Innovator / Creator: Applying the Framework

Disclaimer: To all the computer science and hardware specialists, I am quite a beginner in this field so pardon me if it some things I made doesn’t adhere to the best practices 🙂 

In 2017, I spent a year overseas in San Francisco doing a full-time internship. It was a place known at the international stage for its established entrepreneurial ecosystem. That period was also the time I joined my first ever hackathon, an event where everyone gathers together to create new solutions for the problem statement within 24 hours.

Entitled CHIMEHACK 4, hosted by Facebook and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the theme of the event was empowering refugee girls through education. During the hackathon, the problem statement given to us was that the refugee girls have limited access to education and that schools are typically quite far away from their villages, but most of them own a phone with internet connectivity (we were surprised too!). In building the solution, I helped in the creation of the chatbot using DialogFlow (formerly called API.AI) that could be connected to the Facebook messenger. The refugees could speak to the bot, and share what they were interested in learning, and the bot would bundle together relevant courses, and route them to the right resources to facilitate learning.

In retrospect, it was naïve to think that by changing the way courses are delivered to students such as custom building relevant learning resources based on the refugee students’ interests instead of having them search and learn seemingly isolated content, and then having to forms connection themselves, we thought we had arrived at the right solution. In digging deeper, the main stumbling block is the issues of safe transportation to and from school. The question should be how to address the issues of accessibility. Naturally, those who tackled the problem statement with a solution that removed all these stumbling blocks emerged victory.

Provisional patent filing for the hardware prototype of a sodium tracking spoon using electrical conductivity sensor, load cell, temperature sensor, and Bluno Nano. The salt consumption data would be sent to the user’s mobile app, allowing the user to track his salt consumption over a period of time.

Again, in a more recent endeavour, we prototyped a handheld sodium tracking spoon where patients with a strict dietary requirement, especially with sodium, could use it to monitor their sodium intake. The data captured from the spoon would be transmitted to the mobile app that would keep track of the salt consumption. Leaving the look of the prototype and technicality aside, as we continue building and doing more user-research, what we discovered was that the end user did not like the idea of bringing the spoon out! More importantly, hardware development would drive the cost of the spoon so high that it would not make economic sense for the end-user!  Even though the such an application was considered new and novel to be patented, but because of the low receptivity from the end-user, it’s not likely to become a product that will create positive benefits for the end-user.

Through my experience, I learnt that the novelty of the solution and inherent attractiveness of the solution only remains as the fragments of the imagination of the inventor. Sometimes, the love for the idea conceived by the creator, coupled with the inventor’s limited knowledge of the intended audience, will cloud the understanding, judgement, and evaluation of the effectiveness of the solution in addressing fundamental needs. It was at this point, also, that I came to realise how these frameworks were incomplete; they failed to get at the heart of what is important to the user. Creative ideas ≠ useful ideas all the time.

Innovator / Creator: Getting to the Heart of the Issues

The Spirit of Entrepreneurship (MS&E178) class assignment on the topic of creativity and its role in entrepreneurship. One of the thing that I understood from revisiting this assignment is that creativity can be an acquired skill and that creative ideas can be systematically generated.

Connecting my experience to a later module I took called The Spirit of Entrepreneurship (MS&E178), where I worked an assignment discussing the role of creativity in entrepreneurship. In revisiting my own, the idea that creativity is a “conscious, deliberate, and fundamental ingredient” seemed to support what I had initially gleaned: creativity is not an exactly spontaneous or the kind of “Eureka” moment that we can all expect. Rather, creativity is the combination of deliberate practice of the existing framework, combined with the understanding of the user, business plan, and the awareness of the socio-economic landscape of the business. That is how we arrive at the idea or product-market fit. This idea is also more clearly demonstrated in the highlighted phrase above.

 More importantly, the idea of replacing the horse with a car is a fundamentally new idea, at that time, that would be considered to have negated the dimension—using strong and faster animal—within the conceptual space of transport. However, the novel idea of using motor powered vehicles, while largely unseen at that time, could arrive at the product-market fit because of its ability to identify what’s at the fundamental need at that time, which is to get from one place to another faster and more efficiently.

Through that experience, the key thread the message here is that product-market fit is contingent on a novel idea created with the user in mind. Sometimes, the natural question is how do we best understand what is on the user’s mind? In the world of engineering and consumer design, one of the best way to understand user’s experience is to personally live through it (or conduct an ethnographic research) or to speak to the person directly.

Communications, New Media and Society (NM1101) interview transcript. (Attaching the transcript here as there are many pages to upload as photo).

This reminded me of an earlier module that I had done called Communications, New Media and Society (NM1101). One of the assignments we had to do was to conduct a field study on Foreign Domestic Worker (FDWs) in Singapore. Having grown up without a FDW at home and rarely interacted with them, I had very little understanding of what they experienced here. Through the field study, and a small report done on the subject matter, I came to catch a glimpse into the experience of FDWs and how social media provided them a way to seek solace, emotional connection, and support within their network. No doubt, it might be a little foolhardy to think that a short interaction and a report could surmise what it is like for the FDW is Singapore. However, the answers that the FDWs were sufficient to give some context into their desire, motivation, and issues. The point here is that, regardless whether we innovate solution for others or for ourselves, the solution is only useful insofar as they are coupled with the understanding of who you are serving to create a new meaning that is useful.

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