Innovation Box — developing your ideas
Whether it is a startup, project or product, creative thinking is essential for success. The project “Innovation Box”, run by IT Partnering and Innovation sets out to stimulate creative thinking in the participants, while also guiding them through a project development stage. I attended along with two other fellow students and a member of the Information Systems Services (ISS) staff here in Lancaster University.
The initial meeting had the purpose of teaching us how to brainstorm and build upon those ideas. With 4 brains on it, ideas were flying everywhere. By the end, we had tens of ideas written on sticky notes. Real-time parking space notifications for the campus, a mobile platform for campus services by students, safety app for the nights out… many enticing ideas, but in the end, we decided to stick with what we ended up calling “Smart Halls”.
The idea was born from seeing the appeal of smart homes in today’s tech-driven age. With the “Internet of things”, soon enough most homes will have smart kettles that heat your water automatically as you get out of bed and tell your lights to turn on. What we wanted was to make our university an innovator in this field, by being the first university in the UK, and possibly in the world (to the best of our knowledge) to offer fully tech-integrated smart halls for students.
Such a step is quite daring to be taken. Students are constantly pressured by rising rents, the last thing they want is even more expensive accommodation. Will they even want such halls? The four of us might be techies, but we didn’t want to let that cloud us. So we started researching.
Meeting after meeting, spending on average 2 to 3 hours thinking and developing, by the end we had reached over 20 hours in total. We thought about what will be useful in smart student accommodation, and after choosing the items, we researched pricing. Before any calculations were made, we had the expectation that the rent would have to go up by a significant amount if we wanted to include £2000 smart fridges in accommodations. But after crunching the numbers, we were stunned.
By spreading out costs over warranty periods, it would cost a student a mere ~£3 per week added to the rent! And that includes a smart thermostat, smart plugs, door lock, light bulb, fridge, oven and kettle. We did not include the cost of creating the system that will sync all these devices, but it can be developed internally by ISS. We were more than ready to pay the additional £3 per week for the abovementioned facilities, but we did our target group research. There was interest among students towards the idea, reaching the top of a voting platform for campus ideas within a day of its publishing. We presented the idea to the Innovation Box leaders and they took it to the people above them, and we are currently waiting to see how that develops.
The experience of developing an idea which you are passionate about is truly something fun and enjoyable. You get to examine it from all sides and learn as you go. You have to implement problem-solving skills, organisational skills and critical thinking. While all these are buzz-words in “business talk”, they most definitely apply. I’d recommend to everyone to pick an idea that they have and develop it fully from inception to implementation. Who knows how it will look in the end? You might be surprised.
