Workflow Improvements for ASME Idea Lab Incubator
Idea Lab is an incubator offering comprehensive support to social entrepreneurs throughout the initial stages of product development, from early-stage ideation to developing a low-fidelity prototype. Idea Lab offers a platform where innovators focused on hardware-led innovations receive mentorship, training, and seed capital while employing an approach where participants not only refine their technical skills but also gain a profound understanding of market dynamics, user needs, and scalable business models.
This preparatory phase acts as a stepping stone for these entrepreneurs to increase their likelihood to potentially transition into the ASME ISHOW accelerator ecosystem, where their projects are elevated to the market-ready stage, effectively scaling up their impact.
Through this project, ASME Idea Lab sought to gain insight from a retrospective analysis of its inaugural year in order to effectively streamline stakeholder engagement processes, revise the program structure, and improve offerings to future innovators and mentors in anticipation of the Idea Lab 2.0 launch.
The Fellow worked closely with the Idea Lab team in assessing insights from the post-mortem analysis on Idea Lab 1.0 in order to identify the research scope and areas of refinement. Processes for communication were streamlined between stakeholders (e.g., innovators and mentors). Furthermore, research was conducted, and recommendations were made on how to improve the retention of information between mentors and innovators; benchmarking and tracking of progress; and a formalized process for mentor recruitment.
