Innovation Journey to Capstone

This is just the beginning of the capstone journey. Getting this far and completing this part of the capstone, I found out three interesting things:

1. If I put limit to myself, then I put limit to the potential innovation that I can make. The innovation journey is not easy. It entails grit. It means that I have to be fully convinced that what I am trying to do is what needs to be done. That the innovation needs to see the light of day to help other people. However, sometimes, I have self-doubt. I question myself if I have the right to do it, if this is my domain of expertise, do I have to be an expert to do it, what if people will not like it, and many others. But as I continued to push every day, waking up and thinking about it, every little step added up to where my innovation idea is.

1. People wants to help, just ask. Through this journey, I realize that it is natural for people to help when you ask for it. There are even people that I unexpectedly just bump into and when I share what I am pursuing, they look at it optimistically and give substantial inputs. An idea will always just be a fragment of an imagination if nobody hears about, and then no one validates is.

1. Listening is a skill to learn. An innovator can be so obsessed with the idea that a constructive critic is treated as an insult. I know that I have to be very careful in this. Just by listening to people, I can already see how they would interact to the platform that I am making. It gives me a lens if it is really an opportunity or a pain points that needs to be solved. Listening also means that not everyone will agree or like my idea but making sense out of it and understanding the reason behind gives an input on how a market segment would respond.

Two things that I realized about the scope of the problem statement:

1. That it is a huge problem. I realized that the problem can be very overwhelming. There is a tendency to try to also create big solutions. I realized that when the problem is too big, you have to start from somewhere and start with the simplest, actionable solution, on a certain part of the problem. Experiment. Validate. Learn. Measure. Keep that cycle until there is a problem-solution fit already for a certain part of the problem then move to the next part. Create a roadmap/timeline on the solutions.

1. A problem is mostly multi-sided or has multi-stakeholders. That creating a solution for the problem means looking at the different layers of stakeholders. There is a need to assess how a solution affects the stakeholders so that it benefits all of them. It also helps that empathy to the stakeholders is being laid down. Putting my shoes to the stakeholders gives me an understanding on how they interact with the product or the solution.

I have several hypotheses and questions that I need to find an answer moving forward. One of the questions is: Will an ecosystem of business, consumer and non-profit organization be created to an effective community-based solution? This question is important because the goal of the platform is to create a movement wherein a community problem is to be solved by a partnership of businesses, its consumers, and the non-profit organizations within the same community.