When Prianka Siva first moved into St. Paul’s GreenHouse this fall, she loved the environment with like-minded people who were excited about making a difference in the world, but she wasn’t exactly sure what she wanted to do. Her ideas kept shifting as she learned more, and all the ideas seemed exciting. If anything, she was worried about losing track of the creative ideas she had. She kept a notebook filled with them, but struggled to choose just one to share with her peers. She enjoyed the rich discussions but was dismayed that good ideas often got lost along the way.
Prianka, who had grown up watching her father operate his own business, had spent a term at Velocity, where she learned more about entrepreneurship and how entrepreneurs worked together. But because her interests were more community-driven than technology-focused, Prianka was excited when she heard about the development of GreenHouse at St. Paul’s.
Unlike in the tech sector where people often see ideas as proprietary, protected in order to preserve money-making potential, Prianka’s experience at GreenHouse convinced her that with community-oriented ideas, the more perspectives and people involved, the better an idea often became. As a big picture thinker, she wondered how to optimize incubators and the ideas generated there to their full potential.
Through working with mentors and others in the GreenHouse network, Prianka refined her interests to launch IdeaSpace, an online platform for an idea-sharing network between members of social and environmental incubators.
Prianka describes IdeaSpace as “LinkedIn for ideas,” saying, “IdeaSpace aims to share all ideas, whether fully or partially developed, with the incubator’s network of experts and other entrepreneurs for feedback and validation. This ultimately allows the entrepreneurs to progress to implementation and testing faster, and allow the incubators to fully optimize the potential of every idea.”
Rather than focusing on a specific challenge, IdeaSpace will build a platform that helps entrepreneurs tackle a wide variety of problems. Prianka’s hope is that IdeaSpace will accelerate environmental and social change in communities around the world through network mapping and faster idea sharing.
“Before incubators became popular,” says Prianka, “entrepreneurs had to work alone to make their ideas succeed. The beauty of GreenHouse is that you don’t have to do it by yourself. Connecting with others makes a difference in making an idea happen. GreenHouse is a chance for people to discover whether or not they are an entrepreneur by trying their ideas out. She adds, “Before you find what you want to do, there’s always a period of exploration. Everyone is at the exploratory stage at some point. It’s important to take time to figure out what you want to do.”
- by Susan Fish