inaglobe

inaglobe introduction

inaglobe is an educational initiative that equips future engineers, leaders and innovators with the awareness, the sensitivity and the skills to engage in social innovation effectively. Our pedagogical model focuses on bringing engaged university students to become driven, hands-on and impactful graduates. We focus on experiential learning through projects, and we base the work entirely on real life problems identified by real people on the ground that help guide the innovation and design decisions. An example is the Paige multiline digital braille display device.

We work with two distributed networks: Academic and Humanitarian, and we provide both networks with services and tools that will enable collaborative innovation.

It all started because Xavi, Alberto and I, back at university had one big itch: During our degrees we would have wanted to work on social innovation projects that could make real impact.

Discovery

We began with deep empathy and observational work

Who did we need to speak to? We knew what it meant to be a student with these frustrations, but who else had skin in the game? So we had a goal of mapping the users.

In academic network: students, academics (both teaching fellows and research fellows), directors of studies, university faculty staff, lab technicians
In humanitarian network: Most importantly, the stakeholders of NGOs and social impact projects, but then also facilitators, volunteers, Project managers, Country Managers, Programme Managers, and those that allocated the budgets for it.

Thereafter we needed to deeply understand all of these users (as well as discover the networks that may influence them). This meant:

understanding their day-to-day, their ambitions and their frustrations, as well as the behaviours, patterns and dynamics that they engaged in
understanding the decision making process followed by decision makers, particularly relevant for both the academic and humanitarian networks
understanding the empathetic process of people making impact and their feedback loop

We also talked to experts in their fields, and especially design researchers, that paved the way towards an ethical methodology that we iterate on still today. The motivation behind this is that without representation and inclusion we would not be building something that really works for all, and that is not our vision.

So what did we do?

We spoke and interviewed everyone that could give us a better understanding of all the above at Imperial College
We reached out to NGOs, social impact professionals, development professionals and we put together a plan to run fieldwork in Mozambique.
In Mozambique we spoke to development agencies, local NGOs, schools, HIV centres, universities (students, academics and leadership)
- Every day we made a case of synthesising what we knew, of making sense of what we had discussed and seen
We slept on site at different missions, we lived the life of the stakeholders for a few days, we visited agricultural, WASH, education projects as well as orphanages and healthcare centres in rural areas.
- Here we got to try out some of the methodologies we were designing whether it was for engagement, data collection, ideation and conceptualisation.
- We looked into different ways that we could set up the innovation pipeline concept that kicked off inaglobe at the start.
We travelled using several different kinds of transport (pretty much everything you can think of except for trains), from the south to the North of the country
We ideated with stakeholders, and with NGO members, and by doing so we understood how we could prompt remote effective collaboration

So what's next?

This process never ends, you continue understanding your users through the dynamics they establish in your collaboration. The initial field work was a starting point! We continue to learn from our stakeholders every day.

In any case this doesn't mean we get stuck in a research loop… the story does continue!

Defining inaglobe

We kicked off the project with an idea of a project directory; before the fieldwork with a conceptualisation of a system that lacked the nuances to do the partnership building and the project procurement effectively; and after the trip in Mozambique we lacked all operational knowledge about how to run this at Imperial.

During our time in Mozambique we accumulated many many insights, a set of representative stakeholder mappings and system mappings. It was important to do the synthesis of all this information every day after the work was done, and at the end of each checkpoint collectively.

We defined the problems that all the stakeholders were experiencing and all the opportunities we could intervene in to leverage our goal of building the inaglobe educational experience.

After we came back from Mozambique, we spent several months iterating on a project plan that aligned all the stakeholders around a common goal and a common working space. We aligned the incentives across the two networks such that we could build an "innovation pipeline" that educated future engineers and scientists along the way.

Over the course of the following months we ran countless design sprints, design thinking exercises (ranging from Lean Canvases to User Journeys) and continued to conduct interviews ad challenge our assumptions. This allowed us to transform and mature the concepts and understandings to a point that our stakeholders were always at the back of our minds in every decision that was being made.

You will see in the next section, that inaglobe get redefined every time we finish a design sprint. I believe that is the healthiest way of building a project that is complex and dependent on so many stakeholders.

Ideate & Prototype

As soon as we defined the problems that we were addressing we began ideating what it was that we were building. This started naturally very early on with basic platform concepts, which we were able to evaluate as we did the field work. As we came back from the field we put together lowest fidelity MVP we could of what the inaglobe platform could look:

We were going to leverage an off-the-shelf tech stack to establish an informal platform for collaboration
We engaged several of the stakeholders formally to propose projects (and approve the briefs) and commit to guiding the design process
We engaged our closest contacts in the university environment to adopt the projects, and we secured positions to oversee the projects closely
We ran seminars and workshops at Imperial and UCL to understand how students understood problems and could be guided through solving them.

