The biggest ‘Design Innovation Workshop’ jointly presented by Prin. L. N. Welingkar Institute of Management Development & Research (WeSchool) and MIT Media Lab, USA successfully concluded in an ‘Open House’ on February 01, 2014 at WeSchool campus in Mumbai.  The ‘Open House’ was an exhibition to showcase the outcome of a weeklong workshop where 380 innovators from across India, have been collaborating and sharing ideas across boundaries of disciplines, institutions and cultures to design and implement prototypes with renowned MIT Media Lab experts and local mentors. The participants brainstormed with a large pool of mentors to address simple but vital issues that we face in our day to day lives with a designer’s holistic approach.

The week long innovation hub acted as a platform to an interesting mix of innovators that included dancers, painters, engineers and entrepreneurs who came together from different parts of the country to exchange ideas and experiences  for co-creating simple, novel and practical solutions. The participants teamed up to ideate, innovate and prototype under the expert guidance of a team of researchers from MIT and Faculty from WeSchool. Starting from a field visit to identify crucial pain points of the society to brainstorming on its plausible solutions, the workshop focused on different tracks like Living Mobile, Banking, Sustainability, Grass root Engineering, Performance Capture, Interaction Futures and Creative Learning.

Talking on the occasion, Prof Dr Uday Salunkhe, Group Director, WeSchool said, “The collaboration between MIT Media lab and WeSchool is an initiative to mentor a generation of Innovators (Gen I) , to be nurtured as global citizen leaders who can inspire pioneering initiatives to  address the changes in the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous )  world. WeSchool has been striving to create an ecosystem that encourages people to incorporate design thinking in action.  The convergence of design thinking, technology and empathy in the Design Innovation workshop has created an open platform for bringing   Indian participants from diverse educational streams to leverage their knowledge and strengths in order to create something meaningful for societal good. Such workshops are pivotal in encouraging the entrepreneurial landscape in India. We are glad to be collaborating with MIT Media Lab to provide this platform for translating innovative ideas into executable solutions.”