The Seek app and the team’s admirable goals
Before I critique Seek, let me introduce you to their admirable goals and a few success metrics. Seek is an application created by iNaturalist, a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. iNaturalist has the primary goal of “connect[ing] people to nature, and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting.” (from their website)
Users on the Seek app can identify plants and animals by pointing their phone’s camera at those species. The users earn badges over time as they find new species and by participating in monthly observation challenges. Through a community of iNaturalist users globally and an increasingly sophisticated machine learning algorithm (see their blog about their most recent model), Seek gets better over time at identifying species accurately. “78k people have posted at least one observation via Seek, and there are about 750k observations made via Seek,” according to the Seek representative I spoke with via email. …
Driverless cars today instead of horses. And yet a classroom today: the same as one from a century ago.
A rectangular room. A teacher standing at the front. Children seated at individual desks in orderly rows and columns.
Covid-19 threw that model out quickly. Prior to Covid-19, pilots and grant funding towards education initiatives globally did exist— the Nordic countries are way ahead of everyone (as usual!); Summit Learning in the US with around 400 partner schools is a well-known example of a relatively new model; and Montessori programs, first developed over a century ago, continue to increase in popularity. …
Scalable impactful innovation that takes into account how consumers actually behave: what does that look like? This is a 1st in a series of case studies. Today, we’re looking at the Slovenian start-up PlanetCare.
It’s estimated that around half a million metric tonnes of microfibers enters our oceans because of washing machines (35% of all microplastics found in the ocean), which is harmful to marine life.
PlanetCare’s solution: a plastic microfilter users can install themselves that captures 90% of all fibres, which would otherwise end up in the environment.
Here are 4 WAYS this start-up’s core product & service features leverage behavioral…
About
