Think Tank Leadership Impact Project

Think Tank-

For our project in Management and Leadership, our goal was to develop product ideas that target teen’s needs and leave a lasting impact on the teen community.  First, our group came up with a number of problems that teens face in everyday life.  Then, we cut down the list into eight final ideas.  Next, the group split up into three separate groups and took one idea for their own to research and perfect.  The ideas chosen were: 

• a website with recommendations for classes,

• a schedule pen,

• a vending machine

• an app that told students if there were any parking spots available at the school.  

Schedule Pen-  Our group’s idea was to create a product that would aid high school student’s in an everyday way.  The actual idea was a pen that would have a paper pennant inside that could be pulled out of the pen.  The pennant would have the late arrival and assembly bell schedules, as well as a normal schedule. Colored a nice green for GBN school spirit

Recommendations-  Our section of the think tank found a need for a website that helps kids decide what classes they are going to enroll in. This site would allow students to rate and review classes that are offered at Glenbrook North. Currently at GBN the only way of knowing what kind of class you're signing up for is by word of mouth, the student handbook, and your counselor. Making this website would help students know the type of class they are signing up for and allows them to use their best judgment to decide if a course will suit them well. For our project in Management and Leadership, our goal was to develop  a product ideas that targets teens and execute our plan by creating a website from a pre made page site like Wix. com or Squarespace.com. These websites vary in price from $5-25 a month and would give us a set template to design our page with. We would advertise our site by word of mouth around the school, hand out flyers around the Northshore area, and use the radio. The reason why this would be different from ratemyteachers.com would be because we would try to make this more community oriented. On this website we could offer study material specific to classes that would make people want to use it regularly. We would make money with advertisements. For more information click here

Parking Space- A typical problem we found throughout students in GBN (typically upperclassmen) was that they wouldn't know which parking lot is filled. We came up the idea to create an app that shows GBN students how many spots are left available in each lot around GBN. This would solve the problem of students wasting time instead of getting to class. We researched how I passes worked seeing if it would relate to this product. We found out that they worked with putting RFID trackers on the car and having them go under and RFID scanner that would transmit data. We were planning on doing that so we would need to find out how much and where we can get RFID trackers, scanners and mounts to hold the scanners. The problems we ran into were that we couldn't find a way to tell which spots were available or tell when cars left the parking lot. Another problem was the price, we couldn't find a way to make a profit after spending a couple thousand dollars on RFID chips and readers so it wouldn't be profitable. Also we didn't have enough knowledge on how everything worked and what systems we would need. The final problem we found is that this product would cause teens to look at their phones when they should be focused on driving. So this product ultimately did not work. For more information about this innovative idea click here

Vending Machine- We thought of a common problem that many people forget important necessities while going to the beach. To fix that problem this section of the entrepreneur group pursued the idea of a vending machine that would be installed on beach property containing products that are commonly forgotten such as sunscreen, sunglasses, water toys, etc. We researched how much a vending machine would cost (with shipping and handling), how many items it would hold, where would we get the supplies, and how much we would sell the supplies for. Some of the problems that we encountered is that we were unable to install a vending machine on the Lake Shore Drive beach because they had an existing contract with the beach vendors prohibiting us to install another one. We also couldn't install onto Glencoe beach because we would have to fill out an application and wouldn't know if we were able to until 2015 October. However the lady we talked to on the phone said it was a very good idea, we would just need to fill out an app. We also wouldn't know how profitable it would've been because we couldn't figure out the average attendance at Glencoe beach. So all in all the plan did not work. For more information click here

To learn more about the Think Tanks project click here