SIIC SeedCamp – Aditya Garikapati

It's not good enough to just keep producing technology
with no notion of whether it's going to be useful.

You have to create stuff that people really want, rather
than create stuff just because you can.

It's not good enough to just keep producing technology with no notion of whether it's going to be useful. You have to create stuff that people really want, rather than create stuff just because you can.

- Genevieve Bell -

Role

Designer

About

SeedCamp is a 9 Day Entrepreneurship Bootcamp hosted by SRM Innovation and Incubation Centre for student startups and founders in the ideation stage during the first week of September.

Throughout the course of the year, we at SIIC receive applications from founders seeking incubation. We make it a point to meet all the founders in person and assess their case for eligibility. In cases where they fail to meet their eligibility criteria in terms of idea or tech maturity, we set short terms targets for them to achieve before we could review their application again.

Right before the fall of 2018, we witnessed an influx of applications from an impressive batch of student founders.

It was an extremely diverse cohort of founders with industries ranging from BioTech to Hyperlocal Services built on Hyper Ledger Technology. Owing to our fund size and resources, we had to be extremely shrewd while evaluating their cases. Though every founder was impressive on paper wrt. their ability to develop the tech and their product, our assessment revealed that they hadn't thought through some key use cases, and very often weren't tracking the right metrics.

After due consideration and evaluation of the founders and their team profiles, we invited a batch of 6 to take part in the maiden edition of SIIC Seedcamp. The purpose of this bootcamp was to help these founders and teams build a stronger case for their application while identifying their core strengths and shortcomings. This was achieved by working methodically and closely with the founders on their idea, and evaluating their competencies to execute upon them.

It was an extremely diverse cohort of founders with industries ranging from BioTech to Hyperlocal Services built on Hyper Ledger Technology.
Owning to our fund size and resources, we had to be extremely shrewd while evaluating their cases. Though every founder was impressive on paper wrt. their ability to execute on the tech and the product, our assessment revealed that they hadn't thought through some key use cases and in most cases weren't tracking the right metrics.

After due consideration and evaluation of the founders and their team profiles, we invited a batch of 6 to take part in the maiden edition of SIIC Seedcamp. The purpose of this bootcamp was to help these founders and teams build a stronger case for their application while identifying their core strengths and shortcomings, by working methodically and thoroughly only their idea and feasibility for a period of nine days.

Duration

24th August 2018
- 1st September 2018

Team

1 Designer
2 Principals

2 Designers
4 Developers

Contribution

Story Telling, Identity Design,
Editorial Design

Research + Preparation + Event Design

The research included brushing up on frameworks for problem solving and research documenting. We used material from Stanford D.School HCI Needfinding Playbook, IDEO Design Thinking Bootleg, Jake Knapp's Sprint, and lastly DE Toolbox which is nothing short of a bible for us.

The research included reading up and brushing up on proven problem solving and research documenting frameworks. We used material from Stanford D.School HCI Needfinding Playbook, IDEO Design Thinking Bootleg, Jake Knapp's Sprint and lastly DE Toolbox which is nothing short of a bible for us.

We coupled design thinking with a concept of master-lists and essential checklists to conceive a sprint-like framework to help founders quickly assess the viability of an idea and their capacity to bring it to fruition, all within a week's work.

Masterlists

Masterlists consist of a set of questions that are aimed at helping founders evaluate their understanding of the market landscape and break them down into 'known knowns' and 'known unknowns'. Through Masterlists, they should also be able to clearly define their problem case and their proposed solution in an easily understandable manner.

Checklists

Checklists are lists of to-do's and knowledge base requirements one should go about fulfilling while working on their respective ventures. The role of checklists is to expose and uncover as many possible facets of the problem as possible and to develop a wholesome understanding of the addressable market.