SasTik

Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) is a topic of great discussion in every industry. Almost all MNCs and even major educational institutes have mandatory training for new employees and students alike. Still, approximately 1 in 2 Americans report having witnessed or being subject to exclusion and criticism based on race, gender, sexuality, etc. This discrepancy arises due to the late-stage interventions and ineffective mandatory diversity training for young and old adults. The current standard of D&I training includes activity-based learnings and webinars, both of which have their specific problems. We suggest game-based interventions as alternatives to traditional solutions employed by the HR Department to address D&I. Games are more engaging and allow individuals to learn at an individual pace instead of being a mandatory forced activity. If the principles can be imbibed at an early age then we could possibly eliminate the need for mandatory training in higher education and professions. 

The present framework for incorporating D&I principles in individuals is inadequate based on observed trends across industries. While ~$8B is spent on D&I training in the United States alone, the statistic on actual behavior is highly discouraging, as mentioned above. There is an even lesser capital investment in developing countries and more significant prejudice, which elucidates a larger problem in the global ecosystem. D&I tech solutions are a $100M worldwide industry and are still ineffective. There is a flaw in the systemic approach, alluding to the nature of the interventions being developed and incorporated. While there is no replacement for early interventions in human behavior, games are an excellent way of introducing ludic elements to learning, resulting in higher and, more importantly, more profound levels of information retention. The envisioned D&I game is our MVP, but the greater goal is to address the “Future of Work” through well-designed games targeted at crowd-sourcing solutions for real-life problems. 

Our suggested solution is an aptly designed game where the game mechanics teach the advantages of inclusion and provide penalities for exclusion, thus showing how alternatively able individuals provide advantages to a team to individuals of all ages. 

Examples of mini-games in the larger game world could include:

• Picking the best composition for a football team to ensure the best performance. 

• Experience life as a person who does not experience color or sight by having a puzzle room where one Is blindfolded. 

• Hiring candidates for a superhero mission with differently-abled individuals

• Approving loans at a bank without knowledge od demographics

Diversity and Inclusion interventions currently occur only in the workplace. It is mostly treated as mandatory training that employees reluctantly go through. These interventions, while enlightening, are neither enjoyable nor effective. At the same time, populations outside the traditional workforce are completely excluded from D&I programs. These populations include school-going children, unemployed individuals, stay-at-home members of the family as well as the elderly. Since such large sections of society do not receive adequate or effective D&I interventions. We believe this market is not only grossly underserved but that it requires a completely different approach to D&I. 

Our target population and how we plan to serve them:

1. Working Professionals (Target for the initial pilot): SasTik D&I game will be a fun way for them to learn how to apply their D&I training in everyday situations that involve the workplace. Through our game, they can actually experience how diversity leads to business success. Our game will be modeled on the data that shows that higher diversity leads to higher revenues and profitability.
2. Students (Primary target): SasTik D&I game aims to teach students at all education levels about the importance of diversity and inclusion. The game’s diversity-based reward system will show them how a more inclusive world is a better one, for everyone.
3. Unemployed/ Stay at Home individuals (Secondary target): Unemployed or stay-at-home individuals often have limited exposure across different social situations. The inherent bias in these individuals often goes unaddressed due to a lack of D&I resources. Sastik games aim to virtualize a diverse world and make it accessible through widely used digital devices. Thus from the comfort of their homes, these individuals can play games that would entertain them while also addressing their biases. 
4. Elderly (Secondary target): We are living in a world that is much more diverse and inclusive than before. The elderly in particular are often unable to reconcile with the drastic socio-cultural changes that they witness around them. They have deep-seated biases that are very difficult to change, even with traditional D&I interventions. SasTik’s simple D&I games aim to help the elderly understand the new world around them and realize the benefits of diversity and inclusion. Sastik games can be used by nurses and family members caring for the elderly, as something that also helps senior citizens pass their time meaningfully.

Each of these target markets needs a curated set of Diversity & Inclusion games that we plan to roll out in a phased manner. We are currently running a survey with the target population to understand what sort of D&I intervention would most benefit them.

Sastik addresses Antiracist Technology in the US. Our solution aims to sensitize the population about racism through interactive situational games that promote antiracist behavior by rewarding inclusivity and penalizing racism. Our target population is strategically chosen to maximize the impact of our solutionOur Pilot market is working professionals who often unknowingly create systemic barriers that prevent minorities from availing even basic opportunities.

1. Our primary market is students, who will be the foundation of future enterprises.

2. Our secondary market represents large sections of the population who are the moral backbone of society.

Starting with primary and secondary market research to understand the industry better, we have surveyed over 200 individuals. We have validated the need for better D&I solutions through interviews with working professionals. We have also published our starter webpage to have an online identity and attract potential investors and customers. We are in the prototype phase and are currently designing SasTik’s pilot game which focuses on addressing Diversity and Inclusion for all ages.

The current D&I solutions are hardly effective. In fact, laboratory studies show these types of prescriptive solutions can activate bias rather than eliminate it. Social scientists state that people often rebel against control and rules to assert their autonomy and that inherently exacerbates the problem. 

The innovation lies in our game designing approach. 

• Our game will not be force-feeding mundane D&I frameworks, instead, the concepts will be abstracted behind effective storytelling and a well-designed gaming interface. 

• The current activity-based D&I solutions are not very effective because people tend to either not grasp the message behind the activity or even if they do, they forget about it shortly after. Our mini-games will reinforce the same message through repetition wherein users will try to level up through increasingly complex storylines. 

• Affinity Groups and ERGs (employee resource groups) tend to lack the expertise and systemization to drive effective D&I efforts. They often have a negative impact because they can be felt exclusionary and breed favoritism. With our game design, players will be ranked on metrics that will drive D&I understanding more effectively bringing a systemized approach to D&I education that can be measured and further improved. 

Sastik’s initial pilot will be rolled out to corporate clients. Within three months of launch, we aim to serve at least two large corporations and expand it to five corporations within a year. During this time we expect to serve 1000+ corporate users. 

In 5 years we aim to roll out SasTik D&I games to schools and the general public, serving:

5,000+ corporate users

10,000+ students

50,000+ general population

The overarching measurable for our D&I solution is the number of reported cases of discrimination. We wish to reduce it by 45% within 5 years of deploying our solutions in schools and workplaces. We will also track a custom metric for organizational mindset around inclusion, the options will be ‘No interest in D&I’, ‘Basic Compliance’, ‘Early Stage Implementation’, ‘Inclusion systemizing’, ‘Proactive Inclusion’.

On a more game usage and statistics level, we will be measuring and rolling out changes to improve the following metrics -

• Number of Daily/Weekly Active Users (DAU/WAU) - the cadence of measurement will be determined/changed based on the popularity of the game.

• Total Number of Hours Played (including any replays)

• Number of mini-games played in each session

• Performance in mini-games

• Game performance specific metrics (to be determined while designing the game)  

Our market acquisition and growth metrics are as follows -

• Number of schools and corporate/client partnerships

• Customer Acquisition Cost (customer = partnerships, not each gamer) 

• Number of referrals 

• ROI on marketing spend

The team consists of 3 co-founders with 1 graduate student and 2 full-time professionals. Indrayud is a student in Systems Design and Management (SDM) at MIT while Oindrila and Payal are Strategy Manager and CTO at Cognizant and Searchbloom respectively. 

Indrayud - Worked with diverse teams at Deloitte LLP with practitioners across multiple continents and was a part of D&I training restructuring for US-India to adapt to cultural sensitivities. Had a dedicated goal to maximize team performance while ensuring comfortability and ease of communication during my 6-year tenure at a global firm and having won multiple awards for work and social initiative delivery. 