In our first year we built the concept of the system and a low fidelity prototype; in that year we tested our method with a very basic MVP, just trying to get projects into Imperial College. In our second year, we monitored what it was to have 10 projects running at the same time at Imperial. Our first learning was that projects require care (especially at the start, as we are learning), so we scaled down and in our third year we took deep care of our projects. And in our fourth year we started nurturing our first spinouts, as well as reorganising the organisation for scale. And in the last two years we have been preparing the inaglobe to be commercialisable, pivoting into a charity and focusing on the educational offering where we are polishing the pedagogical model. In these 7 years of operations we have accumulated over €500,000 for our projects, on top of the countless volunteers hours that have been put in.

In 2022, inaglobe attended the Unleash Plus 2022 Final in Mysuru, which is in itself another design sprint. There we confirmed our proposal as a systemic one, and for the months after we continued evolving the model to try out a service model with each of our stakeholders: academic, humanitarian and corporate; concluding that the model with the most potential was that of a fellowship model where corporate sponsors would finance the experience for students.

The bottomline is to never tire of challenging your own assumptions, and never tire of running a new design sprint. social entrepreneurship is a marathon of sprints, and character is a key component of getting anywhere near to success. Yet to this day we are yet to receive a single euro in funding.

Synthesis

inaglobe is not yet fully defined, we still see this as the beginning of our journey. We have been adapting, pivoting, strengthening our model year on year, iterating on our learnings and I think we will always continue to do that because more than ever the world is dynamic and changing.

Currently inaglobe has done 5 academic years at Imperial College, across 9 different departments with projects ranging from smart pillboxes, to water filtration systems and mathematical braille devices. We have worked with over 120 students on over 25 projects. We support several spinouts, of which the most successful is tackling the digitalisation of braille for low-resource environments.

Key Learnings

Ideas are cheap; perseverance, iterations, deep understanding of the problem and the stakeholders those are the real assets that will mean the difference.
- We cannot stress more how important it is to invest in ethnographic and qualitative research; and match it to what the quant data says.
We underestimated the importance of language & timezones. Retrospectively these seem obvious, but at the time we were working with the assumptions that
- async communication would be at a par to sync
  - this is sometimes doable, but it slows down projects. Open discussion and conversation are a great way of capturing nuances
- and we believed that english would be widely spoken amongst our humanitarian partners.
  - In Mozambique I had to pitch the project in Portuguese at least 8 times, and the first time in I was definitely not ready!
When a partner promises commitment into the future, take it with a pinch of salt. It is not that they are misleading you, but they also exist in a changing context and so their priorities will be challenged over the course of time (and so should you).
- For this reason it is important to keep a close relationship with your partners, understand their needs deeply and build a machine that can easily respond to changes.
Bootstrapping is an extremely powerful of building things, it makes them resilient to time in a way that few things are, but it comes with major pitfalls, you are often capped under the critical mass to making a project a self-sustaining initiative. Volunteer based work depends on a higher vision that will be difficult to keep people aligned to as they fatigue.
- It is important to bootstrap intelligently, and without loosing sight of the ultimate value you want to bring at the end of the day.
- Seize opportunities to monetise your project early on, and understand the conditions under which they occurred.
There is no one source of truth, quantitative and qualitative data will give you different frames of a problem, they will give you different nuances, and they will help you build an understanding of the problem and situation, but it is important to always stay humble to the problem because it is imperative you do not loose touch with it.
- We live in a complex world, with changing dynamics. Building resilient initiatives is what will safeguard you through the complexity; and that is not passive work, it is very much dependent on being actively receptive.
- Be willing to change your problem statement, your value proposition and your solution, they are the only things you can change.
Your team is a key element, but it isn't a static condition. Make sure you surround yourselves by people you enjoy working with, but you can seek compromise to create a working environment that works for you.
- One thing worth evaluating as a team is what is your intentionality behind this project, how committed are you? and are you willing to put your ego aside for the sake of the project?
- Be open to people joining in the project at later stages with equal levels of commitment. Life has a funny way of being circumstantial about things, so time and place are really just figments of our reality.
  - There is no question that inaglobe wouldn't be what it is today without the titanic effort of so many volunteers. And the truth is that many of the volunteers are now part of the core members, where as the rest of the original founders have moved on to different things.
Traditional entrepreneurship is usually the result of privilege. I have had to align my professional career with my ambitions with inaglobe such that I could earn a living whilst I bootstrapped inaglobe. Be clear about what you care about and be willing to make decisions that are necessary so that you can get there.