Milestone Labs: Social Innovation with Sustainable Impact

Today’s market is saturated with social and impact business who are “changing the world”.  We have seen so much time and money spent lofty social innovation visions but have always been disappointed with the measurable and scalable impact. Milestone Labs is our solution to this problem. 

Rather than focus on unattainable goals, we propose a different strategy - we focus on addressing concise, distilled needs with proven market potential.  Our R&D methodology takes a unique approach - we bring people who live with unmet needs (we call them expert users) together with those who have technical expertise to develop real solutions. By putting the expert user at the center, we can understand exactly what their challenges are and what solutions they need. We partner with Kadence International on market research and validation, to ensure that the challenges we choose to address have market potential, and 

“Nothing about us, without us” - we believe that those who live with challenges should be involved in developing their solutions. Technology is often developed without user input and its expected that users will adapt themselves to technologies rather than the opposite. Milestone takes a different approach - we believe the user is the best source for challenges; by including them from the beginning, we ensure solutions we develop answer real needs. The challenge of helping communities design and determine their solutions around critical services is directly in-sync with our approach. As the challenge suggests, communities know their challenges, not us. We don’t know the answers nor do we know which solution is needed. We have a platform and a methodology that serves as an incubator of ideas and solutions and our process takes an idea and sees it through to a final product. We focus on disabilities and aging populations and with 1.1 billion people living with a disability and the number of adults over 50 in the US estimated to be 132 million by 2030, it’s a large and growing market. As cities grow and services become more technological, we can ensure that no citizen is left behind.

Inclusion and accessibility are core values to our company. We believe that no one should be excluded nor left behind because of their disability or any other factor. Milestone’s main focus is on people living with disabilities and aging populations. The WHO estimates that an estimated 1.1 billion people in the world live with a disability and the number of adults over 50 in the US is estimated to be 132 million by 2030, it’s a large and growing market.  In order to ensure actual needs are addressed, our team works directly with ‘expert users’ who have a clear understanding of these needs. We define expert users as people who live with a challenge or have a close personal or professional knowledge of a challenge. 

In our work, the expert user is at the center of the process - they are a living case study and design with us. They have the best understanding of their needs and professionals know what solutions are out there and what is lacking. Including the user in the design process expands the horizons of those developing the solutions, fosters empathy through new connections, and forces them to examine their work from a different perspective. 

Milestone Labs was born of a simple idea and a shared frustration; we saw so much time and energy invested in incredible social innovation events and companies; all solving huge problems, all “changing the world”, but we were always left with the same lingering question: What actual impact is taking place?  

At Milestone, we pride ourselves on our unique process and methodology. Developed over years of experience and testing, our approach incorporates several unique elements - We address real challenges from real users, we focus on technology that bridges gaps and facilitate multidisciplinary collaborations. 

Rather then deciding what needs to solve, we go directly to the source. We work directly with ‘expert users’ who have a clear understanding of challenges, they’re at the center of the process - as living case studies who design with us. Users have the best understanding of their needs and professionals know what solutions are out there and what is missing. 

Once we’ve aggregated challenges from expert users, we work with our partner, Kadence International on market research and validation and only addresses unmet needs with proven market potential. Once we have concise, validated needs, we conduct social innovation engagements to come up with solutions. These can take the form of academic curses, corporate partnerships, workshops and more. One key factor is our multidisciplinary approach - we ensure that the expert user is involved and works directly with the technological side creating the solution. Including the user in the design process expands the horizons of those developing the solutions, fosters empathy through new connections, and forces people to examine their work from a different perspective. This leads to unique and creative solutions that truly answer challenges. Our approach includes elements of design thinking, project-based learning, development and digital fabrication technologies. 

In keeping with our goal of sustainable impact, each product or deliverable that comes out of our work gets its own implementation plan and our team works with different entities to ensure as many people as possible can benefit from our solutions. These implementation plans may include partnerships with third parties on production and distribution of products, enforcement of new government policies, or the development of new software applications. Across all the work that we do, our core values and methodologies stay the same and we remain focused on the same goals - ensuring sustainable social impact and creating real solutions to unmet needs. 

The majority of startup companies take a fairly standard approach - identify a problem (usually from personal experience), create a product/program/app to solve it, and share it with users for testing before it's released to the public. At Milestone, we believe that users, particularly those from underprivileged populations understand their needs and challenges better than entrepreneurs do. We believe that they should not only supply the needs but should play key roles in developing solutions. In our joint experience, we've seen so much energy and money spent on "solutions" to perceived problems. In conversations with the potential users of these products, we've heard frustrations over how the solutions don't actually answer their challenges, or how they provide extra, unneeded features. 

