virtual IDEA

virtual

Our Virtual Impact

IDEA went fully virtual in the 11th Year, due to the circumstances caused by the global pandemic. While this set some initial challenges, IDEA proved to be more resilient than ever before through a process of adaptation and virtual experiments that allowed to find out how to best operate in the new and unfamiliar setting. In fact, IDEA never stopped operating and supporting the wide community of founders and entrepreneurs that it’s surrounded by. In order to continue our operations, we moved all our resources to a virtual format, and found new platforms to host our two biggest yearly events, NEXPO and Pitchathon.

This semester, our community also hosted various community events and internal programming workshops all online, including meetings with the Venture Advisory Board (VAB) and Management team meetings in the Virtual Lab. The VAB, a group of founders invited to give feedback on a range of Management Team projects, met exclusively online. Founders were invited to express their wants and needs and Management Team members got help evaluating and re-iterating projects and initiatives for the IDEA community. The #virtuallab was created on Gather.town in order for management team members to interact in a communal “space” since we could not experience the IDEA Lab. It provided fun opportunities in terms of character creation, public and private conversations, and collaborative activities.

virtualidea

A Look Ahead

As inoculations increase and social-distancing restrictions lift, the IDEA Team will have a lot of choice as to which aspects of the virtual environment will continue and which will return to being in-person. This year, we were grateful to experience a multitude of unexpected benefits provided by the virtual environment:

• Eliminating in-person attendance allowed us to hire Management members living anywhere in the world, not just the Boston area; • Mitigating travel time meant that people were able to attend more meetings and everyone had a more flexibile schedule; • We were able to invite entrepreneurs and students from all over the world to attend NEXPO and Pitchathon, which for the first time ever had attendees tune in from 16 countries; • Online events allowed for more data collection and documentation so that future teams will have benchmarks and reference points;

While it’s still uncertain what the 12th year of IDEA will officially look like, we can imagine that future teams may create a hybrid model, in which there will be opportunities to attend meetings and events either virtually or in-person depending on one’s ability or preference. Either way, we are excited to see how IDEA will adapt to new circumstances moving forward!

countries that the members of the management team were located in for our 11th year