An essay
I was buying something at Einsteins today, and they were short handed. Two people were making sandwiches or something a line formed of people buying coffee or sodas. And I had a thought about finding more product ideas. Look around campus for opportunities and inefficiencies. And think whether with your superior knowledge of students’ everything (habits, interests, money, time, whatever) you could think of some tool, service, application or solution for the other non-student members of the Brandeis community, for example:
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What could be done to make Einsteins work better? Can we somehow funnel students to place their orders at slow periods? Can we give them a way to forecast when the sudden demand will happen? To know what products will be ordered when? Is there a way to analyze the receipts or output from the POS system to help them? Is there some kind of coupon, discount, off-hour service idea?
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If you’re an athlete: What does the staff do and how are they not being as efficient as they could be? What is being done by hand, on slips of paper, on index cards, that is causing them to need additional staff? What are the challenges that makes running the athletics at Brandeis more expensive than it could be? How about tournaments? How about organizing teams, or promotion?
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If you’re an artist (performance or other): same question: is there something relating to how the music department is run? Scheduling of practice rooms? Limited number of instruments? Loaning instruments? Repairing them? Deciding when to acquire new ones? Forecasting what the next set of students coming in will require? Tracking inventory?
You get the idea: look for inefficiencies, and try to think about where there are savings or additional value to be found. If you can free up someone doing something menial they can be doing something more productive. If you can increase the capacity of a resource without actually having to build (by increasing utilization) you are saving.
You have knowledge that others don’t have about what can be done with technology. Something that others might not consider possible, or never had a chance to think about might actually be a major inefficiency that you may be able to solve.
Think about your own domain expertise, your own competitive advantage in terms of knowledge, contacts, information, ability to observe. All those can yield ideas!