6 Lessons From The Intel Ideation Camp At Outbox

Intel East Africa collaborated with Outbox an Incubation space in Kampala to bring an Ideation Camp to the local developers in Kampala. The Ideation Camp was aimed at preparing Local Developers for the upcoming Garage 48 Hackathon. The Ideation Camp was aimed at taking local developer and Entrepreneurs through the process of coming up with an idea that you can execute and at the end of the 2 days, teams had to pitch their ideas to a panel of judges.

First the attendees where divided into groups of  6 with each group having at least a Hustler(Business Guy), a Hacker(Developer) and an Artist ( Designer) and according to the moderators Abigael Wangui and Mark (iHub Kenya) this method would allow teams think with a broad perspective and come up with versatile ideas for the camp.

So in case you missed this Ideation camp, let me take you through the whole process and it will be as if you went through the process with everyone who attended or may be you want to take you team through the same process, so here goes.

Team Ideating:

The first step is to have your Team think about  a given problem and in our case we where thinking about problems affecting people in the Health, Agriculture and Education sectors. The Trick is to have everyone think independently and come up with problems affecting any of the 3 selected parameters for about 20 Minutes and then let them share their Ideas. The next step is to let the teams vote on a specific parameter and our team settled for Health.

Write Your Problem Statement:

The next step after getting enough problems in a given parameter is to rate the problems according to its Frequency of happening and and its importance, at this step you are advised to put yourself as much as possible in the shoes of the user. Pick the problem with the highest frequency of happening and with the highest importance then go very specific on the users affected by this problem and be very specific about the problem. The last Step here is to write a problem statement and you write the problem statement by asking this question; How do we  help user X to Solve a specific problem in our case our problem statement was How do we help patients in public hospitals to spend little time in the queues.

Buddy Teams:

The next step would be inter team pitching and this is the step in the ideation process where you talk to other groups about your problem statement and the reason for this is to get more ideas about your idea and a little criticizing. This can be a slight equivalent of getting out of the building for a startup.

Brainstorm Solutions:

So your idea has survived the Buddy Teams, the next things is to brainstorm different ways of solving the problem you have, and the best way to do this is to let everyone think about as many ideas as possible and then pick an idea that is very unique and very important and execute that one. The best way to choose an idea is to use Improv where you spend 2/3 of your time on the ‘Yes And’ thinking and 1/3 of the time criticizing and picking your best idea.

Business Model Generation:

Making money is something startups think about last but at the Ideation Camp, we did it during the ideation process. You have to know how you will make from your Idea from the word Go. This is one of the reasons for filling the Business Model Canvas. You also need to know how your are going to deliver your product to your customers and what value you are going to create before you set out to develop a solution.

Pitching: 

The 2 days were crowned with pitching sessions and the trick we used as a winning team was to make everyone in our team try to pitch the idea to an investor in less than 3 minutes as we practiced, we then picked amongst ourselves the person who pitched a given concept best to be the one to talk about it during the presentation. Remembers Investors like to invest in a story behind the idea so you have to believe in your idea and don’t forget to show them the money.

It was a productive 2 days we spent going through the Ideation camp and we are grateful to Intel East Africa and Outbox for such camps aimed at helping developers, designers and business people come up with ideas to work on. If you have something to add to the story please do so in the comments section.