Ji Mi Choi
NSF I-Corps Hub: Desert and Pacific Region Director

The beginning of a new year is often the time people make resolutions to start doing new things or stop doing old things. We often hear, read, and see things like New Year’s resolutions to exercise more or drink alcohol less—Dry January anyone? And at the beginning of the year, there is a proliferation of articles and lists like top ten lists—‘top ten ways to eat healthier’, or ‘top ten ways to stop procrastinating’, or ‘top five harmful habits to break’. 

A concomitant part of the ‘new year, new resolutions’ narrative is failure—so much so that the second Friday in January has become known, harshly in my opinion, as “Quitter’s Day”.  Thank goodness we are past January 10^th! Since failed resolutions are often attributed to setting unrealistic expectations, some resources advise us to start small: to commit to one step or one part of a larger objective to avoid becoming a quitter or getting derailed before we can even really start.

In my experience supporting entrepreneurship and innovation, three commonalities I have encountered from people of all types are: 1) there’s a problem to be solved or an improvement to be made, 2) there’s a hope that someday, they’ll be the one to do that, and 3) there are pre-conditions whether it’s more money or more time for that someday to be today.

The NSF I-Corps™ program is specifically designed to support that ‘someday’ being now. Through just a four-session, live online course, you can finally take the steps to work on that idea you have been either deeply focused on academically or noodling about in your ‘free time and free brain space’. We have all been in those ‘someone should invent a way…’ or ‘someone should fix that’ conversations. And sometimes, that someone is us—without having to be a whole new you for the new year! 

You have knowledge, or skills, or experience, or ideas that could solve a problem. Through I-Corps and the customer discovery process, you can, in a supported and efficient way, delve into questions such as: how big is that problem, and for whom? Is it really a problem worth solving? Are there people who would support solving it and who would benefit from the problem being solved? Who would pay to have that problem solved? And do you have a valuable idea to address it? In other words, can you determine problem-solution fit?

There’s a children’s book series, Frog and Toad, and in one story, Toad has lots of household chores to do—clean his house, wash the dishes, etc.—but he tells his friend Frog, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll do them tomorrow.’ Turns out, he can’t enjoy today because he’s too worried about tomorrow.

Stop letting unresolved problems and your potential solutions take up your mental real estate. Tackle the idea and see if there’s any ‘there, there’. In just four sessions—you can do anything four times—you can give yourself the time and opportunity to explore. If it’s worth pursuing, great! If you determine through the I-Corps process that, at this time, it’s not, that’s great too! Asked and answered. Allows you to move forward from ‘someday’ to today and start the new year with one objective tackled!

Ready to turn ‘someday’ into today? Apply now to the I-Corps Aspire course and take the first step toward exploring your idea.
Apply Here: https://tinyurl.com/3rj4spp3