Mike Mompi, our sunny Californian strategist, reports from a MyBnk Brainstorm with the LSE Entrepreneurs.
Has anyone noticed the bizarre weather recently? It wasn’t Señor El Niño zapping us – it was the tempestuous and highly creative brainstorm recently hosted at LSE! MakeSense brought together MyBnk and the London School of Economics Entrepreneurs club in an energetic and all but chaotic attempt to solve our social enterprise’s challenge.
The challenge:
To create a mobile learning experience to complement the MyBnk Mobile Savings Account (MySA)
Underlying the challenge were 3 objectives further focused by 3 constraints:
Objectives
1. Develop concepts and themes that apply to young people
2. Ensure continuity of use, e.g. through use of incentives (real or virtual)
3. Must be an educational or learning experience
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Constraints
1. Aimed at secondary school age
2. Mobile phone-based
3. Minimal or NO cost to the user
Weather reports called for a flurry of post-its and stress balls.
After a Q&A session that followed brief introductions and a clearly framed challenge, the LSE Entrepreneurs were ready to brave the turbulent post-it note induced brainstorm. Eagerly, we joined together and embarked on an intellectually rousing journey grounded in reality, then ventured out from there to association, where ideas began to pour (like it normally does in April). From association, like a splintering strike of lightening, we branched further through analogy and reached a hyper-creative realm of ‘crazy’.
Some mobile phone-based ideas sadly had to stay in the realm of crazy
In the moment, this seemingly enhanced creative mental state seemed more like disjointed chaos, where had we stayed we may have never returned. Fortunately, it was a return journey which involved us focusing and refining our superficially crazy ideas back through analogy and association until we ended the journey with a realistic solution.
Unfortunately there were a few participants who had to step out before we had actually returned to reality, so please keep your eyes out for anyone wandering the streets of London covered in post-it notes and muttering to themselves about mobile savings accounts for young people and the future of financial education…
“What we imagine is order is merely the prevailing form of chaos”
– Kerry Thornley
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/22868626 w=400&h=225]
Europe Tour – England – MyBnk from Christian Vanizette on Vimeo
