“I believe our education system is doing a disservice by creating an environment where everything is so structured,” said Ryan Durrant, a Brigham Young University finance student. “It’s not often [students] have the chance to think critically and use their own creativity to solve problems.”
Durrant — a promising entrepreneur — tested his innovation skills at Intuit’s third-annual Intern Summit, which hosted 200 American interns from six locations throughout the country. The program hosts summer-long internships for students of all disciplines and majors, who also participated in a Lean StartIn as part of the Summit, where they learned innovation methodologies and were coached by innovation catalysts as they came up with product ideas, built prototypes, experimented and interviewed customers. The LSI focused on five different challenges — four were focused around Mint and one was around customer voice for Intuit products. Teams later pitched their ideas to a panel of judges.
LSI organizer Leah Butler thinks it’s important to teach innovation to people of all ages and hopes each student takes their learnings to the outside world. CEO Brad Smith kicked off the three-day event, where interns participated in the LSI, charity activities, networking with other interns and more. As part of the company’s We Care and Give Back event, interns also took two hours out of their day and created 320 cards for hospitalized kids, decorated 488 lunch bags for #HashtagLunchbag and made 41 tie blankets for the Veterans Village of San Diego.
“They were able to be creative and work as a team while doing something important to help people in our local communities,” Butler said.
John Clara, a third-year computer-engineering major at U.C. San Diego, and his team, DemadFork, chose a Mint Grand Challenge, which focused on creating an engaging and simple financial experience for young Americans to help empower them to make better financial decisions. The team created Mojito, a product that leverages Mint data to show users where other people spend their money. Customers can compare their spending with the spending habits of people in their age brackets, location and those with similar incomes and then customize a workable budget.
“Mint does a great job at telling you at how much you spend, but not so much at how much you should spend,” Clara said. “Young people have a hard time creating a budget for themselves because they base it on guesswork. With Mojito, they’ll learn what people [like them] spend on categories such as food, clothing or entertainment.”
The team used social media to test if customers would use Mojito. They also posted a link to Reddit and tried to make it look like the web app was fully-functional and free for a short period of time. DemandFork contacted a much wider customer base online, though by interviewing real customers they learned that many young people are unsure about their spending.
“We were comfortable enough to share our ideas, defend them with our own reasoning in the early stages of the process and provide evidence from real people later on,” Durrant said. “This allowed us all to work broadly, see a wide range of solutions and focus on the best one as we learned from each other and our customers.”
After pitching ideas to a panel of judges at the end of the week, teams went home with constructive feedback and a learning experience not soon to be forgotten.
“This is the first year we incorporated a LSI into the summit and I think it was a great opportunity for [students] to not only learn, but get hands-on experience,” Butler said.
Tips to inspire innovation in students:
1.) Sign up for IDEO’s Method Cards, which feature different innovation techniques each week.
2.) Visit the Stanford D-School website for more information on public workshops, classes or to read up on student stories.
3.) Check out Intuit Labs’ resource page, which has information about Intuit’s variety of innovation tools, including journey lines, empathy maps and the NEXT tool, to name a few.
4.) Constantly read up on the newest innovation trends and technology at sites like TechCrunch and Popular Science.
Here is a video from last year’s Intern Summit, which didn’t include an LSI:
For more information on Intuit’s internship program and how to apply, click here.
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