INC - Month in Review - Feb. 2020
INCubatorEDU@Sheboygan South High School
Experiments are On!
Pitches are (almost) behind all of the teams and the work begins to move from customer discovery to customer validation. Essentially, we spent the first semester trying to determine if our problem was big enough and whether our solution will fill customer needs adequately. Now, we move to find out if they will take action. Assumptions were made in the first semester. Now we work to reduce or eliminate them.
Response Bias is a real thing. You may hear from people that they love your idea. You may hear from people that your solution is fantastic. The MVP experiment determines how much bias may be in our initial work by asking customers to take action, knowing that this is the ultimate forecast of success.
Next Month's Events and Activities
Remember, any volunteer/parent can attend our class on any given day. Just tell the Main Office that you are here for INC. Our schedule can be found on the INCubatorEDU site.
March 2-12 - MVP Experimentation
March 13, 16-17 - Legal with Mandy Tran
March 18, 20 - Revisiting the Financial Model
March 30-31 - Storytelling with Jessica Schmitt-Reynolds
Volunteer Spotlight - Coach Mandy Tran
Coach Tran's legal firm, CERES Patent & Technology, is a firm dedicated to smart business development and growth. Specifically, they help protect intellectual property through opportunities in patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret and contract law.
To be successful, you need passion and curiosity of the world and an objective analytical approach to any question. INC can help bring that out of students. She considers that her greatest professional strength.
Advice to Students: My best advice to my high-school self, upon reflection now, is to be more brave and welcome failure more openly, because failure is the key to learning.
Volunteer Spotlight - Mentor David Leeds
He is the senior accountant with a start-up company specializing in HR for investment services. His span of experience encompasses most of the traditional functions of a finance, accounting, and IT.
He chose to get involved with INC because he's seen the impact and demand for entrepreneurial skills, even in an established company or in a non-business field. He has been fortunate enough to have mentors in his own life, and is excited to be able to "pay it forward".
Advice for Students: Take all the math and computer science you can. Particularly the really hard and obscure stuff you'll swear you'll never need, like calculus. Technology and data is written in the logic and language of that hard and obscure math, and more often the glory (and the pay!) go to the ones who can understand and engage the math and translate the results to the team.
Volunteer Spotlight - Coach Jessica Schmitt-Reynolds
Double Vision Films is a local film production company focusing on creating engaging content for businesses and nonprofits. Coach Jessica heads that company and will be coaching our lessons on Storytelling.
Good stories generate empathy, placing the audience in the pit of the problem and guiding them to solution. Creating videos that not only convey a message and brand but also have heart is one of Jessica's strong suits, so she was eager to join our team. She also was interested in INC because it sounded like something she would have been involved with in high school. Advice for Students: Don't be afraid to ask questions! You don't always have to try to appear to be the smartest person in the room...because most likely you are not :)
Did you Complete your Volunteer Spotlight?
INCubatorEDU@SHS
Email: gstone@sasd.net
Website: https://sites.google.com/sasd.net/incubatoredu/home?authuser=0
Location: 1240 Washington Avenue, Sheboygan, WI, USA
Phone: 920-459-3637