Fail fast to learn faster: How an open-minded experimental mentality can help you to succeed

Lessons from young entrepreneurs

by Kylan Dempsey, Creative Writer, Gooddler Foundation.

Last Saturday, fourteen young social entrepreneurs walked into the Hortonworks offices with six ideas about how to improve the world.

As participants in the GOODdler Social Impact Youth Incubator, a 12-week summer program offered by the Gooddler Foundation in close partnership with the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership, they each came with outlines of services that they hoped to turn into reality: a program to bring music education to underprivileged schools; a vertical farming machine to grow vegetables in the home; an educational app to improve the reading level of elementary school students; an idea to use virtual reality to connect students with teachers anywhere in the world;

an initiative that helps ecologically and socially regenerative Kenyan ventures scale globally through licensing and localization while keeping Kenyan roots and benefiting local communities; and a project that is shifting mental models and cultural narratives for better prevention, early-stage identification, and timely care of anxiety & depression for first-generation American children & young adults.

Over the course of the eight-hour workshop, each of these six teams used the research they had been doing in the last three weeks to form business models essential for the real-world success of their initiatives.

The support of Hortonworks promises to be extremely valuable. The company is at the forefront of open-source big data solutions, providing exactly the sort of platforms and services that ambitious social entrepreneurs need to tackle modern-day problems. “Data,” says Hortonworks’ mission statement, “will power all industries, communities, devices, companies, and people.” It is access to this data that will often make the difference between success and failure for campaigns to address the world’s problems. Additionally, Hortonworks shares the can-do attitude of the participants in the GOODdler Youth Incubator. “We believe those with an open-minded experimental mentality — not afraid to fail fast so they can learn faster — will lead the charge,” the Hortonworks mission statement adds. “Those that disrupt their industry, their own business, are clearly seeing the future and anticipating what’s next.”

Saturday’s Youth Incubator module took these lessons to heart. Agility was a central theme of the workshop, with students encouraged to become more aware of their own blind spots and develop adaptive responses to the complex and changing environment. In the very first icebreaker activity, the facilitator asked the participants to number themselves one through eighteen, calling out the numbers popcorn style. If two people called out the same number at the same time, everyone would have to start over. It took ten attempts to pull it off.

Before splitting back into teams and coming up with business models, the facilitators organized another activity that would test the participants’ creativity and resolve. In pairs, the participants were asked to collaboratively hold two ping pong balls in the air using only their fingertips, and, without speaking, to carry them across the room without dropping them. This simple exercise facilitated rich and diverse learning. Here are a couple of insights shared by the participants:

“I learned that the dynamics of a team change not only by the amount of risk you or your partner are willing to take but also by how your peers in the rest of the field are taking risks. You play off of other teams and draw inspiration from different techniques.”

“From the ping pong exercise I was able to learn that vulnerability has to be incorporated within relationships in order for them to function well. I as well learned that coordination has to be built upon trust and confidence.”

These two activities were meant to promote a close reading of the situation, to understand what other people are going to do and how to respond. And before the workshop had truly started, the participants were already innovating. Now the real work could begin.

Over the course of the workshop, I primarily followed teammates Michael and Joss as they worked out a business model for Vertigrow, their in-home aeroponics machine. The device, intended for city-dwellers who want to cut greenhouse gas emissions and grow their own vegetables and herbs, allows plants to be grown indoors without soil. As proof of concept, the pair had already built a prototype and grown a plant in it. Joss also put together a 3-D model of what they expected the finished device to look like. The question they now faced was how to sell it, who to sell it to, and why they wanted to build it in the first place.

