Our Venture Journey: Lessons Learned in Technopreneurship
In our third and fourth week of technopreneurship, our team continued to explore SDG 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities, focusing on Target 11.1: adequate, safe, and affordable housing for all by 2030. The problem we are working on is that informal settlements in Cagayan de Oro continue to grow despite housing programs. To better understand the root causes, we were introduced to Game 2: The Fishbowl Discussion. At first, the activity felt a bit structured, but as we went along, it became a very engaging way to dig deeper into the 5 Whys results. We met through Google Meet, assigned roles, and followed the flow: two members acted as “players” to discuss one “why,” while the rest acted as observers, taking down notes and spotting insights or blind spots. After each round, we rotated roles until all five “whys” were discussed. Through this process, our discussions revealed how housing projects often fail because they are built far from livelihood opportunities. People would rather stay in informal settlements close to jobs, schools, and markets than relocate to distant housing sites. The problem traced back to high land costs in prime areas, lack of innovative financing, and the weak collaboration between the government, technopreneurs, and private developers. The most important insight we gained was that the issue is not simply about building houses—it is about building sustainable communities. Families do not just need shelter; they need opportunities, access, and support systems. From our synthesis, we came up with a promising solution: a tech-driven housing finance and monitoring platform that can bring together the government, private developers, and urban poor associations. With features like crowdfunding, real-time tracking, and transparent cost-sharing, this platform could make housing projects more inclusive and better aligned with livelihood hubs. Aside from the Fishbowl game, we also started reaching out to informal settlers in CDO for interviews. Talking to them gave us a more human perspective—these are not just statistics, but real families who balance the trade-off between living closer to work and having access to safe housing. This strengthened our conviction that solutions should be people-centered and context-based. We also began working on our first milestone in the Wadhwani app, which helped us organize our venture journey step by step. This tool is guiding us in shaping our ideas more concretely and systematically. Overall, these weeks taught me the importance of structured problem analysis and teamwork. The Fishbowl discussion showed how every “why” is a piece of a bigger puzzle, and how listening to different perspectives sharpens our understanding. For me, the biggest learning was that problems should not be simplified—they should be understood in layers. Only then can we create solutions that are realistic, sustainable, and impactful.
