Weekly Inspiration #26: Making Ideas Happen
Last week, Sandbox gave a keynote address and hosted a ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ workshop at the Ivy Leadership Summit at Yale University. Preparing for the conference, we wanted to do things a little different. We were asked to share our thoughts on ‘Fearless leadership.’ Instead, we argued the term is misleading. Observing the Sandbox community, we made the case that leaders aspiring to change the status quo must fear something. Sandbox members would point out three fears in particular:
1. The fear of not having an impact.
2. The fear of doing something they are not genuinely passionate about.
3. The fear of being ‘normal’.
To help participants truly engage with our message, we invited everyone to a Sandbox workshop on Social Entrepreneurship. Our goal was to demonstrate that it’s not only possible to create and act on atypical ideas that have meaningful impact, but it’s actually a lot of fun. We prepared four general topics in areas such as promoting good, improving education, raising awareness of homelessness, and improving remittance payments for migrant workers.
With these topics, we formed four groups and encouraged participants to choose a cause they felt most passionate about. We limited brainstorming time to 30 minutes, asking for a plan with concrete actionable steps that would bring the idea to life. Here is what happened in less than 30 minutes:
1. Bikes for Cambodia: Moderated by Nettra Pan, the group came up with an effective way to address education and transportation improvement in Cambodia. The Idea: In rural areas of Cambodia, transportation is rudimentary while schools are distributed widely, making it difficult for thousands of kids to attend school. The group wants to provide bicycles for children in Cambodia, in this way boosting school attendance. The group plans to create bicycle rental centers at schools in a given village, through which children will borrow bicycles for a small fee. Bike companies and individual donors will ‘adopt’ school zones by donating money and equipment (bicycles). To learn more please join the Facebook Fan page here.
2. Karma Points: Moderated by Fabian Pfortmuller. The group came up with a way to promote good deeds through an online platform, involving both individual and corporate ‘good doers’. The idea: Create a network of people who enjoy giving back to the community. On this platform people will be recognized and rewarded for their day-to-day acts of kindness and compassion. Companies will donate goods and services that will be awarded based on Karma points. To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.
3. Sleep in their Shoes: Moderated by Danielle Tomson, the group came up with a way to raise awareness of homelessness while raising money that helps local shelters. The Idea: Students across the US camp out in their university quads or nearby public parks. Each student seeks sponsorship from friends/family/companies. The act will raise awareness and sponsorships will help local shelters. Students from several universities are putting the plan into action. To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.
4. Air Cash: Moderated by Paul Gleger, the group brainstormed ways to improve expensive and sometimes unreliable cross border remittance payments sent by millions of migrant workers. The Idea: create (or expand existing) text message based mobile money transfers. The idea can first be tested in small towns and university campuses. The group plans to then scale the user-friendly model into larger markets. The bigger idea is to create a standard ‘air cash’ mobile currency that is trusted, easily transferred, and recognized as legitimate payment. The team is currently researching the topic, will develop it further for a university business plan competition, and will connect with a telecom operator in Zimbabwe (thanks to one of team members) to learn more about mobile networks and payments. To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.
It was exciting to see our keynote message put into action. From feedback we realized hands on workshops are preferred over traditional panels – after all, learning comes from doing, not just talking. We also noticed that constrained brainstorming time leads to impressive levels creativity (as we’ve probably all experienced writing term papers last minute ;) We were thrilled to receive positive feedback from participants and we hope to conduct similar workshops in the near future. What topics should we tackle next? How can we make the workshops even better? Let us know!
Afterhours in Delhi
Jyoti & Suresh Guptara - Sandbox Ambassadors in Delhi - report from the last Dinner which they have organized with local talents and visiting guests.
Momentum in Delhi was built. Recommendations from internationally scattered Sandbox members and new friends, and two preliminary meetings later, the time was ripe for our first major Sandbox Delhi networking evening.
On Friday, 5th March 2010, we were kindly hosted at “Afterhours” studio-store, by one of the designers and partners, Mayank Kaul. We were thrilled to welcome around 20 people to the picturesque backdrop of Hauz Khas Village’s lake and ruins.
Two hours and free beer later, we had got to know the other inspiring young movers and shakers from their respective fields, including guests from TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs). Conversation ranged from how to sell pricey designer products during a recession (AKA, How Black Money Saved India from the Recession) and add revenues on social networks, to the founders explaining how their new media company caters to Indian politicians.
