User:Michaelm525/sandbox

Introduction
Prepr is a non-profit educational organization created in 2011 by co-founder and Chief Visioneer Salar Chagpar with the goal of exploring cross sections between open innovation and open education. The Organization is a registered non-profit with registered offices in the United States and Canada.

History
Salar Chagpar is an experienced change catalyst and business growth engineer with over 10 years of experience. He has advised 140+ organizations in the areas of business process improvement and strategic planning. Passionate about building the global innovation landscape, Salar co-founded Prepr, a registered charity and global network of labs dedicated towards solving challenges through collaboration.

Prepr started in 2011, exploring the cross sections between open innovation and open education. In 2012, after a year of field research, Prepr launched the first product, a social network for test preparation and certifications such as PMP, NCLEX, CISSP as well as access to open educational resources.

In 2013, Prepr began running and co-hosting more than a dozen innovation challenges and hackathons, engagement would be high but student and employee continuation of a project after pitch would be less than 5%. Additionally, after evaluating the statistics from the high levels of attrition for those taking a massive open online course, as well as the market shift in investments in Education Technology (EdTech), they realized a gap. A lack of systematic process to guide the journey of solving a problem including building a team, creating a solution and testing it in the market in 90 days or less in order to expedite the journey of learning loops for continuous improvement and growth mindset development through failure normalization, PIE was born.

The organization first debuted at the MIT Tech Fair in Boston on January 31, 2011 - ultimately a part of President Obama’s “Startup America Partnership” program. In the following year along with extensive user research, the first application was built - a social network for education with a focus on test preparation and certification such as PMP, NCLEX, CISSP as well as access to open education resources.