About Challenge Studio

Hello and welcome to Challenge Studio 1!

We designed this course to give you a solid foundation and practice in bringing your ideas to life. In this course, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge, skills and tools to navigate what it means to turn a problem into a tangible solution, build a minimum viable product from that solution, and explore ways to make your product sustainable.

This course introduces you to building and launching a venture. It builds on the skills you’ve acquired in Product Management and Design, and Engineering for Development, and gets you to put them into practice.

Coming into this course, you’ve identified a development problem you are excited to solve. In this course, we’ll guide you through the process of developing your solution, getting insights from your users, launching your solution publicly, presenting it to various stakeholders, and exploring ways to fund your solution to make it sustainable.

While this course takes you through many entrepreneurial concepts, the idea is not to necessarily make you an entrepreneur. The idea is to expose you to entrepreneurial thinking, mindsets and approaches that are invaluable whether you decide to be an entrepreneur or to work within a company. Entrepreneurship has so many transferable skills and you get to learn them in Challenge Studio.

Throughout the course, you will engage in practical activities, case studies, and hands-on projects to apply the concepts learned. This course intends to not only equip you with the skills to launch a venture but also with the ability to contribute positively to the world around you.

Course Information

• The instructor for this course is Farai Munjoma (farai.munjoma@kibo.school)
• The course will run from April 8 to June 14, 2024.
• Live classes will be held on Monday, 4:00 - 5:30 pm GMT (some workshops will run until 6:00 pm GMT). The live classes are mandatory.
• Office hours will be held on Monday, 3:00 - 4:00 pm GMT. These are optional chances to get additional support from the instructor.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Conduct user research on the problem and opportunity space of a chosen challenge.
• Collect quantitative and qualitative data about a group of customers and use it to define product value proposition and roadmap.
• Select and apply product design frameworks relevant to particular situations.
• Develop a product or service to solve a well-defined user problem and define success metrics.
• Launch a venture that solves a well-defined user problem.
• Ideate and prototype solutions to an identified problem.

Course Structure

Coming into Challenge Studio 1, you have identified a development challenge you are passionate about and interested in solving. From your previous course, Engineering for Development, you have been equipped with the skills to spot problems and articulate your chosen problem in an actionable statement.

Starting this course, you will take your identified problem statement a step further by building solutions for them. At the beginning of this course, you will have the opportunity to re-work or change your problem statement altogether. We want to leave room for the possibility that, as you have learned more about the world around you, your thinking and interests have evolved.

Each week in Challenge Studio 1 builds on the next, starting with refining your problem statement, ideating solutions, building a minimum viable product, testing and iterating on it, and finally pitching your solution to peers and potential investors.

The most challenging part of this course will be getting out of your head and talking to real users. This is a very important but often challenging skill because it puts your hard work under scrutiny. But it is a crucial part of creating a successful product.