Have you ever had an idea to better the city or the community, but you didn’t know how to make it happen? Launch Some Good is your chance to take that idea off the back burner and make it tangible.
Launch Some Good is a bit of a riff off events that have been taking place around the world. The inspiration came to organizer David Rust-Smith while in Melbourne. There, he participated in Hub Melbourne’s Freshly Hacked event, which seeks to create a social impact startup within a weekend. “It was so much fun”, says Rust-Smith, and one of the reasons he decided to join the Hub once in Ottawa. “You get twenty-five like-minded young adults with a social itch being scratched that get to create something concrete over a weekend.”
The idea is not to come as a team, but as individuals with ideas (although that’s not necessary). The hope is there will be people from different backgrounds – from environment to education to arts to financing – that will compliment each other. From the group of twenty-five, five ideas are chosen and teams are formed. Teams work to turn these ideas into business cases, create a social business model, design a prototype product or viable service, validate the solution, develop a marketing plan, etc. Mentors will be on hand to give advice on business modeling, marketing, sustainability, technology, market research and more.
At Freshly Hacked, Rust-Smith’s team created an app that facilitated meeting strangers that are on the same train. For many Melbourners the commute to work can take up to two hours, so the app was a great way to initiate dialogue with strangers. The project quickly evolved to a language learning facilitating tool that helped match people speaking a language with individuals wanting to learn the language.
Vinod Rajasekaran, Hub’s Executive Director, sees an opportunity to ground this type of event in some of our city issues. For example, it might be interesting down the road to have the mayor come out and discuss some of the top challenges the city is facing and see how teams could come up with creative solutions. The opportunity to see immediate benefit by testing and prototyping a solution is appealing.
Rajasekaran and Rust-Smith encourage folks that have both hard and soft skills to come. The idea isn’t to build a complete solution. After all, this is impossible to do in 48 hours. Instead the goal is to create something, prototype it and test it. A judge will pick the top ideas and those two teams will win 5 months of HUB membership to fine-tune their project.
If you’re action-oriented and interested in meeting new people and potentially making something tangible out of your idea (or someone else’s), register now. The even takes place this weekend (August 16, 17 and 18th) at HUB Ottawa. Only a few spots are left. The $25 fee is to ensure participant commitment and will be used as the prize money for the winning teams.
