideal for teams to physically/virtually meet in one space with everyone present to build teamwork. In a startup, collaboration is key to rapidly process ideas, which is why my mentor and his team purposefully dedicate time throughout the week to meet socially distanced in person. He detailed the importance of person-to-person interaction and teamwork within a startup and gave me insight into how collaboration can best foster innovative thinking skills.
As my mentor works closely with other small businesses and startups, he has exposure to the framework of many launching businesses. He noticed that some businesses would struggle to launch despite having substantial funding to operate their business. After exploring the commonalities between these companies, he realized that they all had the capital needed to grow their business, but lacked the manpower to help the business operate smoothly. His company then extended their list of connections and talent to their clients so that they could have resources to improve their business. He emphasized the importance of directly communicating with his clients to learn more about the problem space and gain empathy to best understand their needs.
One lesson that really stuck with me was my mentor’s experience with his own mentors along his professional journey. I admired how he was still actively seeking mentorship far into his career, and it taught me the importance of pursuing mentorship from others with the intent to genuinely learn and grow as a professional. He also detailed his regrets of initially approaching mentorship as a “transactional” type of relationship and advised that we accept mentors that can give us valuable insight and guidance, even if nothing concrete like a job or internship may come out of it. This conversation further confirmed the value of having professional relationships that give you a safe space to discuss personal obstacles in your career and offer advice on how to navigate these challenges.
For my second mentor call, I wanted to focus our conversation on career advice and learn more about innovative thinking skills through my mentor’s experiences. I recently completed an interview for my dream company Disney that did not go as well as I had hoped, and it was helpful to talk through my experience with my mentor and learn what he would have done in my situation. He reiterated that he thinks he has never been fully qualified for any job he’s applied for and emphasized the importance of demonstrating that I can solve through problems, even if I may not be an expert on every skill on the job description. He also reassured that recruiters don’t expect every answer to be perfect, and that I should focus on exemplifying problem-solving strategies to make them believe I can learn the skills I need through the job. These thoughts gave me insight on how to approach questions I do not have a great answer to. For one of the interview questions, I was stressing over how to answer it specifically based on past experiences that I did not have. In the future following my mentor’s advice, I could frame my answer by acknowledging I do not have that experience, but this is how I would approach the situation if I did have that experience. In doing so, I would give a thoughtful answer that demonstrates my problem-solving abilities, even if I couldn’t recall a specific instance where the question applied to me.
When I asked about the aspects he looks at when choosing companies to work for, he noted that the interview can tell you a lot about your fit in a company/team. I, then, reflected on my interview with Disney this week and realized that while I may not have been the right fit for the position I applied to, I had a pleasant interaction with the recruiter and could still see myself working for the company. My mentor also told me to contemplate on what I want to get out of working with the company and to try and envision whether that company will give any kind of value in the long run even if it may be difficult to plan exactly where I want my career to be in 10 years. This led me to ponder on my long-term career plans and how even if I am still not 100% sure on what I want to do, I can still make career decisions for this summer that can give me ideas or positive experiences that will be of value for my long-term career goals.
My conversation with my mentor also helped frame my interests in innovation and further enhanced my understanding of what it takes to be successful as an intrepreneur. I, personally, am taking the I&E certificate program not necessarily to learn how to start my own venture, but to adopt valuable innovative thinking skills that I believe are important in every career field. When asking him what qualities he sees in every innovator, my mentor said curiosity and inquisitiveness. He said he dislikes when people say “well that’s the way we’ve always done it,” which made me think to always question every part of the process. I also thought back to a past internship where there were many processes being used in my team that I found to be inefficient, but I never spoke up or publicly questioned as I assumed they wouldn’t want to pivot from their original way of doing things. In order to add more value as an intern in the future, I learned that I should not be afraid to challenge the norms if I believe doing so will add value to my team. I also learned how to apply innovative thinking skills in the workplace through hearing about my mentor’s positive experiences with innovative problem solving. When he realized there was an issue in a contract that his company was ignoring that he thought should be addressed, he took initiative to investigate that issue. He saw a void that no one else did and convinced his team that it was a real problem, and his problem-solving skills ended up greatly benefiting the company when handling the contract. Through the call with my mentor, I learned the steps my mentor took to be a successful intrepreneur and heard about the value of risk-taking and curiosity in fostering an innovative mindset. I intend on utilizing these ideas for future jobs and internships in order to be a proactive and valuable member of any team.
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