BizzyB

Soft Skills for the 21st Century Workforce

Millennials aren't prepared to enter the real world without the essential life skills for the 21st Century Workforce. Our solution is BizzyB a cloud­ based app that leverages triple-­bottom­-line business adventures to empower a growing number of students to find their hero within through innovation and entrepreneurship challenges. With BizzyB, students can acquire essential life skills, learn eco­stewardship and participate in philanthropic giving.

Our solution is BizzyB.com, a new project-­based learning platform for students grades 3-12 that uses common core aligned curriculum to guide students through the process of creating a business plan and eventual prototype. Throughout this journey, students develop innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial skills. The platform monitors development of skills through various evaluations to create individualized student reports. These life-skills are recognized by leading career pathway authorities like “Most Likely to Succeed ” to be necessary to survive in the 21st Century workforce. Our goal is to level the playing field across socio-economic barriers for equal opportunity and education for students.

The system is anchored by a cloud-­based app at bizzyb.com enabling students to access the innovation-based platform in localities of varying socioeconomic backgrounds worldwide. BizzyB offers advanced features including team collaboration, remote mentoring and 21st Century soft skill assessments. While technology is able to reach outlying individuals, others may not have access due to low bandwidth. Thus, to serve all at­-risk constituencies and learning styles, our entire system is mirrored in both cloud­-based and print formats for classrooms, after school programs and at-­home use. Further, teacher’s guides are also available and all materials are common core aligned.

Our goal in the next 12 months and beyond is to keep BizzyB updated with Department of Education standards such as common core standards and to continuously add content that keeps students engaged. Students in lower-economic communities are often forced to use outdated resources due to budget cuts, however part of the advantage of technology is our ability to offer current resources to our students and the best chance for success. The Foundation actively participates in symposiums of academia to remain updated. In turn, this allows us to introduce educators to BizzyB, thus exposing our solution to more students.

We have a history of demonstrating the ability to effectively scale our BizzyB platform to expose more students to our solution. MIT’s program LaunchX is a white label version of BizzyB that now hosts over 8,000 high school students and 2,000 mentors. If an organization or school wants to take BizzyB and name it something else as a white label, this achieves our goal of scaling our solution to students. Another successful method is the introduction of BizzyB to various organizations that want to partner to enhance their existing program such as Scouts BSA, Innovation Explorers Hawaii.

Like most apps, our play is most incentivized to promote via digital marketing mediums as that offers the most cost­-effective and direct conversion path. As it happens, two Bizgenics Board members are seasoned web and SEO experts owning SaaS app development, digital marketing and IT service companies. We also are vigilant to balance digital marketing against our mission of serving constituencies that are digitally impaired, thus high­touch events and partnerships are foreseen as the way to engage at­-risk groups.

Currently, we hosted over 10,000 users on our platform. Included in the 10,000 user base is also contributed by MIT’s LaunchX program, see LaunchX.com. We provide a white label version of BizzyB to MIT’s program which is currently used by approximately 8,000 high school students and 2,000 mentors predominantly in foreign countries. In addition to our online users, we also distributed several hundred copies of our hardcopy workbooks and downloadable curriculum to public and private schools, as well as youth organizations. Our platform users had access to our curriculum to develop entrepreneurial and life-skills.

Our target locality are urban to suburban areas with emphasis in students grades 3 - 12 from underserved communities. By providing a platform that offers the same updated curriculum and educational opportunity for students regardless of socio-economic status, our goal is to even the playing field. We expect to serve 100,000 students in 12 months by hosting youth organizations and school districts. Our hard copy curriculum is already in various schools and we are going through the standard vetting process for our online BizzyB platform. Due to exposure and marketing, we can expect 10,000,000 students in 3 years.

Bizgenics Foundation operates under a voluntary Board of Directors and Advisory model comprised of successful entrepreneurs/philanthropists who do not receive compensation but share a mutual interest to forward our mission by sharing resources and providing a vast network. We also utilize our connections to an international coding team based in Dhaka, Bangladesh that allows us to set updates and developments in motion for BizzyB at any time. Our team is also active in garnering support from experts in the field by speaking in international symposiums such as Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

We have developed membership models for the BizzyB platform. It’s very important to carefully weigh whether an app should be “freemium” (free membership with pay upgrades for advanced features or ad removal), subscription (up front paying communicates value) or other model. The BizzyB model is:

• Free Accounts for All: all users including students, mentors, teachers, parents and gift­-givers may open free accounts in seconds. This allows all to preview library adventures and participate in free features including mentoring and creating student groups. In essence, mentors, teachers, parents and gift­-givers are free members as they contribute feedback to students, bring students to the platform and buy gift tokens to give to students.

• Students Pay $5/mo Per Adventure: Students loading adventure tracks pay one token ($5/token) per month for as long as their adventure is live. Upon project completion, adventure results are available for viewing in student portfolios but not editable unless turned back on through paying.

• Token Gift­-Giving: Any user including students, mentors, teachers, parents and gift­-givers may purchase tokens (available through scaling bulk discount) and gift to any other user.

The purpose of applying to Solve is simple. We've identified that the best way to serve our students is through the collaboration of brilliant minds, and Solve holds the key. We are interested in new ideas to continue the forward direction of BizzyB and to expand upon its potential to reach more students. We truly believe that BizzyB offers students the opportunity to develop entrepreneurial skills and life skills that will accompany each and every user through college and career. Sometimes students just need to be given the opportunity and our online platform can achieve this.

The BizzyB platform collects a multitude of user data such as the development of soft skills. We are interested in effective ways to better our evaluation methods and to interpret the data so we can understand potential patterns of outcomes. By understanding the patterns, we can move forward by refining the BizzyB platform where necessary and providing suggestions to users to better achieve a specific outcome.