We were joined by Sandboxer Marcel Oedi, fresh from Singapore to explore turning a Master’s thesis into real-life business, before heading out for more in-depth and casual conversation over drinks and dinner. Everyone is excited at the prospect of a growing Sandbox presence here!
Suresh and Jyoti are the Sandbox Ambassadors in Delhi. They are sad to think of their imminent return to Switzerland, but confident that Sandbox has a promising future in Delhi and India.
Suresh & Jyoti Guptara
Sandbox at South By Southwest
We’re excited to host our first event at the upcoming South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas (SXSW in short), where Sandboxers from allover the world will come together to attend their Interactive Festival. What started as a music and film festival has become a mecca for some of the hottest startups on the planet and the latest innovations. We’re excited to be there, please let us know if you are too!
Many thanks to Sandboxer Cesar Torres for the organization!
Meet a Sandbox Member: Ashley Ellis
Sandbox member Ashley Ellis is a 24 year old freelance writer, filmmaker, and philanthropist living in Los Angeles, soaking up the sun, and seeking new experiences. Ashley on facebook and twitter.
Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.
My latest project will hopefully become my full-time occupation. It’s a production company that I started called Emerald City Arts, which brings film, music, and visual art together to create “meaningful media and innovative art”. ECA will also have a partner foundation, so that every project is somehow linked to a cause that we want to support. The company came about just out of a need to combine all of my interests (the arts, good causes, and bringing people together) into one thing that I could focus on. The goal is to create a collective of artists who are all collaborating on different projects. Right now, we’re working on a documentary film about Northern Botswana, a mixed-media art piece on Haiti, and a music video for an up-and-coming artist in LA.
What are you doing and how did you get there?
What am I doing? I’m living in LA, traveling a lot, working on a master’s degree, and making films. I came to Los Angeles, because I’m originally from Seattle and had been living in Pennsylvania before undergrad. I was tired of the rain, snow and cold weather, so Los Angeles seemed like the perfect place to attend college. I travel because of my projects and involvement in different organizations, but that’s all a part of my master plan. After spending the summer after undergrad in Botswana, I can’t imagine not exploring new places. I found myself in a Professional Writing master’s program, because I wanted to sharpen my skills, define my voice, and figure out how you can write and make a living at the same time! And I make films, because one day in high school I realized that not everyone can watch seven movies in a day. Films are my passion.
Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?
The biggest success in my life so far has probably been my academic achievements. I’ve been fortunate throughout my childhood and adult life to attend institutions that have given me wealth in knowledge, the opportunity to expand my worldview, and a network of individuals to work with towards common goals. None of it would have been possible though unless I’d worked hard enough to earn acceptance into those school and special programs. My biggest failure was probably in my athletic career. I had the opportunity to play tennis beyond a collegiate level but quit. From these two aspects of my life I’ve learned the following: There is power in education, and if you’re not truly passionate about something, then it’s not worth pursuing.
What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?
In the next week, I’d love to secure the funds needed for my involvement this year in Coaching for Conservation. It’s an amazing and innovative sports program with a conservation and health curriculum for young children in developing Botswana, and this year I have an instrumental role in the growth of the program. Read more about it here. In the next year, I’d love to see Emerald City Arts be able to sustain itself financially and continue to grow. I’d also love to be accepted into a dynamic Phd program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts that I intend to apply for. Who knows where I’ll be in ten years or what I’ll be doing, but as long as I’m able to do what I love and inspire people at the same time, I’ll be content.
What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?
Joining Sandbox…. simply because I knew that I would meet so many like minded individuals and things would begin to serendipitously take off.
How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?
Other Sandboxers can support me by simply offering their advice, time, involvement, and resources as I work on different projects. I believe that the members of this community are here, because they truly want to affect change in the world. So, they should be excited just to see me try to as well and to be a part of the movement that I hope to create!
Ashley’s favourites:
Drink- Savannah Dry
Place on earth- Seattle (home)
Quote-
Art is the conversation between lovers.
Art offers an opening for the heart.
True art makes the divine silence in the soul
Break into applause.
