My Entrepreneurship Story

Entrepreneurship and ME!

Thinking back to a time where I became an entrepreneur is easy! 

Last summer, at the University of Florida, I took a course called Creativity in Action. Throughout this course, students are teamed up and must work together to create, develop, and pitch an innovation to a crowd of people at an event called Catalyst. This event is memorable to my team and I because we won the people's choice award for our innovation. Although our idea did not win the best overall award, our achievement proved to everyone that we had the best interests of our costumers in mind.

The course itself is structured in a way that pushes students to build off of their teams ideas and come up with an invention that has yet to be created and would be extremely helpful if it was. The course instructors give the students an overall theme for their innovations to be centered around. Then the students research as much as they can to find a specific target audience who would benefit the most from an innovation, the students as a team, create. Throughout the six weeks of summer students meet twice a week for three hours and brainstorm and create.

Stemming off of a method our professors taught us where we ask "How Might We..." find a solution to a problem, we created a toy. The theme this past year was early childhood development. My team specifically sought out parents with children on the autism spectrum. We chose to build off of our research where we discovered children who are on the path to be placed on the autism spectrum can express less symptoms if treated from a very young age. Therefore, we created a toy that involves multiple bugs a child exhibiting autistic behavior would have in a way that would allow them to become familiar with the bugs while their minds are focused on something else. Thus, the children are being exposed to bothersome materials while focused on creating a puzzle that then grants them a reward upon completion. The pieces to the puzzle are created using materials children have issues with. The puzzle can be switched for up to five different scenes by the parent. Once the child finishes the puzzle the whole board softly lights up colors and plays peaceful uplifting music. The child benefits from all aspects of the toy, where the exposure to textures, lights, and sounds benefit them in the long-run. It was called ShapeScapes.

We had to create a storyboard showcasing how the toy would be used and would benefit customers. We also then had to create a prototype of our toy and pitch it to multiple rounds of judges, families, students, and community members. Our pitch was given from a booth where our team brought stickers, props, and a poster, we also presented a commercial for our toy that ran on loop at the booth.  Our pitch was taught to us by our professors to follow a "form, function, and benefit" format.
This was our pitch; 

"Our innovation is in the form of a toy that consists of different colored and shaped blocks, each covered in a different texture, that can be matched on a board forming pictures. This assists children during early childhood development who show autistic tendencies. The toy requires the kids to become comfortable with textures and sensory through a reward system. The shapes ultimately contribute to creating different landscapes, or pictures."

Our innovations logo:

We were also taught in the class about a 5 day sprint; a business technique that finds a solution to a problem in just 5 full business days of team work.

This class exposed me to a way of entrepreneurship thinking and I will always remember it.

Therefore, I enrolled in ENT3003 this semester to continue learning the entrepreneur mindset that we need to know as innovation students. I hope to continue to learn unique methods of entrepreneurship that will allow me to work with an array of individuals on projects that I will be tasked with in the real world.