Entrepreneurship

To use design thinking and learn startup methods to have early stage entrepreneurs jump into the process of quickly developing ‘prototypes’ of products and services to answer fundamental questions and assumptions while modeling their businesses.

Outline

With a lot of focus and noise around lean startup methods and design thinking, there’s a ton of material out there and tutorials. I’m hoping to help entrepreneurs at TGP, translate some of the tools that I’ve found very useful, while developing my social enterprise, Amrutdhara, and working with other startups/orgs. The video link I’ve shared is one of the early lean prototypes that we used to test whether people would buy loose water, and what their perceptions around this were.

Requirements

While not a ‘requirement’ per se, it would be most useful for people working on their own startups. So come with an question or assumption that you’re having trouble researching/understanding.

Speaker bio

Akshay is an industrial designer and design researcher, and has worked in the areas of renewable energy, sanitation and hygiene amongst others. One of his most challenging and rewarding projects was working as a project manager for the multi-stakeholder Bill & Melinda Gates Project — Project Sammaan — on sanitation, during his time at Quicksand Design Studio. Over the last two years, he co-founded Amrutdhara, a social enterprise working on technology and systems, to bring better access to quality-assured drinking water to public spaces in urban India. He is currently working on systems for involving grassroots workers in development planning using ICT while consulting with organisations working to create social impact in education, WASH and other sectors.