Teaching innovation from scratch
Students want to make an impact, but don’t know how to start. They feel stuck. They don’t know who to help, how to discover important problems, or how to find ideas where they can contribute.
The Zero Experience changes that. Over a single semester, students engage in live and interactive workshops that teach them how to innovate. They learn how to find users, break down global problems, and design practical solutions.
Over 3,000 Canadian students have done Zero, with glowing reviews.
3 weeks
In just 3 weeks, students in the Zero Experience discover the building blocks of innovation throughout live, interactive workshops hosted virtually for convenience, working in teams of peers to design impactful projects.
3 months
Over 3 months, students begin exploring their school’s innovation ecosystem guided by Zero, expanding newfound projects, and enjoying personalized office hours with Zero founders and advisors.
3 years
Everyone in Zero gets at least three years unlimited access to hundreds of tools and resources, a global alumni community, and more; so they can return back to innovation whenever opportunity strikes.
Our Methodology
The Zero Experience is grounded in live, highly interactive workshops offered virtually to teach students. This lets us move from bite-sized lectures, to group reflections in the chat, to breakouts, team calls, and more. The program is based around experiential learning, and online workshops allow us to jump into the practice right away.
In order to make the workshops work, we have a couple rules for ourselves:
Lectures are always less than ten minutes. Practice is better. We teach students an important concept, then immediately have them engage with peers, mentors, users, and themselves to build skills.
Everything must be useful immediately, and in a year. Students need to see the immediate impact of their work and benefit of learning, but those skills need to keep returning value long after Zero. Therefore, everything needs to be useful within contexts like work, school, entrepreneurship, and day-to-day life.
No experience required. Lessons are designed so that anyone can get value from them. Whether they’re in 1st year, or getting their PhD, each exercise still reinforces skills that are doable and relevant to innovating from scratch.
Zero’s learning goals include building problem-analysis and solving skills, communication skills, and self-confidence. These goals are measured through immediate, short-term, and long-term assessments.
Fueling diversity in innovation
58%
of participants
identify as a visible minority
52%
of participants
identify as women or non-binary
46%
of participants
identify as international students
Anyone can be an innovator. In practice though, many students don’t identify as innovators, entrepreneurs, or even creative - even when they fully have the potential to be.
The Zero Experience is a program which is actually accessible to those audiences. That diversity of background makes the program stronger, as students get to work with teams of wildly different backgrounds on incredibly different projects.
Bringing Zero to your students
The Zero Experience is an off-the-shelf, turn-key solution for kickstarting your student’s innovation journeys.
All you need to do is let your students know; we’ll handle teaching, program pipelining, messaging, administration, and more.
We offer a Pilot Zero version to help you discover if Zero is right for your students. Contact us now to learn more!
Three thousand so far
With over 3000 students joining since 2020, the program has consistently delivered value at scale to the University of Waterloo and several other schools. With over 50,000 slack messages between participants, and glowing feedback from hundreds of alumni even years later, Zero has a proven track record to make innovation accessible for post-secondary students.
FAQs
-
The Zero Experience runs each Fall and Winter school term. Students from every participating university receive personalized project resources and communications, then join live workshops with students across North America.
-
Zero is incredibly interactive. Students are constantly practicing new skills, interspersed with team activities and engaging (but always brief) lectures. Workshops move efficiently, never wasting a minute. Despite being firmly rooted in modern research and widely accepted teaching pedagogy, Zero is constantly innovating how students can engage with innovation.
-
Zero is best for students who are curious about making an impact but don’t know where to start, regardess of background. Every term we accept a broad spread of post-secondary students, from first-years to grad students across North America!
Don’t worry if this seems daunting! We provide you with messaging resources and strategies to help reach these students effectively, expanding your institution’s innovation pipeline dramatically. -
We offer a “pay-per-seat” model to participating institutions so they can send as many students as they want each term. We keep it fair, and only charge for students who show up. We also offer flat pricing pathways to suit your needs.
Regardless, students don’t pay a dime themselves to participate. -
Absolutely! Contact us now to learn about our guided pilot.
