Collaborating with a Community of Innovators
NEARSOFT:
In March Innovators Collective visited Hermosillo Mexicos "little google" to facilitate one of our hackathon style workshops.
We spent weeks getting to know the company through conversations with team members in varying roles. We discovered their strengths and vision and guided the team through excercises built around those strengths and designed to develop the seeds of their individual visions into a unified collective vision.
BAJA ANGEL INVESTORS TRIP:
Following the Angel Ventures Summit held in San Diego, CA Emma Cruz (of Angel Ventures Mexico and Global Shapers) organized a trip to Tijuana Mexico to explore the emerging innovation ecosystem including coworking spaces, civic collaborations, 3DRobotics Manufacturing HQ, and of course delicious baja cuisine. Joined by Angel Ventures Mexico, Cali Baja, Chile Global Angels, MindHub, HubSTN, Tijuana EDC, Fundacion Bavaria, and a few other changemakers it was a weekend to remember.
Startup Weekend Womens Edition: "The perfect pitch"
Amber Brandner spoke at the pitch perfecting event preparing Startup Weekend Women participants for the pitch portion of the weekend long event.
"Find your story - build from there, remember your audience, speak from the heart and mind merger, if you don't believe in it - don't pitch it, if you can't explain it - refine it, collaborate to refine, create something useful - meaningful - and important."
Startup Weekend EDU Presentations Coaching
Amber Brandner and Lauren Avenius joined Ed Hilago of Thinkabiit Lab and Mark Lovett of TEDxSanDiego to give participants story shaping feedback.
Teams presented a range of ideas from Coding to collaborative editing platforms.
A few lessons
1) Avoid getting into details before the audience has "bought-in" to listening to your idea.
2) Honor your collaborators no matter their age or expertise, do this through an awareness of langauage and credit.
3) Assumptions, make none but do give your audience credit (if you are speaking to educators their knowledge of the subject matter will be different than that of an investor, marketer, or mentor)
4) Decide if you are taking the weekend on to start a new career, collaborate on a fun project, or learn through experience.
