Creation Vs Facilitation

Being a designer, innovation to me always meant 'creating' a novel solution to a problem. In fact, most of my innovative ideas have been products that are made to fit a certain need.  Mark Heckmann's visit to our class broadened my vision to another type of innovation; facilitation. His startup, StudentIntuition is a platform where students can work for companies on short term projects to make money to pay for college tuition. He simply identified two problem areas, and provided a connection so that they could mutually benefit each other. The students were getting paid to cover their tuition and companies were getting their projects done at a relatively low rate, with Mark and his team merely acting as 'facilitators'.

No one can argue that this is not innovation, even though nothing new is being 'created'. It is a simple, novel and ingenious solution that is solving two problems at the same time. After looking at Mark's business model, I started to think of ways to incorporate this  innovation through 'facilitation' in my project. Even though the furniture line is essentially a product of 'creation', I came across a few ways including the act of 'facilitation' in the Clip Collection. I realized that students in rural areas need furniture as much as students who live off campus in universities for 1-2 years. The best option they have is Ikea, where the students still need to pay $400- to furnish a room, and don't know what to do with that furniture once their program is over. It would be nice to fit both the needs together so that they mutually benefit each other. Going further on, I am going to start thinking about marrying these two aspects of aspects of innovation and integrate it in my project.