Art is, at last, the knowledge of
Where we are standing-
Where we are standing
In this Wonderland
When we rip off all of our clothes…
-Hafiz
On Adam Smith and Coca Tea
Nate Loewentheil recently moved to Cochabamba, Bolivia, and publishes occasional pieces on Bolivian politics as well as his personal adventures on the Sandbox blog. Nate can be reached by email at nate.loewentheil [at] gmail.com.
There aren’t many places in the world where one can buy Nintendo Wiis, dried llama fetuses and bananas by the ton, but La Cancha is one of them. A series of interconnecting outdoor markets, stands, tiendas and shopping malls that stretches over nearly a hundred square blocks in the heart of Cochabamba, La Cancha is both the city’s bustling commercial center and a physical manifestation of Bolivia’s economy, encapsulating both its strengths and weaknesses.
My first visit to La Cancha was an overwhelmingly mix of sights, smells, sounds and jabbed elbows. Crossing Calle Aroma, the traditional northern border of the market, there is a veritable assault of vendors vending from above and below, from left and right, from the streets, sidewalks and storefronts. The sheer variety of products makes Wal-Mart look like a provincial corner store: flat-screen televisions and empanadas, coca leaves and Nike cleats, Levi jeans, hand-made jewelry and imported French colognes. The market is chaotically well-organized; there’s no map or guide to the endless labyrinth, but Cochabambinos can steer helpless gringos to rows of belts, wholesale fruits, electronics, kitchenware, and artisan goods (a mortal tourist trap).
The market’s physical form reflects a hierarchy of income: at the higher financial end, individuals sell their wares from rented or owned shops; outside these stores, salesmen and women rent street and market stalls, while circling around them others set up shop on corners and on the edges of sidewalk; finally, thousands more ambulate, selling from wheelbarrows and baskets. These layers also represent a chronological progression – the market has slowly grown over the preceding decades, expanding both in territory and in density as the region’s population has swelled and as more and more of the economy has moved to the streets.
Not all of Cochabamba exhibits the same frenzied economic activity; in fact, in the city as a whole, there is a far more relaxed attitude towards commerce than one would find in any Western country. On any given street, three or four out of every ten stores may be closed – because the owners are on vacation, because business is slow, because no one has yet arrived to open it. As in many other Spanish-speaking countries, lunch is the primary meal of the day, and many businesses close from 12:00 to 3 to allow their employees to return home to eat. This holds not only for small family corner stores but for large banks, cell phone distributors and government offices. Hours are not only endlessly variable but invariably unposted. In the same vein, customer service could not be described as highly prized – there is an underlying assumption that the stores are providing a service by being open for business in the first place. Because chain stores are rare and most operations are family-owned and independent, there is an unpredictability and informality to business that – for better or worse – is rare in the ever-orderly commerce of the United States.
But things are different on the south side of Calle Aroma. There, stalls open bright and early Monday through Saturday, and lunch is taken on the job. Each and every vendor is eager for your business – because if they don’t get you, the competitors on either side, in front and behind surely will. The intensity of competition gives new meaning to the term marketplace – in the central clothing region, there are at least two hundred stalls selling virtually identical selections of jeans; the laws of supply and demand unfold in real time. Capitalism sparks in the air from the sheer energy exerted to make sales and turn a profit.
The products on display, meanwhile, speak to Bolivia’s integration into an ever-more global economy. Tens of thousands of pirated DVDs go for a few bolivianos a piece. [Even more appealing than the prices are the astonishing provenances of the movies – a recently purchased copy of Inglourious Basterds was dubbed from French to Spanish, filmed inside a movie theater using Russian subtitles.]
Next to the DVDs are ripped software packages – a program as expensive as Microsoft Suite goes for less than $2. Shampoos, cell phones, vacuums, cameras, mugs, backpacks, pencils and polo shirts all bear the stamp of intercontinental commerce. Meanwhile, imported used t-shirts, button-downs and trucker-hats from the US fill street after street, dressing lower-income Bolivians in bizarrely retro outfits (“Give Hugs not Drugs,” reads my local fruit-seller’s baseball cap). Nowhere is the turbo global-consumption more evident than in the sneaker neighborhood, where Puma and Nike battle it out with Adidas and Reebok, all competing against identical Chinese knock-offs in every imaginable shape, size, color and quality. Never could I have imagined that were so many varieties of shoe-wear in all the world.
