This past Wednesday kicked off the beginning of the L3 Innovation Challenge, a weekly program by Youth CITIES designed to promote entrepreneurial problem-solving and thinking in a technology-centric world. Not far from Kendall Square, one of the most high-density technology centers in the world, I entered Lab Central, a biotech lab facility and coworking space. Lost at first, surrounded by pristine-white laboratories with fancy equipment, I headed down an equally pristine corridor until I found the meeting room our program had taken over with thirty five middle and high school students and a buffet of pizza, fries, and chicken fingers.
L3 promotes a kind of thinking and approach to engineering that I really appreciate, and although I’ve been involved with Youth CITIES for over six years, I’ve never been able to truly get involved with this program until now. L3 takes students who are often technologically inclined and potentially interested in a career in engineering and teaches early on that technology cannot purely be designed in a bubble. Technology exists in a context defined by its users, environment, and the problem it seeks to solve, and for true innovation these need to be understood to create true innovation. In high school I completed Youth CITIES’ flagship entrepreneurship March-to-May Bootcamp, and L3 seeks to inject that entrepreneurial mindset into a more technology driven program. After high school I attended Olin College, an engineering school with a heavy emphasis on user-centric design, and graduated with a mechanical engineering degree this past May, spending the summer kickstarting an engineering and design thinking program in China. Youth CITIES inspired me to attend Olin, and I can’t wait to take what I learned there and bring it back to Youth CITIES.
After initial introductions, the room split into two groups, each run by two Challenge Partners who will be defining the problem space student teams will be innovating in. The first group was lead by Kate Donovan, the Clinical Director of Innovation at Boston Children’s Hospital, as well as a co-founder of Hacking Pediatrics. Kate leads a team that is rapidly introducing and testing new, innovative technologies in the clinical environment, and students will be roleplaying as her employees for the camp. The second group was led by Todd Reily, creative lead at Bose Labs, who will be offering the technology that students will be exploring fully for potential innovation. Together, the students will be investigating how Bose technology such as the Bose Frames and Bose Soundwear can be used to innovate for Boston Children’s patients who experience low vision or other vision impairments. The challenge for this year is going to be incredible for students to dive into, but for class one we intentionally did not introduce the challenge until we first primed their approach to thinking.
The spark of inspiration for a solution can be driven by the prospect of initial technology, or by the identification of a problem that needs an innovative solution. Both are valid places to start, but require the other to completely flesh out an innovation that both fulfills a need and is technically feasible. Kate’s group focused on identifying a problem as the initial point of inspiration. With the student’s she developed a scenario for an older adult and used that as the jumping off point for brainstorming problems she faced. The students shouted out their ideas for who this person was and thus was born Beth: an 84 year old woman who lives alone, has two servants who are currently on vacation, 2 kids who live in China and Antarctica, uses a walker with tennis balls, doesn’t carry a smartphone, uses an electric wheelchair when out of the house, has low vision and forgot to update her prescription, and hearing aids that ran out of batteries. In her effort to get to the hospital (to which we vetoed mention of her private jet and the fact that her house is right next to the hospital), we discussed the challenges travelling in a wheelchair, accessing doors, living alone (when the servants are on vacation) and communicating and navigating spaces with low hearing and vision all present. From this the students generated a list of problems that would be used later.
Todd’s group received an introduction to the Bose technology they would be using in the course, trying on sunglasses, listening to music, and asking questions about the many included features. Todd’s group brainstormed ideas for innovations that could be made in these products as well as other ideas for innovative products. These innovations that students were brainstorming were centered around elderly living, but the subtle difference was that their ideas were technology driven to inspire the problem. Students mentioned using the Bose Frames to help with spatial navigation, using the Bose Soundwear to play calming music when someone is identified as stressed, and were inspired to propose brand new ideas like a Bose baseball hat for better awareness on the baseball field.
Both groups of students spent time with Todd and Kate, after which we met together for a Mad Libs style brainstorming activity. As a class we listed out problems from Kate’s activity and technologies from Todd’s activity and discussed how we could put these together to create a whole technical solution that factors both the technology and the root problem it seeks to solve. What was interesting was that a pure matching of these problems and solutions was never quite satisfactory to create something that felt fully realized, as each was identified in a bubble that ignored the other side. Going forward, students may discover ideas based on their time with the Bose products, or they may experience a real world problem that they want to solve, but for either approach to be successful, they need to fully understand both simultaneously to be innovative.
As Class 1 wrapped up, Kate and Todd went into more detail on their daily work and the entrepreneurial mindset that they bring to their respective large organizations (which has been popularly coined “intrapreneurship”). Looking ahead to next week, I’m excited to see how students take the activity from Class 1 and apply it to their own brainstorming on low vision solutions. I’ve been handed projects where I need to discover a problem and design a solution, as well as projects where I have been given an existing technology and asked to innovate on it. I’m excited to see which route the student teams lean toward most and to help them stay on a central path between the two.