#lifehacklabs

Today we're launching Lifehack Labs into the world.

We're welcoming twenty of the brightest young people from around the country join us in Wellington today to begin Lifehack Labs. It’ll be five weeks of intensive learning, research, mentoring, coaching and prototyping of technology projects, but really it is just the start of the journey for many of them.

The Labs experience brings together a range of disciplines such as design, entrepreneurship, social innovation, and technology and runs from 15 August until 19 September. This social lab is the first of its kind in New Zealand which aims to improve the wellbeing of young New Zealanders through technology and entrepreneurship. Unlike an accelerator programme, applicants enter Labs as individuals, and form teams and ventures around ideas during the lab with a specific social focus.

We’re helping people build resilient teams who are able and willing to take these technology ideas to scale, and impact the lives of thousands of Kiwis. We’re excited to be kicking off the Lab and supporting the next wave of leaders working on youth wellbeing in the digital age through rapidly advancing technology and social media.

With around 40% of the Kiwi population likely to experience depression in their lives, and New Zealand experiencing some of the lowest youth wellbeing rankings in the OECD, we need more skilled people actively working on the biggest problems in our society using a range of toolkits to help them develop new ideas and build on what’s already working around the country.

Lifehack partnered with Trade Me to run the Lab in their iconic space on Market Lane in Wellington. Lifehack is also working with organisations like entrepreneur hub SODA Inc from Hamilton, Queensland University of Technology, and social enterprise network Enspiral.  Labs has attracted mentors from academia, the corporate sector, not-for-profits and the blossoming social enterprise scene in Wellington.

Lifehack is part of the Prime Minister’s Youth Mental Health Project, which also funded projects like Common Ground and SPARX.  

Today we’re delighted to announce a new partnership with Trade Me!

We’ve been eager to announce the venue for Lifehack Labs 2014, as we think it’s one of the coolest darn spaces in the whole of Wellington.

From mid August we’ll be taking over Trade Me’s old space in Market Lane (opposite St John’s Bar) - yes, that’s the one with a slide in it.

It’s also got a fantastic layout for the kind of high intensity collaborative experience we’ll be running in August & September with 20 bright minds from around Aotearoa. Lifehack Labs is a 5 week design-led bootcamp to kickstart impact projects for youth wellbeing.

Trade Me really came to the party to support Lifehack Labs to happen - it’s great to be working with one of NZ’s leading businesses which is using technology to enable new ways of doing things. Many of you will know the Trade Me story, so you’ll know that they began as a small gem of an idea, made it through the startup days, and 15 years on they’ve enabled thousands of trades between Kiwis and kept a focus on supporting the NZ community.

When we asked Trade Me why they decided to support Lifehack Labs, they told us “We thought this was a cool way to help out an interesting and inspirational tech-focused initiative literally next door to us.”

Our epic Lifehack Labs project is just around the corner. We have selected the participants, we are finalising the venue and the programme. Individuals from across the country will be joining us in Wellington over a five-week period to tackle some of the hardest problems of our generation. They'll forming teams, validating hypotheses, launching social ventures.

We'll have one hell of a story to tell. And we need a helping hand doing that. 

Lifehack is looking for a part-time intern to join us on the Lifehack Labs journey to produce creative content for a range of media: blog posts, social media items, photography, and moving image. You'll have a nick for writing, a keen eye for spotting a great story unfolding before you, and ideally a skilled hand when it comes to a camera (and the editing software). 

We are looking for someone happy to become part of a friendly, hard-working and tight-knit team. You'll be given a high level of autonomy, and paid for your time. Hours and place of work are to be arranged – there'll be key events where we'll need you, but otherwise we're very flexible. 

It's the last week to get your applications in for #LifehackLabs!

Do something special this winter, and set yourself up to turn challenges into opportunities for the rest of your life.

Many young Kiwis have told us that they want the opportunity to take action to improve wellbeing for friends & whanau.

Over 75% of the people we spoke to said they would make space in their life if they were given the opportunity to do something truly impactful.

So we created LIFEHACK Labs.

As this is Aotearoa New Zealand's first ever social innovation lab, we put together this cheat sheet to give you a run down of what LIFEHACK Labs is all about.

Quite a few people have asked us how LIFEHACK Labs is different from Accelerator and Incubator programs, so we started with a quick side-by-side comparison. Accelerators & Incubators are important parts of the "support ecosystem", but LIFEHACK Labs - as you will see - is quite different.

Currently there is also a new breed of accelerators and incubators launching, such as LaunchPad from our friends at Ākina Foundation which seek to find and support a blended social & financial return. For the purposes of the below, we've compared to business accelerators & incubators.

We're excited to be able to provide this opportunity which may well produce teams with solid product/service ideas which would benefit from accelerator or incubator services once they have attended Labs.

If you have any questions, leave us a comment or get in touch - we'd love to hear from you!

LIFEHACK is recruiting for a Co-ordinator of our new program - New Zealand's first Social Innovation Lab - LIFEHACK Labs.

We're looking for a highly skilled new member for our team who is keen to help in this pioneering program which seeks to tackle complex social problems.

The Labs Co-ordinator will have a great variety of work to get their teeth into starting in June and running through to September, including contact with partners, mentors, and participants, finalising venue logistics and much more.

This is an exciting opportunity to join the team in an all important pilot phase, so we look forward to hearing from applicants.

Download the Role Description here.

Wow, time is flying by for our first Lifehack Labs Online cohort! We set them a challenge at the beginning of the year; go from "I have an idea", to "I have a version of my tech that I can trial with people"... in 3 weeks.

So far, our Lifehackers have got some great ideas on the boil:

How might we acknowledge the increasing amount of male youth suicides by utilizing positivity through technology and music?

How might we use technology to help education, corporate and community sectors work together to achieve coherent civil society?

How might we use technology to address depression in individuals and empower their support networks?

We've been delivering our first online Labs cohort with two emails a week containing some of the best knowledge we've built up from our experience of social ventures & tech startups, as well as some great curated resources from around the web. We're also hooking them up with some great tools (like LeanStack who've made us an official accelerator!) and mentors. 

3 weeks is a huge challenge to pack in a great amount of learning and still work on your idea, but it's the kind of energy and cadence which we know you need in the early days of crossing the chasm from Idea to World Changing Tech. You'll hear some more from us next week about other ways we're going to help people bridge the chasm - in the meantime here's some great advice from startup founders.

Finally, here's a great resource from Pollenizer on the importance of Focus for Entrepreneurs.