Last week we got the Tech, UX and Creative groups at Schematic NY together for a 2-hour creative workshop. The idea was to break the group into 6 interdisciplinary teams that would come to represent 6 startups pitching ideas to a group of VCs.
There were three main goals:
1) to facilitate rapid collaboration between disciplines on projects (mostly) of their own choosing
2) to provide a platform for teams to present their products, elevator pitch-style
3) to get together for a light-hearted exercise that still required people to think creatively.
As many of us are big fans of Top Chef, we thought it would be fun to start with a Quickfire Challenge that would make Padma proud: each team had 3 minutes to construct a sentence (that still made sense) with as many industry buzzwords as possible. The team what won the quickfire would get an advantage during the main portion of our exercise. If I can dig up the winning sentence, I’ll post it here. It was a doozy (in the best way possible).
Once the Quickfire was done, each team chose a random combination of audience, problem and platform (think: Hipsters + Fitness + Mobile, for example) to be the focus of their startup’s product.
And here are the products that the 6 startups would tackle:
Each team had 30 minutes to go brainstorm + ideate + sketch together. After that time they were to come back to the main room and each had 5 minutes to pitch their startup idea to a panel of “potential VCs.” Each product had to be accompanied by at least one visual and would be judged with the following criteria in mind:
- innovation
- harmony between audience/problem/platform
- creative use of technology
- collaborative approach
- presentation
After working through their ideas in smaller groups…
The teams came back with 6 different, well-thought-out products and a variety of visuals to support their ideas.
All in all I think we got a lot of value out of the two-hour exercise.
Everyone spends so much time with their heads in a similar problem space that it was nice to see people somewhat out of their element, solving problems with some more creative freedom. There was a certain dynamism that reminded me of grad school, which I think is an important energy to try and capture in one’s regular process. I particularly liked the random way of determining the problems that would be addressed. We also learned some things that we’d tweak as we plan other events in the future.
Thanks to everyone who put so much energy into their participation.
See all the photos here.