Your job is simple: find a real problem, understand it deeply, generate ideas to fix it, and show your work.
For the first half of the workshop, your only job is to understand the problem. Resist the urge to fix things too early.
Everything should come from your actual life — things you've experienced, not things you've imagined.
During ideation, the worse the idea the better. Being "wrong" is the point — it unlocks the good stuff.
When time is up, move on — even mid-sentence. The constraint is part of the exercise.
No passengers. If someone on your team hasn't spoken in a while, it's everyone's job to ask them.
Put the phone down during sprints. Distraction is a creativity killer — 3 hours of real focus is worth it.
The goal of this phase is to surface a real, specific problem from your own life or community — not an invented one. You'll end the phase committed to exactly one problem your team will work on for the rest of the day.
⚠ Two tracks in Phase 1: If your team arrived today with a problem already in mind, your facilitator will direct you to Print 01 — work through the 5 challenge questions independently while the rest of the class does the discovery activities. You rejoin the class at the Problem Commitment step (around 0:35). If you're starting from scratch, skip Print 01 entirely and use the discovery questions below.
You are not an inventor yet — you are an observer. Your job is to notice friction, frustration, and broken experiences in everyday life. The best entrepreneurial problems are hiding in plain sight: things everyone has experienced but nobody has fixed.
Don't try to find a "big" problem. Start with something small and specific. Small problems that affect many people are far more powerful than vague global ones.
Choose one problem and write it as a clear, specific statement. A good problem statement names a real person, a specific situation, a root barrier, and a consequence.
Most first attempts produce a category, not a problem. Here is the difference:
Rule of thumb: if your problem statement could describe the entire world population, it's too broad. If you can picture one specific person experiencing it, you're getting close.
If your team has two candidate problems and can't agree, ask these three tiebreaker questions — give each problem a score of 1–3 for each:
Pick the higher-scoring problem. The last question matters most — your team's insider perspective is an advantage that generic groups don't have.
Most teams stop at the symptom. This phase is about going deeper — finding the real cause of the problem and understanding who it affects most. The better you understand the problem, the better your ideas will be in Phase 3.
You are a detective now. Your job is to be sceptical of the problem as you first stated it. What you named in Phase 1 is probably still a symptom. Underneath it is a cause — and underneath that is probably another cause. The interesting level is usually 4–5 layers deep.
Resist the urge to start generating solutions. Every minute you spend here makes your ideas in Phase 3 sharper and more likely to actually work.
Use the tool your facilitator provides to keep asking "why?" until you can't go further. The goal is to find the underlying reason the problem exists — not just describe that it does.
Your problem rarely affects only one type of person. Use the tool your facilitator provides to map the different people touched by this problem, how it shows up in their lives, and how severely they feel it.
Here is what the depth exercise looks like when done properly. Follow this pattern with your own problem:
Notice: a solution aimed at "students arriving late" might be a reminder app. A solution aimed at the root cause might be a shared planning API, a coordination committee, or a redesigned timetable. Far more powerful.
Before you generate solutions, you're going outside to test your assumptions against reality. You will talk to 1–2 real people about your problem — not to pitch, not to explain, just to listen. This is one of the highest-leverage activities in any design process.
Your job outside is to be curious, not convincing. Do not explain your idea. Do not pitch your solution. Do not look for people to agree with you. Your only job is to understand how real people experience the problem you identified — in their own words, not yours.
The most useful thing you can hear is something that surprises you or contradicts what you assumed. That's not failure — that's the point.
After each answer: nod, stay quiet for 3 seconds, and let them keep going. The best insights come after the first answer. One person asks. One person takes notes.
Opening line — always start with this: "Hi, sorry to interrupt — we're students doing a quick research exercise. It'll take 3 minutes. Could I ask you two questions about [topic]?" Most people say yes to 3 minutes.
Now you get to think about solutions — but the goal isn't to find one perfect idea. It's to generate as many ideas as possible, including terrible ones, before choosing the best. Volume first, quality later.
Turn off your internal editor. The voice that says "that's stupid" or "that would never work" is your biggest enemy right now. Every idea gets written down — no exceptions, no apologies.
Your first ideas are the obvious ones — things you already knew before the workshop started. Push through them. The interesting ideas live on the other side of the obvious.
Your facilitator will run this as a timed competition. For 5 minutes, your team generates the most absurd, illegal, expensive, or ridiculous solutions to your problem you can think of. The worse, the better. Then for 5 minutes, you flip each bad idea: what's the kernel of a real idea hiding inside it?
The point is deliberate. Generating bad ideas first removes the pressure to be brilliant — and almost always unlocks better ideas than going straight for "serious" ones.
Once you've generated as many ideas as possible, select 3–5 to carry forward. Give each one a short, punchy name — 2 to 4 words. Don't try to describe them fully yet.
Once you have 8–12 individual ideas, try these combination moves before you pick your favourites:
Often the strongest idea in the room comes from combining two mediocre ones, not from a single flash of genius.
You don't need a full business plan yet. At this stage, a good idea just needs to pass three quick tests:
The final phase is about communicating your thinking clearly and confidently. You'll turn everything from the day into a single deliverable, post it publicly, and be ready to pitch in 60 seconds with no warning.
This is the sheet you post on the wall for the gallery walk. Fill it in completely — all fields count.
Your deliverable is a single visual artefact — the Wanted Poster — that captures your problem and your ideas. Fill it in using everything from today. It should be readable from across the room, clear without explanation, and honest.
Walk around and read every team's poster. You each have 5 dot stickers — place them on the ideas you find most compelling. You can put multiple stickers on one poster if you believe in it strongly. Vote on the idea, not the presentation quality.
Random teams will be called to pitch. You won't know it's you until it happens. You have 60 seconds. Keep it to these four beats — nothing else.
The session closes with a short whole-class debrief. Think through your answers now so you're ready:
One sheet. Everything from today in one place. It's your evidence that you found something real.
Something vivid and specific — not a category
Who suffers and how severely
What you found when you drilled deep
Where and when this problem shows up
3–5 named ideas with a one-liner each
What changes if this problem disappears?