Yet despite the tremendous range of goods — and the cornucopia of sneakers — La Cancha bears little relation to modern malls. It is a unique hybrid of traditional Bolivian commerce and modern capitalism, of dead baby farm animals and Nintendo gaming systems; it is a collision of worlds. Unlike other more traditional businesses in Cochabamba, La Cancha is always open and the customer is almost always right. But as in traditional Bolivian towns, Wednesdays and Saturdays remain Market Days, when the already crowded streets are flooded with more goods, products and peoples. When it storms, the streets are literally flooded, washing the debris of twenty thousand people along the ankles of buyers and sellers alike. Imported home theaters go for $5,000 while home-grown bananas sell seis por un peso (42 bananas for $1 US). Cactus fruit fight for space with the latest Abercrombie & Fitch designs. The rich come for computers and the poor for rice.
It is this collision that makes La Cancha such an accurate microcosm of the Bolivian economy. Like any market, it is a site of commerce and competition. Money is exchanged, profits earned, goods distributed. Bolivia’s economy functions like any other Western economy in this regard, providing for consumer freedom and protecting private property. But capitalism requires much more than free exchange – it requires the aggregation and investment of capital. It is here that Bolivia lags behind. Virtually all electronics, heavy machinery, luxury goods and processed foods sold in La Cancha are produced in foreign countries, and the real profits from their sales return home. There is no industrial base in Bolivia, nor any domestic demand – given the globally enforced trade liberalization policies – to stimulate one. Without that industry, without organic economic growth, there is a sharp disparity between the goods for sale and the conditions in which they’re sold, between the dollar-priced electronics and Boliviano-priced vegetables, between the luxuries of the upper-class and the necessities of the lower. While La Cancha has received the goods and absorbed the forms that constitute Western commerce, Bolivia still lacks the economic content that would truly drive growth.
Wanted: Part-time Intern in New York
In a nutshell
- We’re looking for an intern based in New York to join our US office.
- The internship is part-time, around 8 hours per week, starting asap.
- We’re a fast growing startup that connects exceptional young people worldwide and helps them to make their ideas happen.
- This internship is different; you will meet outstanding people, take over responsibility and be inspired at the same time.
Still interested? Read on.
About us
We’re a global network of exceptional young achievers under 30. Our members have already in their twenties a significant impact on the world by running businesses, building social ventures, leading organizations or creating art. We carefully select them, bring them together, and help them make bigger things happen. As a community we help large organizations to find atypical solutions for complex problems. The rest of this website will tell you more ;-)
The adventure: what the internship is about
There are so many exciting things happen to Sandbox in the US, we’re exploding. And we need your help to make these ambitious plans happen ;-)
• Help us grow the Sandbox Network in the US in all aspects of community management. Support our members by connecting them with other members or senior leaders worldwide, screening new applicants and helping them to find the right resources within our network.
• Plan and execute NYC and East Coast focused Sandbox activities and events.
• Help us build up the Sandbox content team that produces insightful stories about young innovators and their ideas worldwide.
• Support us with client work and trend research.
• Regularly brainstorm crazy ideas with Fabian and Paul over Coffee on how to take over the world.
The hero: who we’re looking for
We’re looking for an ambitious young New Yorker who loves to make things happen as much as we do. The job requires that you have a strong interest in meeting people, connecting people, organizing events and leading projects. Communication is key and ideally you love writing and are good at simply explaining complex messages.
Overall we prefer passionate people to great CVs / good grades. We are looking for someone who got bored by the traditional internship experience, rather wants to take responsibility, has an entrepreneurial mind and is not afraid of working hard ;-) The formal expectations are simple: we ask you to invest at least 8 hours per week over the next 6 months and live in New York. You are free to work from our office or remotely. We ideally look for someone who can start now ;-)
The treasure: what we offer
This position is unpaid in its traditional sense but priceless in terms of experience, inspiration, fun and network. By working with us, we’ll open you the door to an exceptional network of young people who will shake the world in a few years and to the senior leaders that we interact with every day. And we promise that by beeing around people who make their dreams happen you’ll be inspired just as much as we are. Last but not least we wll try hard to make work fun and an exceptional learning experience. Plus we’ll buy you very strong Espresso and will make you eat more Swiss Chocolate than you can handle ;-)
Talk to us!
