The tree of knowledge is a student entrepreneurial incubator that throughout the first year of its activity became an important factor of the Zagreb start-up scene. The tree of knowledge wishes to provide to all the users a space for work, the possibility of financing and consulting from the economic, legal and technological standpoint, and enable projects and companies to have greater opportunity for success.
How can we recognize and foster students with entrepreneurial potential and design services that shall provide them support to realize it?
The beginning of the process for solving set challenge was to find out about unsatisfied needs that are key for realizing creative potential in students and the young by collecting information and intrinsic motivation of users.
Based on collected data, we prepared a synthesis of insights and defined several main topics, i.e. sore points. The main topics that prevent students from achieving entrepreneurial potential came to the surface.
For each of the main topics we applied a different ideation methodology (15 %, brainstorming and 25/10 method) to reach concrete solutions of a business challenge.
The goal of prototyping is to make ideas from the previous step tangible so we can divide them with others more easily and get feedback. The prototype in this case was an event in which new potential services were included, and based on feedback additional adjustments of the final solution were made.
By focusing on different persons (personas) created by service users of the student incubator, we defined their course of using the new service. Implementation is personalized according to service user profiles through strategic development for realizing set challenges.
We defined a strategic framework for further development of the Tree of Knowledge project, as well as necessary tools for the advancement of the service. We detected the biggest challenges which the student population faces when entering entrepreneurship. Furthermore, we made a contribution in creating focus on three groups of activities: connecting, fostering and sharing knowledge. The product of cooperation was a series of meetups the goal of which was to foster entrepreneurship and networking.