OVERVIEW

| OVERVIEW

The Impact Incubator is a competitive business accelerator run each semester. The program is designed to help student teams across campus receive guidance and funding to pilot and launch a social enterprise.

Student teams are equipped with resources, connections, and actionable steps for turning ideas into impact-generating business models. The semester-long program includes hands-on workshops led by organizations spearheading entrepreneurship and innovation in Central Florida, and each team is matched with a professional mentor. The Design Thinking process is at the core of the curriculum, supporting businesses through ideation, empathy gathering, prototyping, and piloting.

role

Team Lead,

Head of Social Entrepreneurship

organization

date

| problem

The Social Impact Hub is a co-curricular department that provides tools and resources to address local and global social issues. This is done through hands-on learning and purposeful dialogue based on human-centered design methodologies.

In the 2019 end-of-school-year review, the Hub team identified a common problem students faced; they wanted more financial resources and step-by-step guidance for student-founded startups.

The common requests were:

More guidance/support for new ideas
Space on campus like the Florida Hospital Innovation Lab
More opportunities to advance businesses
Less event planning, focus on a core structure program
More collaboration and new relationships with outside experts
Engage students from every major

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END-USER RESEARCH

| end-user research

I spearheaded the development of the Impact Incubator program from ground zero. My first step was intensive research. I identified similar programs that were offered by leaders in the university, innovation, and startup spaces.

I created a group of 8 that acted as my design group, made up of department heads, outside experts in innovation and entrepreneurship, business experts, and students studying social entrepreneurship. We met in person and collaborated virtually to create a prototype program that would be offered to students in the Fall 2019 semester as a pilot run.

The program curriculum that we worked to design is based on human-centered design methodologies, Design Thinking, and the Social Lean Canvas and helps support businesses through ideation, empathy gathering, end-user research, prototyping, and piloting.

PROTOTYPE

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| prototype

We utilized the Impact Incubator pilot run in the Fall semester of 2019 to collect pre-program and post-program surveys from the student startup founders, the expert mentors matched with the startups, and the workshop facilitators.

The initial marketing strategies and application process for the Impact Incubator pilot were helpful in gathering further quantitative and qualitative data about the type of demographic interested in the program.

The pilot test was a success! Check out the numbers:

11 businesses applied
15 student founders qualified for the program
5 hands-on workshops
7 expert mentors from outside of the college
6 expert workshop facilitators from outside of the college

SOLUTION

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| solution

The Impact Incubator is a competitive startup accelerator that helps student teams receive guidance and funding to pilot and launch a social enterprise. The curriculum is based on the Design Thinking process and the Social Lean Canvas and includes 5 hands-on workshops, expert mentor matching, access to a mentor pool, funding, automatic eligibility for the Ideas for Good pitch competition finals for a chance to win additional funding and a spot at the Global Social Innovation Challenge.

As a coach and mentor myself, I also supported the founding teams with guidance on UX strategies, wireframing, pilot development, organizational service design, financial investments, and marketing and branding.

Opportunities for giving honest feedback and gathering quantitative and qualitative data from program stakeholders each semester play an important role in the continuous growth and development of the relationships and the program as a whole. As the director of the program, I also led the training of future Impact Incubator leaders, teaching them how to manage and continue to iterate and expand the program.

The Impact Incubator is currently on its 8th run, and the overall impact of the program so far includes: