Journey North

Journey North was Cognito Foundation’s response to a piece of the Northern Economic Plan: give high school students in Northern Adelaide a way into entrepreneurship. We set out to build an online tool that mapped the South Australian ecosystem (training programs, scholarships, workspaces, microfinance, community groups, incubators) and pointed each student at the next opportunity that actually fit where they were.

The pieces already existed. TAFE programs, university initiatives, libraries, microfinance, accelerators, community groups, government schemes. The problem was that none of it was discoverable from inside a high school. A student leaving school had no single view of what was out there, no shared language for the stage they were at, and no obvious entry point into any of it. Providers did not talk to each other, students bumped into one or two by accident, and the long tail of opportunities went unseen.

On top of that, the audience was teenagers. Anything that read like a careers portal or a government services list was going to lose them before the first scroll.

The first body of work was service design, not screen design. As Cognito Foundation, we worked with local schools, businesses, and students to inventory every organisation, program, and resource in the region, then categorised them by what they offered (training, funding, physical space, community, support services, online resources) and by who they were for.

That work produced two artefacts the rest of the project leaned on. A timeline view that placed providers across the arc from latent entrepreneur to established entrepreneur, and a categorised ecosystem map that grouped them by service type. Both became reference material for the working group as much as inputs into the product.

The progression model. A five-stage path (Cub, Apprentice, Grunt, Boss, Chief) with an avatar at each stage. The naming was deliberately informal so a 15-year-old would recognise the journey instead of bouncing off it, and the stages gave students, schools, and providers a shared vocabulary for talking about where someone was and what to do next. That model carried more of the platform than any single feature.

Two-sided product. Students needed surfacing, but providers needed a way to keep their listings honest. The platform was scoped as two tightly linked surfaces: a student experience that matched people to opportunities, and a provider tool that let a non-technical staff member at a library or training provider add and manage their own opportunities without help.

Tagging that survived the long tail. Every opportunity carried two layers of metadata: opportunity type (Physical, Online, Support Services, Training, Community, Funding) and entrepreneur stage. That structure let the matching logic stay simple while keeping the long tail of niche providers reachable.

Workstreams ran in parallel rather than sequentially.

Student experience. A short profile questionnaire placed each student on the progression model, and the dashboard surfaced opportunities matched to their stage with a “Get in touch” path back to each provider.

Provider tools. Organisation profile, opportunity list, and add-opportunity flows designed for staff at libraries, training providers, and community groups. The forms were short, the tagging was opinionated, and the empty states pushed providers toward filling in the things that actually drove matching.

Prototyping and testing. Low and high-fidelity prototypes moved back to the Cognito working group at each stage. Concept testing with students focused on whether the progression model made sense, whether the surfaced opportunities felt relevant, and whether the language and avatars landed for the age group. Wireframes and process maps were approved by the working group, and the high-fidelity prototypes tested well with students before handover.

MVP build. Worked closely with the development team to bring the platform to life, making sure the progression model, the matching logic, and the provider tooling survived the build intact.

The wireframes, process maps, ecosystem model, and progression framework were approved by the Cognito working group. The high-fidelity prototypes tested successfully with students. The MVP was built. Before the platform reached public release, the Northern Economic Plan was defunded and the project was wound down. The artefacts (the ecosystem map, the progression model, the platform design) stayed behind as a clear vision for how entrepreneurship support could be made legible to young people in the region.

The useful lesson from this one was how much weight tone carries on educational products. The ecosystem and the opportunities were already there. What was missing was a way to talk about progression that a teenager would not bounce off. Cub through Chief did more work than any feature in the platform, because it gave students, schools, and providers a shared way to talk about where someone was and what to do next.

The other lesson was about working in service of a plan you do not control. The project did serious work and shipped real artefacts, then ended because the funding around it ended. That is part of the texture of public-good initiatives. The best you can do is make the thinking durable enough that the next attempt can pick it up.