Project Neo: Team Forming
After jumping around from one innovation project to another, I decided to take the leap once more. Reflecting on my past projects — cork wallets, a smart watch app for medical professionals, a wearable camera, a mobile app focused on job training, I returned to focus on the education space.
Since working at Teach For America and venturing into the start-up world, I focused on innovation in education as I believed the cost of higher education is out of control— Total current cost is 1.3 trillion in debt; about $40K per student and the trade off for what is required to obtain this training is increasing.
I decided to pitch a concept I had researched before, ‘Expedia for Higher Education’ at the HackED: HIVE Education Hackathon in October at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. An excited group of students joined me for the weekend, we developed the concept further, and ended up placing for the hackathon.
As the weeks continued — we pushed forward on the concept.
While we were experimenting, interviewing potential customers, current students, doctors, and high school students we talked about skills sets and roles. Reflecting on my previous experience I was trying to define the hipster (designer), hacker (developer), and the hustler (biz/dev) for the team.
At the last meeting we discussed Anabell Jimenez will focus on development and Alana Matos will focus on design, while I will focus on business development. At the simplest level, we are all on preparing our prototype for selling real classes to see what we can learn and hopefully gather ‘evidence’ (active users or paying customers) to determine if we need to pivot or refine the concept.
Also thanks to Akshay and Aaron as well for your coaching, advise, and your design expertise. Looking forward to what is next. Lets move ‘learning’ forward!