If you’re motivated to invest at least 8 hours per week over the next 6 months, live in New York and are up for the adventure described above, contact Fabian Pfortmuller, co-founder of Sandbox and Head of the US activities, drop him a line (fabian [at] sandbox-network.com) and tell us more about you. Looking forward to hearing from you!
Learn more
- Read what people said who worked with us in the past (the ones who still talk to us haha ;-)
- Get a little “behind-the-scenes” view on what the Sandbox team is like
- Meet Fabian in New York and let him tell you more.
Kudos of the day
Lucian Tarnowski
Lucian Tarnowski is the Founder and CEO of BraveNewTalent.com, a website that connects people to employers via a social network which also organized the global social media outreach for One Young World. He is the youngest European Young Global Leader 2010 as announced today by the World Economic Forum.
Tori Hogan source: Beyond Good Intentions
Tori Hogan was featured in the Wall Street Journal today in an article about the Question of aid effectivness and “ How can we better calibrate good intentions in our own lives?” She is the Founder of Beyond Good Intention, an organization “committed to uncovering more innovative and effective approaches to international aid worldwide”.
Kudos to you guys!!!
First Sandbox Boston Event
We had the pleasure to host the first Sandbox event end of February in Boston with local members, guests from the Harvard Entrepreneurship Conference and new people. I really enjoyed this evening full of inspiring conversations and look forward to many more to come soon. Many thanks to Nabeel and Sehr for their help with the organization and to our friends at the Kauffman foundation for joining us. More pictures can be found here.
Meet a Sandbox Member: Mohammad Modarres
Sandbox member Mohammad Modarres is currently living in Cape Town, South Africa, where he is interning at FIFA Football For Hope as an assistant to the program director. He is a third year public health and anthropology major at Johns Hopkins University with research focuses on fair trade consumerism, initiating women’s empowerment and how social innovation can create better diplomatic ties in the Middle East, particularly in Iran. He enjoys coaching tennis to kids back home in the States and screaming at and dancing around the television whenever FC Barcelona matches are on. Mohammad on twitter and facebook.
Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.
I’m pretty pretty excited about a project that I just started working on before I came to the ZAR, called Voice of the Earth. It’s still in the caterpillar stage and has maybe three semesters to go before it pilots around a couple East Coast colleges. Voice of the Earth will be the first student-led public health “creative” agency that will use digital media tools to raise awareness about social issues to the public, and provide free public health information online. It will set up shops in schools around the United States hoping to recruit the imaginative, graphic design/video/editing savvy kids to create awesome materials to help social profit organizations develop outreach agendas without monetary exchange. In return, students will be able to expand their portfolio, and choose between public service and academic credit.
What are you doing and how did you get there?
We are three students planning on powering up to thirty in the next year. One is recruiting the first set of student artists while the other is working to engage university faculty and staff to support our experiential learning curriculum to gain college credit for work done. I am initiating partnerships with associations across sectors to exchange our skills for pro-bono assistance and resources. It’s intimidating as just a student, but knowing we have what most companies want—the perspective of the young consumer—reaching out to them becomes much less daunting, and in many ways, very enjoyable. My previous experience with developing The Peace Project, has got me hooked on the start-up phase.
Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?
When asked about his most successful operation, world-renowned Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon Dr. Ben Carson has been known to say, “That’s easy. It’s the last one I did.” In many ways, my successes and mistakes are changing and growing every single day and its the latest projects I have worked on that best reflect my understanding of social development projects. I’m young. It was only two years ago when I was introduced to the term “social entrepreneurship.” Before that what I did outside of the classroom was personally viewed as just that—an extra curricular activity that fed my interest to help others. Now I have scheduled it differently. As a result, I face constant difficulties organizing a schedule that battles academic work and projects. Many times this has led to poor results. However, it is my combined studies in public health theory and social entrepreneurship skills that are making me the person that I want to be. And I love every minute of it.