The GOODdler Youth Incubator utilizes a tool called the Business Model Canvas. There are different types of Canvas used, depending on the type of a business participants are working on. Youth is first divided into three tracks: the hero track, the savior track, and the evolutionary track. The tracks are summarized as follows:

• Heroes: Should demonstrate the potential to improve quality of life of their employees and customers by creating decent job opportunities and delivering genuine value for the customers in an ethical and sustainable way.
• Saviors: Should demonstrate the potential to effectively address symptoms of a specific social or environmental issue through market mechanisms without unintended negative systemic consequences.
• Evolutionaries: Should demonstrate the potential to use entrepreneurship as a vehicle for making the world more just, sustainable, and flourishing for all by intentionally redesigning worldviews, cultures, and institutions that perpetuate a complex, systemic issue.

Each track receives its own Business Model Canvas that helps the participants to identify what resources are needed, who the stakeholders are, what the costs will be, who will benefit, and much more. By answering these questions, each team was expected to come up with three possible business models in case their initial strategy failed. Heroes use the conventional Business Model Canvas, Saviors use a canvas that includes social impact, and Evolutionaries use Flourishing Business Canvas developed by the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group — a global community of innovation practice and a knowledge mobilization initiative hosted by the OCAD University Strategic Innovation Lab.

Team Vertigrow, firmly on the Hero track, sat down with the team designing virtual reality education tools and discussed the challenges they would face in bringing the product to market in “an ethical and sustainable way.” One such question was the target consumer. I asked Michael who the vertical farming machines were for. “They’re for people like college students, people who want a food group other than instant ramen,” he said. This was later expanded to anyone who lives in an urban area and wants to grow their own food, but might not have access to a garden plot. Pricing came next. Everyone agreed that the machine should be affordable for anyone who is interested, but it needed to be profitable at the same time. And if it could be sold for, say, $75, then how many should be produced in order to satisfy the market? What about seeds and nutrient solution? Vertigrow had the opportunity to sell seeds and nutrient solution alongside its machines to help balance the checkbook, but this raised a host of new issues. Could the seeds and solution be sold on a subscription basis? What incentives could there be to buy Vertigrow’s seeds and solution instead of third party products, and was there an ethical way to create them? “We don’t want to be Apple,” said Michael, in response to a proposal that the machines only be compatible with Vertigrow’s own products. Throughout the discussion, profits took a back seat to ethics, and the conversation was always anchored to the assumption that the goal was to offer people an affordable vertical farming machine, not simply to make money.

At the end of the day, all six teams produced three business models, chose one, and presented their plans. The range of proposals was incredible: from the simple task of bringing a product to market, as Michael and Joss intended, to the vast undertaking proposed by participants Dennis and Lindah that promised to transform the economy of Kenya. The undercurrent connecting all of the projects was a collective intent to better the world, whether by marketing a beneficial product, providing a much-needed service, or dismantling a social problem from the ground up. In just eight hours, these ideas solidified into comprehensive blueprints for success which, thanks to the GOODdler Youth Incubator, might soon become reality.

Interested in participating in our next Social Impact Youth Incubator? Apply here. To receive information about the Gooddler Social Impact Youth Summit sign up to receive updates here.

About us: Gooddler Foundation is a 501(c)3 US Charity that aims to create a resourceful networking platform for young people from all socioeconomic backgrounds to grow with the desire to contribute to common good and inspire them to become a part of solutions to the most pressing global issues and issues plaguing communities they live in by giving them tools to create sustainable and profitable businesses.

To provide participants with cutting edge thought leadership and support that includes insights and frameworks from top-level academic research, real-life case studies, and rigorous mentorship, the Gooddler Foundation partners with the Institute for Evolutionary Leadership (IEL) — a California-based social enterprise that helps individuals, teams, and communities intentionally drive systemic transformation towards a more just, sustainable, and flourishing world. Through its educational services IEL has been enriching, transforming, and co-designing educational programs, fellowships, and incubators with strong focus on addressing deep systemic root causes of complex global and local challenges. IEL’s modules have been ranked top 1–2 compared to social innovation modules provided by Stanford D-School, OpenIDEO, and other prominent organizations in the field.