Kickstart Global

2022

Project brief

Kickstart Global is a student-run accelerator and incubator programme for students to help build user-obsessed companies. While I was familiar with Kickstart Global as one of the founders to take part in its accelerator through Matter of Mind, I joined Kickstart Global as Head of Incubation and Innovation in November 2021 through to April 2022. With the INCUBATE program, I aimed to provides the knowledge, framework and sandbox environment for students to create their very first validated product/design. Our end goal for the incubation program was an MVP. As Head of Incubation, my role at Kickstart was to design and develop an Incubation program for their new INCUBATE cohort. I successfully collaborated with the ACCELERATE Kickstart, Entrepreneurs First, Deloitte and Mentors Teams and designed a course derived from the Design Thinking Cycle lasting 12 weeks. Furthermore, I interviewed teams for the INCUBATE cohort and delivered the program through Key Workshops, culminating in Pitch Day, April 2022.

timeframe

6 months

industry

Innovation & Entrepreneurship

01 responsibilities

My time as Head of Incubation involved creating the entire Incubation Programme. One of the first responsibilities I had, was devising the structure of the 12 week course, and defining what the application period would look like.

The incubation program was thus divided into 3 stages. Apply, Meet and Learn & Build. The Incubation Programme was designed to support students through the early stages of building a startup. It was decided that the programme would offer the opportunity for students to meet other like-minded students to build their co-founding team and offer support through perks, such as Notion and Bubble.io subscriptions, and dedicated office hours from Kickstart’s team of mentors, so that students could build their ideas well. Partnering with key figures from Financial Times, Deloitte, and other companies in the innovation space, I was able to design a 12 week Programme with workshops delivered by trailblazers in the field of Ideation, User Centered Design, Prototyping etc.

Apply

Meet

Learn & Build

02 outreach

As part of the effort to reach out to as many students as possible, it was decided the committee that we should market ourselves extensively so we could recieve enough responses to the applications as possible. I was responsible for creating the designs for Instagram and LinkedIn, as well as creating an extensive ad campaign, both of which netted us a 150 applications from our network. The designs created for the social media campaign are attached below.

03 team formation

For Individuals applying to the programme, my team members of the Kickstart Global Committee pitched in to decide who would be best suited to join the programme. The application form was designed by the team together, asking applicants questions about their past experiences in entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as whether they were coming into the program with an idea already in mind, or if they were open to developing one once they had found a team during the team formation stage. After the applications were given a thorough read, and each individual was scored on their application, their experiences and their ideas, they would be put through the Team Formation stage. I designed the Team Formation Stage to help the students build a team and find people they’d work well with. To address this goal, I personally organised events, introduction workshops and mixers. For example, one of the first Kickstart events we introduced during the Team Formation stage was a 3-minute Speed Idea Dating event. The concept was that students would be randomly matched for 3 minutes where they would be able to speak about their experiences, ideas they’re passionate about and what they’re hoping to gain out of the programme. Another example is the introduction of Mini-Hackathons and Design Tasks, where students would be randomly put in a team and they would be given Design Tasks to accomplish over a period of 2 hours, so that students could showcase their skills in a team, and decide which team members they wanted to go through Team Formation with. After the Team Formation period elapsed, Students would be expected to deliver their ideas in a pitch presentation to their assigned mentors and the Kickstart Committee. If their presentation passed the judging criteria I designed together with the Committee, the team would then be able to “Track Out”. This was all conveyed to the Students we’d selected through a Mixers Event on Hopper, facilitated by me.

Workshop I facilitated about the designed Incubation Programme

04 Judging criteria

As Head of Incubation, it was also my responsibility to design the Judging Criteria for the teams that made it through Team Formation and wanted to track out. This very same judging criteria would also be used on Pitch Day, April 22, to compare how far teams had come throughout the program, and how they’d incorporated the learnings of the workshop into their product.

05 designing the programme

Team formation - week 1 & 2

The aim of Team Formation was to guide students into making teams that could help support their ideas, if they had one in mind, or form new ones while also finding a dynamic that works for the students involved in the project.

Ideation - week 4 & 5

The aim of these weeks was to introduce students to the design thinking cycle. I had assumed that there might be some teams who already had an idea in mind when they joined the program, but the Ideation stage would help them refine the idea, and for those teams who didn’t have an idea in mind, the Ideation stage would introduce the to analysing issues and problems through empathising with users and defining requirements for any solution. The ideation toolkit I built for the teams would help themcome up with offerings.

Problem Validation - week 6 to 8

The aim of these 3 weeks was to validate what students have come up with through the ideation stage. These 3 weeks were crucial in teaching students how to conduct interviews, how to make assumptions about our product and validate the assumptions, and to think how the users would interact with what their solution was.

Build, Test & learn - week 9 to 12

It was assumed that by Week 9, students would be more sure and familiar with what their solutions were. Their solutions would have been validated and the students themselves would have pivoted their solutions to cater to these validations. The aim of these 4 weeks was to build their idea itself, either using no-code solutions like Bubble.io, tools like Figma, or even a spreadsheet as an MVP that validates their assumptions. These 4 weeks were used to grain traction for their solutions and to build, test, iterate.

To make sure that the programme had a good value proposition for the teams in the incubation programme, I was responsible for organising workshops for the teams, each week, based on the themes of the week. To do so, I contacted key figures in the field of Service Design, Ideation, Problem Validation & Prototyping. The teams , thus, had access to a panel of workshops from professionals working at IDEO, BBC, Financial Times, Deloitte, EY-Seren and more. Furthermore, I set about making an Incubation HQ page on Notion, where teams could circle back after their workshops to find workshops recording on the topic as well as a curated list of links, resources and toolkits.

incubation hq

From designing the program, facilitating and delivering workshops, to organising speakers, my final responsibility as Head of Incubation was to create an Incubation HQ for the 2021-2022 Cohort. To create the Incubation HQ, I created a Notion directory that contained recordings of workshops delivered each week, tools, resources and links that may be helpful to the students throughout the programme. As such, resources compiled from Board of Innovation, Service Design University, DesignKit, IDEOUniversity, and from my own experiences were updated weekly. The topics included everything from Narrative to Paper Prototyping to Usability Testing.

04 characteristics of the programme

4

Workshops personally facilitated and delivered

3

partnerships established during programme

1

team personally mentored

12

workshops organised