During the summer, I took my part in a summer program in Columbia,
New York. The experience was amazing but the highlight was the venture we
created for my course, Entrepreneurship and Innovation. My group consisted of
me, Anisha from Dubai and Joe from California. We were inspired by a service
project Joe had undertook in California in which he interviewed the elderly in
order to get an insight into their values, morals and life lessons eventually
composing a documentary with the footage collected.
While
brainstorming ideas we realized that people hold on so closely to photographs, jewelry,
clothes, etc. of lost loved ones as that is the last relic left of them. Hence
we developed the idea of creating a company in which families would hire us and
we create documentaries (for any during per requested by families) documenting
their life lessons, morals, values, advice for their children/grandchildren, stories
and answers to questions asked by us. The questions would revolve around topics
of regret, love, loss, etc. The aim of the documentaries would be to capture
the essence of the elderly and hopefully bring back good memories for the
family while watching them. It could hopefully give future generations an
insight to a lost loved one. We were told to form the business proposal from
start to finish focusing on costing, income flow, marketing strategy, etc.
Throughout this process I improved my skills of working collaborately with
others as I had to week for three weeks with two people I had never met before
who had different viewpoints from me. I increase my awareness of my own strengths
in which I realized I'm quite creative (for example, I came up with the vision
statement for our venture "keep the lost found") and also showed perseverance
for three weeks, even when things got hard. Lastly, it was rewarding to come up
with such an original venture which we got great feedback for!
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