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What Do You Need?How will you work with your neighbors and local students to define what problems matter in your community, and what it will take to solve them?
Find Unsolved Local Problems & Help Solve Them
We Need ‘X’ teaches people to identify, quantify, and share their most urgent local problems with designers, engineers, and policymakers who can help solve them.
We Need ‘X’ has been developed over several years in a Harvard course called The Innovators’ Practice, which teaches students through experience about effective human-centered design and organizational behavior in multi-disciplinary innovation teams.
Structured Problem Finding Guide + Publishing Platform
From problem identification to working with others, solving problems is messy.
Projects are a series of hundreds of decisions in a context of high uncertainty. It is seldom totally clear who to work with, what to work on, or how to get it done with minimal resources.
Between 70-90% of professional innovation projects fail, often because of avoidable decision-making biases. Our Innovation Guide provides easy-to-use, research-based decision-making frameworks to help you navigate the tradeoffs of different ways to decide what to do next. Quality problem and context understanding leads to quality solutions. We Need ‘X’ helps you build and assess low-bias problem statements quickly based on structured qualitative and quantitative fieldwork, and allows you to publish your work for others to build on.
Start Local
We work with educators and motivated learners.
Research Problems
We help people identify, quantify, and share local problems in systematic ways that make it easier to work with designers, engineers, and policymakers to solve them.
Share What Your Community Needs
A lot of innovation fails due to insufficient understanding of the problem. We help learners identify problems and join with others to solve them.
Find Out How People Like You Deal With Team Issues
Another messy side of innovation is working with other people with different ideas about what matters. Our case explorer includes studies of successful and failed professional projects from top companies across diverse industries (e.g., Proctor & Gamble, Bank of America, IDEO, Uber, Gucci). You can search for filter the database for like you, and learn how they dealt with problems like you are having with, for example, an unmotivated teammate, working alone, or struggling to find funding. Our team has added research notes to connect key inflection points in the cases to related scientific research.