Developing A Moonshot Idea - Broadening Perspective & Thinking Creatively

by Ryan Weber | at MinneBar 14

Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore famously predicted that computing power would grow exponentially by doubling every two years (“Moore’s Law”). The implications of such rapidly improving computing power are now evident all around us, but back when Gordon predicted such growth it was hard to imagine a future with such incredible computing power. There are now many exponential trends that are expected to disrupt us as much as the internet and mobile did over the past 20 years.

Many of us are trapped in convergent thinking and need to strengthen our ability to utilize divergent thinking for exploring the future to improve our ability to adapt and innovate. This session is an interactive session designed to help you learn new skills to strengthen your adaptiveness! The two techniques you'll learn in this session are Question Storming and Future Wheels along with an intro to how these could be paired with exponential tech to come up with a Moonshot!

Question Storming - Discovering problems actually requires just as much creativity as discovering solutions. There are many ways to look at any problem, and realizing a problem is often the first step toward a creative solution.

Future Wheel - The Future wheel is a method for graphical visualisation of direct and indirect future consequences of a particular change or development. The Futures Wheel is a way of organizing thinking and questioning about the future – a kind of structured brainstorming.

Nick Tietz, Serial Entrepreneur, former Director of Innovation at Lifetime Fitness and Sr. UX Designer at the Nerdery, and Ryan Weber will be tag-teaming on this session on behalf of the SingularityU Minneapolis-St. Paul Chapter to provide you a primer on coming up with the next MinneMoonshot!

Beginner

Ryan Weber

Ryan Weber is the Co-Ambassador for SingularityU Minneapolis-St. Paul Chapter and Managing Partner of Great North Labs. Previously, Ryan was Co-Founder/Chief Product Officer for NativeX (FKA Freeze and W3i), a digital media company that scaled to 170 employees, and offices in Silicon Valley and Minnesota.

Great North Labs invests in technology startups across any industry that are based, or have meaningful operations, in the upper mid-west. We have assembled a team experienced in scaling technology startups across a variety of industries, along with individuals with strong expertise in exponential technologies, so that we can help regional startups achieve greatness!