DEBORAH ESTRIN: Product challenges are an opportunity for companies, organizations, foundations, government agencies
to pose challenges for students. And the students work on them in mixed groups, mixed as in technical and non-technical. And they take the original prompt that is posed by the challenge and then they go through what most start-ups and creative teams do, which is to take that prompt but then turn it into something that can be created as a real product.

ANNA SCHILLER: The challenge that  the Cornell students were tasked with was how to make the airport experience a seamless, frictionless one. In particular for special needs  customers, disabilities, families,  unaccompanied minors, et cetera.

DEREK BROWN: Addepar's company challenge that we gave to Cornell Tech was determining the credit-worthiness of fixed income securities.

NICK PANAMA: The challenge that we gave the team was  what if we could use technology to create new, more personalized relationships between fans and entertainers.

DAN HUTTENLOCHER: The product challenges are deliberately things that are much broader than please build this, please do that. They're challenges that  provoke a team of people to think about what kind  of thing could or should be built in order to address that challenge.

SCHILLER: Being able to be with those students, understand and sort of look at things with a fresh set of eyes and start to ask questions about why we do the things we do has been very valuable and surprising even for me, who's been there for a number of years.

BROWN: The team's phenomenal. Their solution, like caught me off guard as far as how good it was and the direction that they were taking. They, very early on, took a approach that was drastically different than A. What I expected and  B. What was actually on the market. So it was pleasantly surprising.

PANAMA: Just in the course of the last couple months, working with them, we've been inspired to see how they're learning the product development process, and how to build stuff quickly, and iterate, and really understand, in some cases, a completely new market from scratch.

HUTTENLOCHER: That process of going from a broad-based challenge to envisioning what might actually address that challenge to then building and testing it is something that you rarely get the experience of doing in your life much less in an educational setting.