Last Saturday saw the start of Bethnal Green Ventures.
We brought together six teams we’ve chosen to work with for the next ten weeks for an afternoon of meeting each other and eating homemade lasagne.
The aim of the afternoon was to help them work out what they should be doing over the next ten weeks. All the teams are at different stages: some have very early stage funding, some already have users, but one or two are only a bit further along than ideas.
The basic framework we’ve designed for BGV is based on what we’ve learnt from running Social Innovation Camp for the last three years and inspired by reading lots of Paul Graham’s writing and some ideas from Customer Development (or Lean Startup as it’s sometimes called), amongst others. Just as we try and bring together very diverse people (from software developers to people who work in front-line public services), we’re equally interested in what we can learn from commercial start-ups, service design or other people working on social innovation.
The basic format of our first run of BGV is based around a dinner once a week where we’ll bring in an external speaker with real experience of doing what the teams are trying to do. During the rest of the week, we offer the teams office space or they can come in and have one-to-one sessions with us to talk though any issues they have.
We’ll share more of it as we go along, but our input is only a small part of the BGV programme. The real benefit comes from getting all the teams helping each other and meeting new people. We have a nice big contacts file of people who have very kindly offered to help the teams that we can put them in touch with – more about our BGV helpers in future posts.
What we’re trying to do is create a supportive environment for people who want to start something that might just change the world and improve peoples’ lives.
We won’t go through the teams yet because some of them don’t have public websites and many are still working out how to explain to people what they are trying to do, but over the next ten weeks we’ll be putting more up here and then revealing where they’ve all got to in December.
