February 27th Activity Hour Meeting: Ideate!

The weeks keep going, and so do our Innovate Monarchs. As our "How might we..." questions refined our problem statements, program participants collected even more specific information from their target end users. We start this meeting by debriefing on this additional data collection. Who else did we talk to? What else did we learn? What does this mean for our projects?

We debriefed as individuals first, to make sure that we had time to get all of our ideas and feedback out. Then, we shared with our teams. Did someone else hear the same thing? Great! Did someone else have a similar idea? Awesome! This gave us a chance to see what was similar or different about our data collection and synthesis experiences.

Then came the best part - ideation! This is where program participants combined their "How might we..." questions with their extensive data collection to come up with all sort of ideas in rapid succession. How might we address these problem statements? At this stage, there is no such thing as a bad idea. Any idea that comes to mind should go up on the board.

Only after the ideation process is finished do we start theming. Which ideas are similar? Different? And, more importantly, which ones look the most interesting - like the ones we would want to tackle? Here, now, we reach our research projects.

Our participants have landed on the following topics:

• Re-envisioning the Learning Commons

• Digital safety/cyber security

• Re-imagining the freshmen orientation/First Class experience

• Cutting through the noise - communicating with students

It is an exciting time to be part of Innovate Monarchs!