4 Steps to Kick off Innovation in a Big City |...

9/5/2016 4 Steps to Kick off Innovation in a Big City | Inc.com

http://www.inc.com/maureen-kline/4-steps-to-kick-off-innovation-in-a-big-city.html 1/6

INNOVATE

4 Steps to Kick off Innovation in a Big CityThe DO School brings students together to help scale New York City's startup

support capabilities.

kline_maureen¬ @

CREDIT: Getty Images

The city of New York has a challenge. It wants to offer fertile ground for local entrepreneurs,

particularly in the poorer parts of the city, to start businesses and help them grow,

empowering the incubator infrastructure to work as effectively as possible.

Enter the DO School, a global institution that, for select programs, borrows students

passionate about social change from accredited colleges and offers them experiential

learning through doing, challenging them to solve real-world, pressing problems in

sustainable ways.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation tasked a team of 20 DO School

students from 10 different colleges in the New York area with this specific challenge: "Create

and test a new program or service that, by leveraging a shared resource model, will enable

entrepreneur-supporting institutions to sustain and expand access to entrepreneurial

BY MAUREEN KLINE

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entrepreneur-supporting institutions to sustain and expand access to entrepreneurial

opportunities across New York City and in marginalized communities."

The problem was that many small, community-based entrepreneurship support

organizations, or ESOs, existing in New York City lacked resources, networks, and visibility.

They wanted to enhance their ability to provide new entrepreneurs with basic assistance

and infrastructure.

The students approached the challenge by applying the DO School's innovation method,

which they call "underlying magic." The 4 steps in the method go like this:

1. Dream: enable participants to open up and share new perspectives to come up with

genuinely novel ideas;

2. Focus: use a variety of tools from observation and prototyping, to stakeholder mapping

and role playing to fine-tune participants' proposals;

3. Plan: transition between idea and implementation, introducing essential management

skills; and

4. Do: support the implementation of the idea and measure its impact, ensuring at the same

time quality and sustainability.

The students learned that incubators in New York have trouble finding and retaining

networks of industry experts, speakers and mentors, that they are short on staff for

outreach and marketing, and that they struggle to offer opportunities in poorer areas of the

city.

Brainstorming exercises, which included engaging 30 experts over the course of nearly 4

months, led the students to focus on sharing resources as a solution to the problem. They

nicknamed their solution KIN, or Kickoff Innovation in New York, proposing an event series

and a video competition.

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and a video competition.

The main goal of the event series would be to bring together corporate resources, includingspeakers and mentors, and incubators, simply to make it easier for them all to meet eachother. The students found that "corporations have shown increasing interest in workingwith startups, but seemingly don't yet know how and where to start," and that "on the flipside, our survey showed 93.8% of ESOs see corporate outreach as a clear opportunity forcollaboration." They decided that by holding events in corporate innovation spaces, theycould link incubators with corporate innovation officers, students and other networks,unleashing networking opportunities in order to connect challenges with solutions, ideaswith practical implementation. The events would focus on mentorship and would alloweach host to highlight their brand and mission, and would offer a mix of fun andprofessional activities designed for relationship building. Corporate innovators could hold"reverse pitch" nights where they pitch problems they want startups to solve.

Holding events would solve a financial problem as well: ESOs spend far too much timedeveloping their networks and building relationships; at events this could be done muchmore quickly. ESOs' biggest source of revenue are members, so the incubators need toincrease the exposure of startups and, generally, their visibility, in order to bring in mentors,sponsors, investors, and ultimately new members.

The second part of the KIN solution focused more specifically on increasing exposure ofstartups, in order to help launch them and in order to help create fertile ground for more.The DO School students decided to create "NYC Startup Stories," a video competition forstudents that highlights enterprises successfully launched by incubators in the area. Thevideos would eventually form a history, a chronicle of how the New York City startupcommunity develops over time.

The students presenting the KIN solution to the New York City government, at the end oftheir DO School course, said they felt it was crucial to have the two complementarycomponents of events and a video competition. "By strengthening the ecosystem fromwithin (with the event series) AND promoting the ecosystem externally," they read fromtheir pre-written notes, "we're left with a symbiotic cycle of continual and self-sustaininggrowth."

City government representatives received the KIN solution with enthusiasm and said theywere ready to implement it. From the city's point of view, the process of presenting achallenge and being offered an in-depth solution by a group of enthusiastic, creativestudents seemed like a big win.

What if this were how our society approached every challenge?

PUBLISHED ON: SEP 1, 2016

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Loot Crate boxes have

included items relating to

arcade game Space

Invaders, video game

Fallout, and Spider-Man.

CREDIT: Courtesy

company

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