Guest Blogger and Net Impact President, Yair Sarfaty, writes about his experience at the Harvard Illuminate Conference, which was funded through a Taylor Changemaker Catalyst Award.
The Harvard Illuminate Conference is an event that gathers leaders from all over the world in one place. It is held in Harvard University on Boston, MA. We got to the conference on a Saturday at 8:00 a.m. It was very exiting to be around so many people with different ideas for businesses and how to make the world a better place.
The conference started with a talk by Mehmood Khan, the CSO of PepsiCo. Mr. Khan’s talk was one of the best talks I have ever heard in my life. He talked about all the problems that the world will face in the future. He talked about overpopulation, lack of water, lack of food, and others. Mr. Khan mentioned that the only way, in which we can overcome these problems, is with innovation. Innovation will make us solve problems in ways we did not thought were possible. For example, applying technologies to an industry from different unrelated industries.
Another talk that I enjoyed a lot was the Human-Centered Design workshop with Shuya Gong. In this workshop, we were encouraged to form small groups and come up with small ventures ideas. Through the development of ideas process, Ms. Gong gave us different constraints. For example, we only had one minute to identify a problem and state a solution. Or we also needed to include a sloth somewhere in our venture. These constraints made us work under a small amount of stress. At the end, we learned that the body makes very good and fast decisions when it’s under stressful situations. The different constraints made us only think on the important features of the ideas and leave the unimportant for another time.
As with this two events, there where many interesting workshops and talks in this conference. Each activity gave me something different that I can use in my day to day life and, especially, as the president of an organization on campus. The conference not only gave me ideas on different activities to have for the Net Impact Tulane Chapter members, it also gave me a different perspective on how to approach problems and develop entrepreneurial ideas. This conference was a great opportunity to network, learn, and be inspired from what others have done. The next step is to apply all of this information to my life. I have already started doing so with the Net Impact Tulane Chapter, but this is a long process of revising what I have done in the past and what I will do in the future.
By Yair Sarfaty