This week, we began the process of beginning our semester projects. To begin class, we split up into our groups with some paper and markers, and we began thinking of problems we could solve in our lives. Our problems included making it easier for people living in urban environments to grow gardens within their homes, as well as making time management easier for students. We also talked about solving the problem of shaky phone videos as well. In the end, we created a list of ideas as shown below.

After all of the groups made these lists, we then met back up and presented our ideas to the class. Our instructor, Vishal, then critiqued our ideas and presentations and gave us helpful advice for choosing our projects moving forward. Once this was done, the members of each group were then split up into separate groups where we presented our ideas to the members within our group, then they gave us their feedback. This was very helpful, as it gave us fresh new viewpoints from outside our group that gave us an insightful new perspective on our problems.

This process was a very helpful learning experience for me, as it shows me what evaluating an idea will be like if I work at a business after college. As the dummies.com article titled “10 ways to evaluate a new Business Idea” says, there are many questions you should be asking yourself and taking into consideration when thinking of a new idea for a product. Things like “Am I really passionate about this?”, or “Does this idea actually meet or solve a real problem?” are questions you should definitely be asking yourself when thinking of business ideas. This is a something I learned how to do this week, and it is a very important skill to have if you would like to create new products or identify needs in a business.

Now that I have learned the skill of thinking critically about problems in our world and how I can solve them, hopefully I can use this experience to create something of my own that would solve problems. I hope to design products at a company or possibly run a company of my own one day, and having the skills to identify a need or problem that needs to be solved is a very important skill that provides the starting line for product development. I can’t wait to develop these skills even further in the upcoming weeks, and hopefully with some more practice on developing products I can design some products of my own one day.

In order to continue my learning on evaluating business ideas, I did some more online research by myself. One article I liked a lot you can read here. While in class we worked on identifying needs that needed to be met in the world, articles like this one are more centered on the finances and business feasibility of such ideas, which are very important factors to consider when thinking of coming up with an idea.

I also liked this article, as it goes into ways you can evaluate ideas as a group if you’re working in groups. This article is helpful because in most scenarios it will not just be you alone in a room thinking of the next great idea. You will be put in groups with other people just as smart as you and you have the opportunity to build off of each other’s ideas. This kind of groupthinkinking is invaluable, and the suggestions listed in this article help to maximize the benefit of thinking of ideas in groups.