Week 2 - Building the net
“This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does it to himself.”
Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Indians
This has been my thought during the second week of Bootcamp. The connection may not be straightforward, but it is really important. After having understood the urban problem on which we are working on, in fact, we are now analysing the network around it. In as much as in daily life we use the GPS when we face unknown and complicated paths, this week we used a map to deal with the net to which our project belongs to. In particular, we used the so called stakeholder map: a graph that allowed us to visualize who are the people involved by our work. For example, the workers of the companies that join us in finding the solutions and the final users. We had the chance to interview them and by understanding their point of view we could develop further our action plan and understand who can help us. It was intense and tiring, but we learnt how to create connections by dialoguing and sharing.
Why is it important to understand the nature of these connections? First, as anticipated last time, “innovation cannot be done in isolation”, we need support and we have to discover who can give us such support. Second, as said by James Lee, developer of the parking app- VOLO, who called us from San Francisco, “innovation is always disruptive”. It means that it will always change the status quo of things and this implies that we have to calculate accurately the possible outcomes of our actions. To do so, we need to see at our problems from different perspectives: the point of views of all the person involved by our innovation process. Third, learning to see our project in a bigger context, we can iterate it and improve it; basically we can share value. As explained by the facilitator team during our practical session, starting from a common vision we can create economic value with a social purpose. I found this human dimension really important because as people we are all connected and by doing something for the others we are actually doing something good also for ourselves. We are all one. This is really a simple, but tremendously strong concept.
This week I felt even more involved in the Bootcamp. Not only our projects are connected to a broader net, but also we as individuals are connected among each other. We are building connections with our teammates, innovators, but also we are learning many other realities of start uppers from all over the world. I would like to leave u with these words by *** who came to visit us and offer us all his support. He said to us to “stay focussed, dream your dream and make it happen”; a really precious connection that will help us to face the next weeks of Bootcamp.