At Milestone, we've developed a unique methodology that takes an innovative approach to addressing unmet social needs  - put the user at the center. We address needs that come directly from the users and the institutions that work with them. We perform market research and validation with our partner Kadence International to ensure that there is market potential for the needs we choose. 

Our innovative development process puts the user at the center and has them work directly with the technical minds developing and creating the solution. This not only allows them to serve as a living case study and give their input at every step of the process but also provides the developers with true insight into the audience they are developing for, it fosters empathy and encourages creativity. 

The result are simple, clever products that truly answer needs.

Milestone Labs includes technology in all our solutions. We are an incubator of ideas - working with users to come up with potential solutions that answer unmet social needs and taking them from early stage ideas and validation to prototypes and through to final products. Each of our products has a technological element and they range from classic hardware products, software apps, Internet of things, wearables, AR/VR solutions, digital manufacturing technologies and more. These technologies are key components of our solutions and will go a long way to helping underprivileged populations live a better and fuller life. 

Milestone Labs works to serve underprivileged populations and help create solutions to their needs. In addition, we work to raise awareness of unmet social needs and get as many people as possible involved in developing solutions. 

We have seen again and again how much time, energy, and money goes into social innovation companies and projects that boast lofty goals of "changing the world" and "affecting the lives of 250 million people" but time and time again, we have seen that these goals are just paying lip service and the time and money that is spent does not make any lasting impact. 

By taking data and user-based approaches to solving unmet needs, Milestone ensures that the solutions we create not only have markets but truly answer the needs of users. By putting the user at the center, they provide the necessary input to make the products relevant to their needs. By doing intensive market research and validation, we will only select challenges that have proven markets that are large enough make development and production worthwhile. 

Currently Milestone is serving the 150 people who we have worked with in the last year. This number includes both expert users who gave us challenges and those who worked on creating the actual solutions. 

In one year's time, we expect to have worked with aprox. 400 people, again including both expert users and those who develop solutions. 

In 5 years, we hope to have products we have developed be on the retail market and available to any and everyone that needs them. This is will raise the number of people that our work affects to the tens of thousands. The more products hit the market, the more people we will serve. 

The Milestone Labs model is a new approach to creating solutions that answer unmet needs. We view ourselves as an incubator of ideas that will continue to grow exponentially. As we develop more and more products and have them reach the market, our impact will continue to expand helping us to fulfill our goal of social innovation with sustainable impact. As our business grows, we hope to take on other social areas and apply our methodology to affect change in those spaces as well. Currently, our work focuses on unmet needs facing populations of people living with disabilities and elderly populations, helping them to become more independent and create inclusive solutions that are scalable. Our next area of work may be in environmental issues, agriculture in developing countries or work with refugee populations. 

As time goes on, our work expands, and our influence grows, we vow to stay true to our 2 core principles: 1. User-centered approaches that always put the user and their needs first; 2. addressing unmet social needs - defying expectations and creating solutions for populations that the market has left behind. 

With Milestone, we have created a new model that turns traditional product development on its head. It is always a challenge to be the first and we are feeling those difficulties today as we work hard to grow our business. 

Some clear financial barriers in our way are that we are a hard sell to traditional investors (even impact investors). As we do not have a set, clear product, but rather a model and a method, its been very difficult to convince investors to take a chance on us. 

Culturally, we need to constantly talk to people and convince them of the innovative nature and effectiveness of our model, this involves many conversations and dubious looks along with a near-constant push to "prove it". This often puts us in a "chicken/egg" conundrum (how can we prove it, if we aren't given the opportunities/resources to do so and how can we get those resources if we haven't proven it yet?) 

We have clear plans to overcome each one of those barriers. 

Financial: 

We have been fortunate to secure a $100K angel investment from a private "friends and family" investor who truly believes in us and our model. This has been invaluable in allowing us to stay afloat as we grow our business. Additionally, we have decided to bootstrap and have created a revenue-generating fee-for-service model, where we work with corporations, academic institutions and other entities on curricula, workshops, events and seminars where we bring individuals together with different expert users and facilitate engagements where they learn how to define and distill needs, come up with early stage prototypes, foster empathy and learn more about creating inclusive solutions. We have already started generating revenue from this work and it's projected to continue to grow and remain a major source of income for our company. 

Culturally, its all about conversations, speaking out and writing. We continue to actively promote our model and work to stay patient as we develop our company. Once we finally "complete the first cycle" we will have all that we need to prove that we are on to something really special and we'll be able to show that our model works. Until then, we will keep fighting the good fight and pursuing our goals of social innovation with sustainable and scalable impact. 

n/a

2 Full time staff

5 part time staff

3 consultants 

Milestone Labs is pioneering a new approach to creating solutions to unmet needs. Our work relies on a multidisciplinary approach and therefore our team's skills are diverse and varied. Team members with technical skills (engineers, industrial designers) provide the core of our product development work and ensure that the products we create are the best fit for the challenges we are addressing. 

