Challenge
Zahn Innovation Center, an on-campus entrepreneurship space at City College of New York (CCNY), hosted its annual Idea Jam, a day-long ideation session meant to challenge students to create innovative solutions for local, global and everyday issues. As part of Zahn’s commitment to an applied education, Zahn looked to Openbox as a partner to facilitate the session.
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Solution
After an introduction to design thinking, we placed 30 students into cross-disciplinary teams and guided them through a hackathon, where they developed their ideas and received feedback from 20+ experts in real time. After presenting their solutions—which ranged from ergonomic furniture to smart trash cans—students left with confidence, a clear understanding of systems thinking and a design thinking toolkit to translate their ideas into action.
. + Experience Design + Workshop Facilitation |
My Contribution
As a Workshop Facilitator and Co-Project Lead, I interviewed Zahn staff and students, reviewed strategic documents, and conducted a competitive landscape of on-campus innovation accelerators. With my team, I developed insights that guided how we would design and facilitate the session. I led client communications throughout the workshop design process.
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Results
After Idea Jam, students left with an appetite for entrepreneurship and the tools and confidence to apply for Zahn's incubator program.
Since its founding in 2012, Zahn Innovation Center has created 100+ internship opportunities, granted $150,000 in prizes and generated $6,000,000 in revenue across its companies. |