What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?
a) I applied for tickets to the World Cup Final. I’ll find out next week if I’ll be finally living my childhood dream.
b) This time next year I will be in my last semester at Johns Hopkins. By then I hope my plans after undergrad will be ready. I’m not too worried because if all employment opportunities fail, I know my creativity will keep me busy. Plus, there are a couple things I want to cross off of my to-do list before a professional career takes over—bull running in Spain, volunteer to build a school in Afghanistan, get my pilot’s license…
c) In the next ten years I want to be in a position to encourage more nonprofit work in Iran. Passionate about nonprofit capacity development, I hope to see myself working to foster ties between a growing Iranian Diaspora and social entrepreneurship organization to oversee expansion of the nation’s citizen sector.
What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?
Sitting next to a four-year-old girl speaking Persian to her dolls at my sister’s engagement party, which brought together my entire immediate family for the first time since I went to college. It was a combination of all those things at that very moment that made me think about the important things, the big things, the small things, the smaller things, and how life is unfolding right before me. It gave me a good moment to think about “life” and how blessed I have been especially in the past couple of years. Between my travels home to Portland, school in Baltimore, and my current stay in Cape Town, it’s easy to sometimes loose sight of the bigger picture.
How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them?
Knowing that there is a community out there that builds off of creativity and innovation, and “thinks wrong”, is so unbelievably comforting. I believe I can help others bring the student perspective, and the overlooked power of the volunteer to the table. I’d love to shadow change makers in start-up organizations so that I can better learn how to manage and lead group projects in the making.
Mohammad’s favourites:
Movie- Dr. Zhivago
Travel destination during last year- Alaska
Food- Dad’s omelette. It’s got extra cheese and a slice of love
Quote- “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I will meet you there.” - Rumi
Weekly inspiration #25: Brainstorming
source: Brainstore.com
Last Thursday, I was invited to Paris to participate to a workshop organized by our friends from Brainstore. Over the last 20 years, they have developed and standardized a creative process, which I was very impressed to see in action. Brainstore has created a real idea machine (see schema above), a system allowing to produce ideas industrially for almost any question you could ask.
On our side, we also earned a lot of expertise on organizing idea generation sessions for our clients over the past year. This way, we could come up with breakthrough concepts and strategies for a major European airport, for a multinational car manufacturer and for a German city. But methods for helping clients with the help of the Sandbox community should be the topic of a blog post of its own. Today, I want to focus on how we use brainstorming on a team level and on a weekly basis.
Brainstorming Friday
Together with the Zurich team, we made a habit of finishing the week with a brainstorming. Every Friday, another team member comes up with a topic and leads the session. Brainstorming like this helps us on different levels:
- motivation & team building: brainstorming is funny and puts everyone on a high energy level
- focus: turning an idea inside out helps us to see clearer what the essential is in it - and to focus on that
- idea creation: the main purpose of the brainstorming remains to come up with new ideas that we can apply to further develop Sandbox
How to get started
How we proceed: the brainstorming is divided into two parts: a warm-up and the brainstorming itself. For the first part, we use several techniques, for example someone takes an object (say a glass) and we try to find as many uses as possible for that object (drink, use it as a pen holder, grow a plant in it, etc). Or we use shapes (see example below) and give ideas about what they could mean (the circle could be an egg, a CD, a Mexican viewed from the top, etc).
During the brainstorming part, the one who has prepared it asks the questions one after another. People say everything that comes to their mind about the topic and when we are out of answers, the facilitator moves to the next question.
Challenges
There are several challenges to doing a good brainstorming and here are the key points:
- Define a theme which is not too narrow, but not too broad either
- Ask the good questions: it should be possible to answer a good question in 1-3 words, without using full sentences, otherwise it becomes a discussion
- Prepare the right setting: a big sheet of paper, a whiteboard, pens, etc.
- Don’t filter the answers: take down everything that is said
- Don’t criticize or laugh at others
- Try out different locations: at your office, in a café
- Try out different times of the day and pick the one that fits you best
- Manage time: if you want to keep the energy high, don’t spend too much time on each question, don’t wait that people have used all their possible ideas before moving to the next question
Try it out with us
Getting to a good brainstorming level requires exercise. If you want to try it out with us, let’s have an open brainstorming session this Friday. If you have ideas of themes we could brainstorm about with you or if you just want to participate, please comment below or just drop me a line: I’ll give you all the information you will need to participate wherever you are based.
Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He is currently sitting on an Easy Jet flight bringing him from Brussels to Switzerland and is preparing an exciting Sandbox week! Christian will be visiting from London from Friday to Tuesday.