After a long week of preparation and rehearsing, the Graphrite team pitched a year’s worth of product and business development to a panel of four judges. We were honored to be the recipients of $7,000 from the competition for the prospect of officially launching our business. As we were preparing our pitch the team knew that we would need to have a discussion on where to go with the business after the semester was over. With all four of our team graduating within two weeks we had to make a decision to red light or green light the project.
Within a few days after the competition, the team sat down for its first discussion. Under normal circumstances with other decision making, the four of us are generally not in major disagreement but this conversation brought different mind sets to the table. However, this just made our conversation all the more productive. We powered through different direction and ideas faster than we ever had fueled by our strong opinions. With the unmovable rule for a unanimous vote for team decisions we decided to consider the ideas on the table overnight and meet again the next day. Coming back to the ideas after tabling them for a night changed our conversation and we were able to reach a conclusion easily.
As the team moves to different parts of the country we will continue to work together remotely. The Graphrite will exist as an online platform used as a resource for students and teachers to aid in the education process. The design will be open source and protected by a creative commons license, given out freely. Our goal is to be featured with companies such as Makers and get our name out there as a tool for teaching. The site will host a variety of process use videos and education content.
Our new pivot positions us to serve as an aid for education purposes, making this a low commitment endeavor for our team that we can actually achieve for a mission that we all believe in.
Really cool example of how pivoting an idea or innovation is essential, sometimes, to the viability of the concept.