Saturday several of us visited Stanford University to attend a workshop preparing us for mentoring the Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability course (there was a great article on it in Fortune last week – what a fantastic experience!  The class is part of Stanford’s d.School and incorporates graduate students from the Graduate School of Business, Engineering, Product Design, etc.   Many of the students are just back from (and recovering from) their needfinding visits to various developing countries like Rwanda and Myanmar – they were exploring what products they might introduce to improve the quality of life there, and perhaps making a profit from marketing these, if that makes sense.  We mentors exercised out listening and empathy skills by interviewing ourselves about, imagining, prototyping, and refining… oral hygiene solutions – you never know what it is that people in another culture will value as an addition to their lives, so it didn’t really matter what we practiced on.

I look forward to seeing how they develop new metrics to see how one design is more appropriate than another – letting the predict future success potential with their customers; all consumers have choices, how do we know that they will chose the ones we develop?  Looking forward to working with our faculty of Erica Estrada, a former class participant and co-founder of D.light Design, and Prof. Jim Patell.