We know stories of entrepreneurs who skyrocket their net-worth overnight by an excellent business idea. A good idea is the first step towards a successful project. But it is also the hardest thing when you are in a team of different strengths, interests, and well… cultural backgrounds.
At least this is the current situation in CERES — my final project team at Minerva. For those who are not familiar with this concept, students at Minerva have to work on a project in collaboration with a civic partner to solve a local challenge or fill in a certain gap. For this year, I’m working with Jack and Haitham from Kenya and Svitlana from Ukraine on the question: “How might we make space exploration more accessible to San Francisco residents?”. Socially, I love my teammates. There is certain chemistry among us that creates a psychological safety net for me to say whatever I want, even in the most frustrating scenarios. However, our creativity and enthusiasm in various topics take a toll in deciding on a final idea to work on (given that we had written two papers about our project before.)
Then Svitlana came up with an excellent idea. We would sit down together for 3 hours until we can finalize our idea. We reevaluated on our old ideas and recognized critical loopholes in each of them. And “Eureka!”, we came up with an excellent idea of using AI to make people realize how close and essential space technology is to our daily lives. However, as like every time, we always came up with “excellent” ideas and came back with a loophole a few days later. Progress halted. Frustration arose.
To prevent that situation to reoccur, we decided to:
First, spend 30 minutes to research on this current idea to explore whether similar ideas had existed or if it was feasible technically.
The first criterion was met. It seemed to be both technologically feasible and original in today’s market.
Secondly, we would set up a meeting with an AI professional to kickstart on the technical side. Two have confirmed to meet us this weekend and we are very much looking forward to it.
In short, we managed to decide on our idea, which is very big of a deal for an ever-changing team like us. Sitting down with your teammates for a few hours like a mini-hackathon and researching immediately on potential ideas seem to work perfectly. If you’re facing the same problem, perhaps you should try this method out!
