Enabling Young Social Entrepreneurs Design Proposal
A Design Drinkers Partnership: Andrew Hoang & Leslie Luo
The Challenge Encouraging and enabling young people to pursue social entrepreneurship.
What is social entrepreneurship? Identifying social problems and solving them in a large scale.
Why? More and more young people are pursuing social entrepreneurship but many fail to move past the initial ideation phase due to lack of support. We want to find a solution to help.
What we know (assumptions) ❖
A lot of young people do not have the tools / knowledge / guidance to pursue entrepreneurship.
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Individuals may feel inadequate in their knowledge and are ashamed to pursue this route.
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Young people may not have the resources or bandwidth (like capital) to start their own businesses.
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Often, experience trumps ambition - more experienced folks will have the leg up compared to a younger individual straight out of high school or college.
What we wanted to know (through user research) We wanted to: ❖
Challenge our assumptions
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Better understand why people pursue entrepreneurship (or don’t)
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Learn what motivates people
Discovery Phase
We reached out to our social and professional networks to gain insights through qualitative interviews and learned what people’s motivations were, how they reached their failures and accomplishments, and why they pursued social entrepreneurship.
What We Learned (Key Insights) ❖
Passion & Purpose
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❖ Support, Community, & Knowledge
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Fear
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People who have a problem that they know they want to solve are more likely to pursue and go through with solving that problem. People cannot succeed in entrepreneurship without business skills - it's not just about passion. Finding your passion and purpose is a personal journey born out of your experiences.
Often, people will find information online or through books if they can't find information from someone they know. People with knowledge are more likely to want to share knowledge. People who lack knowledge, actively seek out knowledge.
People are afraid of uncertainty People who have never done something before (i.e. start a business), build a lot of anxiety because of the lack of prior accomplishments. Fear is something that you can overcome with practice.
Through these insights, we asked ourselves... How might we create new ways for people with knowledge/business skills to share with those who are seeking it? How might we involve the community who has knowledge to want to share that knowledge?
How might we create new ways to build a person’s confidence?
The Big Idea An online community that helps to educate young professionals interested in social entrepreneurship. The website provides resources to help users get started on their journey and alleviates some of the uncertainty entrepreneurs face.
We begin with... Someone is interested in pursuing their own venture and they have big idea. They begin looking for information online and come across the resources page that’s filled with tools and other information to begin their journey as a social entrepreneur. These include resources developed by professionals in the field (initially) that detail out specific guides on how to begin and continue the journey (specifically with benchmarks and goal-setting).
With all the information... They are interested in learning about and from people who have pursued similar things. They have lots of questions that arise but not enough experience so they begin browsing (over time) the forums to see if anyone has asked and/or answered the questions they also have. The core forums include safe spaces to pose questions but also places to seek and provide mentorship. There are also forums for people to share ideas and provide feedback as well as find team members or volunteer their services.
From there... They find information they need but want to ask more specific questions. They begin posting onto the forum, initially to seek more answers but over time they also realize they have information that they can contribute. Within the forums, we have an “upvoting� system that promotes most relevant and thoughtful answers (according to other users) to build positive community support.
Over time... They find people who share similar ideas and goals and decide it would be best to form a team and share their expertise and responsibilities. They utilize the resources from the website to form their organization and develop a business plan and form a checklist of tasks they need to accomplish to be successful. As their organization gains traction, they post about their progress and success stories and find additional people who are interested in helping their cause.
Prototype & Feedback We shared our initial concept with a few of the individuals we initially interviewed. High level takeaways: ❖ ❖ ❖
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How does this concept scale? Can this be a process built into an existing organization? How do you develop the initial pool of resources (where experts come in to help build resources)? Will this grow organically or will people need to be incentivized to contribute?
Future Iterations We’re looking to refine our ideas by sharing this concept out with our networks and receive further feedback.
Ultimately, we want to push the boundaries and tap into an existing process in how people gather information themselves by consolidating a knowledge base so that they can focus on the real issues they are trying to tackle.
IDEO + Acumen | Human Centered Design Course | 2015