The Brainstorm Project

It took only a few days: Less than a week after traveling to Indiana to start the next chapter of my education last Fall, I felt the urge to Brainstorm.  I had discovered a glaring inefficiency in the way students had to keep schedules at the Kelley School: Class schedules, which varied week by week for first-year students, were posted to an internal web site with no export capability.  That meant 211 students had to manually enter the same 14 class sessions into their Outlook calendars each and every week.  My workaround solution was quite simple - I gathered an email list of everyone in my class and sent Outlook invites to them - but many class members did not want to participate and others wanted to build off of my solution.  Without a forum to talk about the problem or the solution, we defaulted to giant email threads that clogged everyone's inboxes.  What's more, school administration was left in the dark.

Brainstorming would have made this problem and solution much more manageable and clean.  And by the verb "Brainstorming," I mean utilizing Intuit Brainstorm, an idea-sharing social network developed by my professional alma mater.  The tool allows employees to post ideas for new products, new services, ways to streamline operations, and anything else to improve the business.  Everyone in the organization can comment on ideas, post documents and demo videos, and form teams to push ideas forward.  I took the tool for granted while at Intuit, where I worked on ideas ranging from efficient use of office space to a mobile app that we ended up launching in the Android Market.

On top of needing a place to discuss ideas for improving classes, organization, career searches, etc., I also see a huge need at Kelley for a place for entrepreneurially-minded students to discuss venture ideas.  While we have the weekly Napkin Club meetings, there is no forum for continuing to move ideas beyond the napkins, not to mention no forum for communicating promising ideas outside of the group that attends club meetings.  While the Kelley School is truly a leader in the academic side of innovation and entrepreneurship, there is a lot of opportunity in moving the needle on practical applications.  Thus I have decided to bring Intuit Brainstorm to Kelley.

The Brainstorm Project, spearheaded by the Graduate Entrepreneur Club and supported by faculty all the way to the Dean's office, will kick off at the IDEA Competition, an annual campus-wide business plan competition.  It may usher in a new age of creativity at the nation's premier public university in entrepreneurship & corporate innovation, or at the very least, it will give student ideas a tangible home.