Payal - Having lived in many culturally varied cities in India, Payal was always sensitive to the cultural significance of a place and the role it plays in the everyday lives and conversations of people. She believes everyone has the basic human right to live comfortably in their own identity without worrying about facing ridicule for being different. Payal became even more passionate about Diversity and Inclusion when she entered the US startup ecosystem after her MBA and felt an acute need for it. She is the biggest advocate for women, BIPOC, and minority group hiring initiatives at Searchbloom and evangelizes an equitable workplace in public forums, and boardroom conversations.   

Oindrila - She is a Manager at Cognizant, a global corporation with 75% business in the US and a diverse workforce. She has worked in diverse multicultural global teams. She has actively taken part in various Diversity initiatives and knows firsthand how even corporations heavily invested in D&I could still sometimes fall short. As a volunteer for Cognizant’s social outreach program, she has taught young children about inclusivity and tolerance through fun activities. She feels she will add great value in designing games aimed at diversity education.

The three co-founders come from very different backgrounds in India and have had professional exposure to a variety of industries in their consulting-based roles. Our team is inherently diverse in the exposure and experience we bring to the table. With varying degrees of experience in the US, we have noticed and been a part of systemic discrimination ourselves so as a leadership team, we are driven to build an equitable and just company. We are looking for non-Indian co-founders with complementary skills to join the founding team. We are also working with non-Indian mentors and advisors to counter our biases and opinions shaped around the same nationality and ethnic origin. 

As the company grows, the culture will be set by the way people operate, especially the founding leadership team. So, it is important to make sure we create an environment in which everyone feels valued, respected and included. We will strive to create an organization in which ideas and voices flow not just top-down but bottom-up as well. 

Startups succeed because of perseverance and support from like-minded individuals who have faith in the idea, and the SOLVE challenge and community can provide access to both. We are applying to this challenge because previous MIT grants that we have applied to have supported our cause and provided targeted feedback that has helped us grow as an organization. Furthermore, these challenges provide an exposure unlike any other to a community that is not regularly accessible.  

Here’s how Solve can help us:

1. Grant funding of $10,000 would be extremely helpful in developing our prototype and assembling the early team beyond co-founders
2. SOLVE can connect us with developers, technical professionals who we can partner with to build our prototypes
3. The initiative can also connect us with like-minded individuals, D&I experts, and advisors who can help refine our business model and solution.
4. SOLVE can facilitate partnerships with other companies creating solutions in the same place to collaborate and address a more significant challenge.
5. The SOLV[ED] community can help test our initial prototype and provide valuable feedback

According to us, the most essential partners (in decreasing order of priority) are as follows -Human Capital (e.g. game developers, animators.) -- at present, we do not have individuals with game experience in our early team. While we have an understanding of software development, game development has certain nuances which we are not aware of. 

• Financial (e.g. establishing a long-term business plan, pitching to investors) -- our funding right now is enough for license purchasing. But we need financial support for game development and developer fees.

• Business model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development) -- the D&I product is our MVP launch but the greater picture has much more industry value. A S&O roadmap needs to be generated for the bigger picture. 

• Technology (e.g. software or hardware, web development/design) -- we have $4.2k for any licenses we need, hence the low priority on the ladder. 

• Public Relations (e.g. branding/marketing strategy, social and global media) -- last rung in the ladder after we have established the above. 

Organizational partners such as Roblox, Unity, or Unreal (existing gaming platforms) would help save us licensing costs for the usage of their platform. Companies like Catalyst that work specifically on D&I increase would be excellent partners as well. Intra-MIT, the MIT Game Lab, and the Orbit community would be particularly useful for feedback on designed games and partnering with early team members, respectively. In terms of faculty, it would be great to connect with Dr. Philip Tan (Research Scientist at the MIT Game Lab), Dr. T.L. Taylor (Professor of Comparative Media Sciences), and Dr. Eric Gordon (Visiting Professor in Comparative Media Sciences).

