In June, Ti Xu of Cibus Health gave a talk to our SUCCESS programme.
Ti’s start-up helps infants to communicate with babies, with an initial focus on prevention of overfeeding. Ti is also a big presence in the Oxford entrepreneur scene, helping researchers take their ideas – validate them – and get them started, and he’s hugely passionate about the entrepreneurial process.
The session provided many practical insights on needs-based innovation. Here we share a couple of the highlights from Ti’s talk.
Ti outlined a two-stage process that ventures need to undertake to effectively identify and then filter needs and ideas.
The first stage involves navigating the needs landscape to search for the ‘global minima’ – the most compelling needs.
The second stage is about filtering these needs by various factors, including market size and stakeholder alignment – with the elimination of risk being the key goal of this exercise.
This blog by the Methods for Change team, illustrated by Jack Brougham, asks if we should spend more time talking about the methods we use as researchers. Drawing on a recent paper, we suggest that researchers need to articulate why methods matter in creating change to global challenges. We share three creative techniques that we have experimented with across the Methods for Change project that can encourage playful, reflective conversation about methods and their role in galvanising change.
This ‘How-To’ Guide outlines the Collaborative Zine Making Method used by Professor Sarah Marie Hall from the University of Manchester and developed in collaboration with Inspire Women Oldham. The zine was also created in collaboration with Inspire Women Oldham.