Additionally, our team is made up of community relations and partnership professionals who oversee the relationships with the expert user and their organizations. This side of the team manages our work with these users and their organizations with the upmost sensitivity and professionalism. They make sure everyone involved in our work is included and connected to the experience. 

Milestone's co-founders have a decade each of experience in the social innovation/impact space. Both have seen many projects and organizations with incredibly lofty goals fall flat. In the social innovation space, so much time and money goes into grand claims "changing the world..." "moving the needle..." and then nothing happens. With this in mind, we have set Milestone up to succeed and focus on small incremental change  with exponential growth - social innovation with sustainable impact. 

Academia:

• The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign School of Business and School of Art & Design  - Make for change course, helping business and design students create solutions for disabled athletes on campus
• Cornell Tech - course matching Masters students with residents of the Roosevelt Island Senior Center to work together and learn digital fabrication technologies and create solutions to the seniors's challenges
• Pratt University - course with Masters Industrial Design Students bringing them together with patients and staff of Blythedale Children's Hospital to create solutions to different challenges raised by the hospital community 

Medical/Community Organizations 

• Blythedale Children's Hospital  - see above
• Beit Issie Shapiro - need partner in Israel, providing with challenges, beta testing site, and advisory consulting 
• Alyn Children's Hospital -  need partner in Israel, providing with challenges, beta testing site, and advisory consulting 
• Roosevelt Island Seniors Center - see above
• Cornell Weill Hospital & Medical School - Needs partner on hackathon facilitation 

Corporations: 

• Ultimaker - partner on all 3D printing needs for social innovation engagements enable us to create prototypes of solutions. 
• Autodesk - partner on all CAD software needs 
• Philips Israel - partner on social innovation engagement - connecting Philips employees with local special needs schools in the Israeli city of Haifa. 

Milestone Labs has a dual-revenue business model and a unique triple impact model. 

Our social innovation work with universities, corporations, governments, which includes courses, workshops, events, and consulting sessions around solving unmet social needs is done in a fee for service model. We are currently generating revenue from this work and will continue to do so. 

We will hold equity in any and all products are developed through our cycles and will generate income from them. 

Our triple impact model effects 3 distinct groups: 

1. Expert Users who provide us with needs to be solved. For these users, their voices are heard and they are able to share their challenges and play key role in creating inclusive solutions. 

2. Participants in our social innovation activities are able to work directly with expert users and create solutions to their challenges. They gain a new sense of empathy, expand their horizons and learn to develop for unmet needs. 

3. The third group impacted by our work are the future consumers of our products. As we are only identifying unmet social needs with no existi

Milestone Labs is already generating revenue from our services. We offer courses, workshops, makeathons, and seminars as part of our methodology. These activities play a key role in our product development process and in bringing technology experts together with the 'expert' users who live with needs. 

In addition to revenue generation, we will raise investment to develop our prototypes into full market-ready products. Milestone will retain some percentage of equity iMiln all products that emerge from our cycles. This will create growing revenue for our company and will sustain our growth. As we continue to grow, we will produce more products which will increase our revenue. 

We at Milestone Labs believe that joining the Solve community will help us overcome the barrier of connecting the dots in our unique model. As we advance in our work, we believe that we will benefit from the community's insight, diverse experience and connections. Milestone takes a different approach than most in how we plan to effect change and as we grow and continue developing, the minds, mentorship and the experience of the Solve and MIT communities will give us relevant feedback and help us grow our businesses in the most sustainable fashion; allowing us to impact the lives of as many people as possible. 

n/a

We are happy to partner with leading companies that can help us get our solutions out to as many users as possible. Companies such as (and including): J&J, Proctor and Gamble, Stryker and more will help us with distribution of our products. We also are looking to partner with companies on their CSR to help them make more of a lasting impact; for example, companies such as; Nike, Lego, Publicis, Ikea and more. 

In addition leading global entities and universities will help us spread our model and work. We are actively looking to partner with the UN, UNICEF, the Red Cross and more. 

On the academic front, we want to continue to expand our partnerships with universities and would be thrilled to connect with MIT, the Stanford University D-School and other leaders in the social innovation space. 

n/a

A core element of Milestone Labs is our education work. We believe that by recreating STEM curriculum to allow students to address unmet needs of real people from their communities that they meet, they gain a new understanding of the importance of the STEM skills and how to apply them. By taking a multidisciplinary approach to our educational work, we allow students to engage in their community, get to know underprivileged populations and help solve their challenges while still completing a STEM curriculum. 

If selected for the GM Prize, we will expand our education work and continue to write new curricula, expanding the subject areas we teach and pursuing our model of social innovation through education. 

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a