Design Thinking for Innovation – Assignment Two

By Byron Morton

Challenge

As a language travel agency, we knew that our product offering was too wide.  We offered multiple  partners in numerous locations. This caused inefficiencies in three main areas; administration,  commission and sales education. Administration was made difficult as each partner has its own  accounting and booking processes, our power to negotiate commissions was weakened as bookings  were widely distributed and our education of the sales staff was lengthy and complicated as they  were required to visit and learn about so many schools. We proposed too that customers were also  overwhelmed with so many choices.

The obvious solution was to slim down the portfolio, but where and how? So we challenged our  stakeholder group to define who we should work with.

Selection

Collective mind mapping presented many benefits for this exercise.  It allowed us to bring together,  improve relationships and gain ideas from sales people, product managers, administrative staff and  key clients. Partners were not invited as they had the potential to lose out from this process and  were therefore unlikely to prove objective.

Application

Twelve carefully selected stakeholders were invited for a two-hour afternoon session. We spread  relevant information around our largest meeting room. This included sales volumes and sales  revenues by city, country, school, course level and language. We included an overview of our  company vision, mission and objectives and also included our product brochures, but also those of  our competitors and summaries of analysis we had undertaken on their market positioning,  marketing and sales. We included information on our partner schools, including locations,  differentiating features, fees and commissions. Finally, we also included information provided by the  industry governing body on current and future booking trends.

Participants were invited to pick out the important elements from all this information in a 45 minute  session, noting down interesting points on sticky notes. They then had ten minutes to organise their  sticky notes and thoughts before sharing their inputs in two groups of six. Inputs from all  participants were grouped during this process and then once again reviewed by the group to gain  insights.

Insight

Our identified insights included:

•  A few strong partner recommendations displays knowledge, clarity and confidence to the  consumer

•  Perceived value is more important than cost

•  Partners of low financial value can be important in rounding out a portfolio and offering  solutions to customers in unique and sought-after locations

•  Value can also be created by offering unique solutions rather than obvious ones

•  Sales staff sell the products that excite them, we need to really excite them about our core  products if we are to limit what they can sell.

Approach

In future, I would mix the groups at the point where they were asked to review their whole groups  inputs.  My hope is, that this would create more ideas as this element was did not work so well in  our practice as participants had already felt like they had done this when explaining their own  insights to the group.  Refreshing of the groups would have required members of the original group  to better explain the input overview they had created and may have lead to more ideas.