We are a team of passionate social entrepreneurs who are on a mission to put an end to systemic racism and discrimination. Racism and other discriminatory systemic problems cannot be solved by having webinars, surface-level conversations, ethnic lunches, or team activities. None of these methods solve for the root cause of the problem and only look to solve the symptoms of the problem.

We, at SasTik, want to inculcate the importance of respect and equality in young students at an early age before they have formed their world views and outlooks for life. AntiRacist Technology solutions are on the rise but how many of them are tacking the root cause, the need to mistrust or judge people different from ourselves. With our fun and easy-to-play mini-games, we will be able to intervene early on and share the message and benefits of a diverse and inclusive environment.

The prize money of $300,000 will help us acquire more users for our game. The more players interact with our mini-games, the more robust will be the insight from their gameplay data. We will be able to tweak and fine-tune the game mechanics to have the most desirable, equitable, and fair outcome.

Present D&I initiatives are ineffective because they are disengaging and are conducted at late stages such as higher education and during professional careers in organizations. By this time individuals are fully formed and have already created their worldview. Instead, we suggest that D&I should be introduced at a young age, possibly 5+ through the games on our platform. Introducing ludic elements into learning usually results in higher engagement and greater retention of conveyed concepts. This applies to both children as well as adults. D&I is treated as an afterthought and not at a core part of the process during the creation of teams (in organizational structure) and the design of products.

Products are usually created for the majority population and then retrofitted for things such as accessibility. Instead, ensuring accessibility and creating a truly inclusive product should be the aim from the get-go. In the short term, our games would teach the value of D&I to students, thus promoting inclusive behavior in the classroom, playground, and in their personal lives. As students become more inclusive, they will interact regularly with diverse individuals resulting in personal growth and higher diversity in the classroom. Greater diversity would result in a higher representation of minorities such as BIPOC and differently-abled individuals in STEM education. 

While business targeting diversity is flourishing, diversity is not. People of color–who make up nearly 40% of the U.S. population–remain acutely underrepresented in most influential fields. From 2009 to 2018 the percentage of black law partners inched up from 1.7% to 1.8%. From 1985 to 2016, the proportion of black men in management at U.S. companies with 100 or more employees barely budged–from 3% to 3.2%. People of color held about 16% of Fortune 500 board seats in 2018. A 2018 survey of the 15 largest public fashion and apparel companies found that nonwhites held only 11% of board seats and that nearly three-quarters of company CEOs were white men. And in the top 200 film releases of 2017, minorities accounted for 7.8% of writers, 12.6% of directors, and 19.8% of lead roles. These numbers are reported in organizations that have internal D&I initiatives thus alluding to the systemic nature of the problem. 

For diversity and inclusion to become a reality in the nation’s workplaces, companies and institutions need to do more than recycle costly and ineffectual initiatives such as activity-based workshops and mandatory webinars. Think about this, children are learning strategies to defeat zombie armies and learning pin-point sniper accuracy to eliminate rival teams at the age of 6 and above yet they are taught diversity and inclusion as a way of life during collegiate studies and beyond which is much later. Our games would provide alternative, engaging, and possibly cheaper D&I interventions for organizations.  

Gender equality is a $12 trillion dollar missed opportunity. According to McKinsey, companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic and gender diversity are 35 percent and 15 percent more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. In another study of 22,000 companies across 91 countries, companies with 30 percent female executives make six percent more in profit. 

Despite positive financial returns, the representation of women is still lesser than ideal because of present D&I interventions which are disengaging and ineffective. Because a company has swift and efficient delivery of products or services to its clients, many tend to “operationalize” D&I initiatives.  The program becomes a “check-the-box” numbers game geared to speed and efficiency rather than incorporating the very culture changes and behaviors that allow them to understand inclusion and diversity barriers. 

Formalization results in ineffective results, like standardized instruction. Everyone learns in their own way and navigating a game allows individuals to learn at their own pace and via their own chosen decisions instead of directed instructions by an invigilator. SasTik aims to provide an alternative method of delivering D&I interventions in organizations to close the gender gap and foster equal treatment in the workplace.