The first week of Creative Entrepreneur. This is a class I have been anticipating since I started the program. I am a natural entrepreneur at heart, and have always been drawn to opportunities to create products and services. Needless to say, my hypothesis is that this will be my favorite class of the entire IxD program.
I am also expecting to come out of the class with a truly viable product or service that I can turn into a reality. I have no intentions of just using this class as an exercise in founding. I am tired of working with “possible” concepts in all my other classes. I am ready to start something real, and this is the perfect mini incubator for it.
So, we assembled our team. Amos is an Industrial Design student, and Will and I are both Interaction Design students. We spent the week identifying areas of interests to address, and narrowing down to a specific area. Conversation was fluid and we seem to work well together. Will and I have worked together in the past, and Amos is motivated to make something happen also.
After doing secondary research to explore our potential areas of interest we came back together. There was not a lot of natural overlap in our areas of interest, so we ended up more or less voting, and selected video conferencing as an area to tackle. But, part way through the week we had a change of heart and began to lean toward commuting. We decided to focus our research efforts on that topic, and have begun to line up potential interviews for our primary research phase.
I learned that it is slightly difficult to arrange a group prior to knowing areas of interest. Finding a topic that everyone is equally motivated to pursue is trickier than having a passion and finding others that share a similar passion. Even at this stage of the process I can see the time we are losing by trying to come to an agreement of what we would all like to do.