DESIGN THINKING FINAL ASIGMENT

Rolando Martinez

1.    CHALLENGE     It all started as a joke. My wife and I are Latinos living in the US. She is an English teacher,  and I am a writer. We wanted to brainstorm about potential business ideas that could be  successful during quarantine times and that we could execute working from home.  We thought of online Spanish language classes for English-speaking Americans.  We wanted to brainstorm about potential business models, the main actors, and processes  needed, the flows of information and money among them, as well as the complexity level.   Ultimately, we wanted to evaluate if this type of business was something that we could  handle.    2.    SELECTION    We chose the Visualization Tool, as explained in Week 1 of the Design Thinking for  Innovation by Angela Myer. We thought that it would be the best tool to gauge the  complexity levels and interconnect the different processes and information/money/content  flows. By visualizing the processes and relationships, we could also be able to think of  potential business model alternatives.    3.    APPLICATION  We brainstormed the main topics and items that we should contemplate, from pricing to  type of students and their goals, using a black Sharpie and a white paper. While we were  brainstorming, I unconsciously tended just to write a list of words floating on the board (See  Board 1). It was when we started to interconnect them with arrows and use different colors  when we broke our verbal thinking process and realized that we had two new business  models and two potential targets.    Board 1:

4.    INSIGHT    Just when we were painting the money flows (in pink color in Board 2), we realize that  companies could be paying for individuals' fee. So, we realized that we could have  companies, not individuals, as the primary target market. That led us to think that the  classes' content would be quite different depending on the target.  Another learning popped up when we were painting the teaching material and manuals and  their relationship with the brand and the teachers. What if we just sell the teaching  materials, the courses, and not real teachers' time?  That was the a-ha moment: we were reproducing the business model that we were familiar  with from previous experiences, that is, selling real teachers' time via Skype in one-on-one  classes. But we had uncovered different new alternatives, like selling pre-recorded teaching  classes to companies. The contents could be customized per industry, like “Spanish for  Retailers” o “Spanish for the Hospitality Industry”. We felt that this last option could be  more manageable for us and that we could do the entire process, from shooting the classes  to selling them to companies, from home.    Board 2:

5.    APPROACH    After the exercise, we realized that, as a writer and a teacher, we were more comfortable  writing words than drawing figures and images. Neither of us is good at drawing. But by not  getting out of our comfort zone, we were not able to escape from our verbal thinking mode.  It took us arrows and three colors to do it.

We decided that a better approach for next time will be Visualizing by making collages from  magazine clippings. That would liberate us from the pressure of drawing, and we could also  get inspiration from the pictures selected.  After understanding that the new business idea could work for us, we will do a proper full-  Design Thinking process, from the "What is" stage to the "What Works" stage.

