Dough –
Stretch your potential
‘Dough’ is a digital peer to peer discovery app aimed at helping young people better understand themselves and others in the world of work.
We want to help to inspire young people that are trying to decide what they want to be in the future. The service will help young people imagine the future possibilities of work by showing them authentic and user generated videos of young professionals working.
MA2 – Team 6
Alison Rosam
Donglin Kim
Karen Rozenbaum

WHAT?
Tell us what the concept is about. What are you designing? What are the key benefits?
Dough uses short videos created by young professionals to help inspire young people about the future possibilities of work by showing them content that is relevant, stimulating and informative, such as subtle details like the work environment, the team (that job descriptions don’t convey).
Unlike existing career services that require young people to have a certain level of understanding about themselves and often narrow down choices. ‘Dough’ intentionally opens up possibilities by not requesting any information about the user; aside from their name, age and email address at the point of sign-up. Therefore the videos that are shown to the young people are randomly selected, in an attempt to stimulate imagination and open up possibilities. And because the service is interactive, when a young person reacts to a video it begins to learn about the user.
The output of the service is presenting these learnings in a meaningful way so that the user can begin to understand what might be important to them and how they might like to work in the future. It is not a matching service and it does not provide any advice or recommendations. It is
We believe that ‘Dough’ has the potential to change the way that both young people and schools currently approach the question of ‘what do I want to be in the future?’. Changing the first step from ‘choosing a career’, to replacing it with ‘understanding myself better.’
WHY?
Tell us some of the key findings of your background research and what is the problem you are trying to address.
From the research about the future of
The way we are learning is changing as
During our primary
We found out that
We then ran a workshop with high-school students to understand the details of that decision-making process and the main insights that we identified were: Young people are struggling to envision what
With these key insights in mind, we identified a clear opportunity where we could open up possibilities about the future of work. We want to empower
WHO?
Tell us something about your users and key stakeholders involved.
The other side of the service relies on professionals to upload and share their videos and therefore we needed to understand if they had
Finally, in order to reach a greater number of entrepreneurs and receive their support, we have identified accelerators and incubators as the most effective intermediary. We validated that hypothesis with Founders
WHEN?
Give us an idea of the future scenario where your project will be working.
We believe that Dough can complement existing services and is best placed to be used in the early stages when exploring what young people want to be.
Current services within this space often narrow down choices, because they very much focus on the ‘now’ both in relation to what young people know about themselves as well as the job market, with little or no consideration about how the world of work is changing.
Our service has a space to open up future possibilities. It could be used during this whole decision-making process in several subsequent moments, such as deciding whether to stay at school, go to college or apply for vocational training to choosing A-Level subjects and making the decision of going to university or getting a job.
WHERE?
Tell us if you have thought of a specific location where to prototype.
Our MVP will focus on young people between the ages of 16 to 18 from a specific school. We could potentially work with the school that we worked with during the project or there might be the potential to connect with Telefonica’s Open Future Community or the (MOOCs) that they are currently working with.
In terms of the accelerator and
HOW?
Give us an idea of your strategy, your process, your prototyping plan and the next steps.
MVP – NEXT 6 MONTHS:
As a
In order to do that, we will need Telefonica Alpha’s support to develop the Data Science behind the service, particularly the data labels/ categories we have created that entrepreneurs will need in order to label and upload the videos. We will also need to work with a developer to deliver the actual ‘live prototype’ for us to test with young people.
Besides these professionals, we estimate that
6 MONTH ONWARDS:
For the next phase of the
In terms of technology, we will explore moving to a more sophisticated model of machine learning by using historical data, demographics and learnings from previous users of the service to map out and predict how someone will behave so that we can personalise the selection of videos sooner.
SCALABILITY:
We believe that ‘Dough’ has the potential to change the way that both young people and schools currently approach the question of ‘what do I want to be in the future?’. Changing the first step from ‘choosing a career’, to replacing it with ‘understanding myself better.’
We are confident that ‘Dough’ has great scalability and has the potential to be launched across several countries that Telefonica serves. Because the challenge of finding out what you want to be and linking it with the future of work is universal.