Design Thinking for Innovation – Final Assignment:

Reflection: “Learning Launch for carsharing in medium sized cities”

Challenge and Selection

Working in the marketing department of a major German car manufacturer, we wanted to explore the

possibilities of an app based carsharing concept in medium sized German cities (100,000 – 250,000

inhabitants). In this concept, users can easily book a car via smartphone and drive around within the city limits.

It is free-floating, which means when the journey is over, users can park the car anywhere within the city limit.

They do not need to bring the car to stations. This carsharing concept already works in big cities. Our question:

“Can this type of carsharing be successful in smaller cities?” All data from previous research was useless,

because the test persons could answer the questions using a likert scale from 1 (disagree) to 5 (agree). Even

though we had many participants who answered our questionnaire, we only received the mean/average values

to each question with a huge deviation, making it impossible to draw any conclusions out of this data. The

individual reasons for or against carsharing are just too many. To overcome this, we tried to use LEARNING

LAUNCH to gather better insights and a broad understanding of individual mobility, which may vary a lot from

crowded cities with over 1 million inhabitants.

Application

In the first step we only concentrated on the target group of younger people between 18 and 25 who already

owned a car – maybe one day they will not need to own a car anymore and only use carsharing instead. To find

out we conducted interviews, but also looked at their behavior in terms of transportation in their everyday life.

For one month they wrote down every trip they have done with their car. We even joined them in their rides

from time to time. This was a bit of an experiment each time with the question in mind: “Could this trip be done

using carsharing? And how much more complicated would it be?” To organize our research, we used the

LEARNING LAUNCH PROCESS. At first we created a hypothesis: “Our carsharing concept is a better alternative

for young people than owning a car in a medium sized city.” Important questions to us were: Can we create

value to this target group by offering carsharing? Can we execute our concept of carsharing in a medium sized

city, which is different to a large city in terms of transportation? Is it dependable and can we scale it? To make

sure we asked the right questions, we had a diversed team: Team members living in a city, in a small town and

rural areas. But also team members who come to work by bike, by train, and by car. We tried to make sure we

had a very broad approach when formulating open questions we asked the target group in our interviewes.

Insight & Approach

From these interviews with young car owners, but also by observing, we gained valuable insights in their

behavior. Many of them grew up in rural areas around this city, got a car when they were 18 years old and then

moved to the city nearby for University. Amongst many insights that this study revealed to us, this was the

most interesting one if you compare big cities (1 million inhabitants) with medium sized cities (100,000 –

250,000): People from all over the country (or even the world) move to large cities for jobs or to go to

university. They find new activites for their free time inside the city and many young people find public

transport sufficient – carsharing is just one means of additional transportation to them. But medium sized cities

do not attract people from all over the country. Very often it is the young people living in the villages around

the city who move to the nearest city for their first job or education. They still have friend and family in the

rural area outside of the city, and sometimes they are even still in the same sports club from their youth. Their

worries about carsharing was not only getting around WITHIN the city, but OUTSIDE of the city – which is not

an option for our carsharing model and would bring a lot of uncertainty to this target group. They depend on

the availability of a car. Having this valuable insight, we decided to not go any further with this idea, as too few

people in this important target group would actually use carsharing in the medium sized city: If they already

own a car, chances are they need to be mobile outside the city limits. The bottom line is we had to disconfirm

the hypothesis: “Our carsharing concept is a better a better alternative for young people than owning a car in a

medium sized city.”

We now have two options: Either “trash” the idea completely – or use this insight to modify our carsharing

concept, so that it really is an alternative for people who sometimes leave the city limit.

