Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge and Selection

Two months ago, I decided to become an entrepreneur. Some partners and I  started a project which became a technology start-up. We studied Mechatronics  Engineering and love advanced technology, therefore, we decided to provide  artificial intelligence solutions as the main services/products in the company.

This sounded great, however, the real world requires a problem to be solved and  people who are willing to buy whatever we sell. Then, we decided to do some  research and found how other countries used tools based on this technology in  order to solve a large amount of problems, from medical diagnosis to advanced  targeted advertising.

What we are aiming is to have a service oriented to applied data science and  another one for devices and machines that can help many kinds of industries to  perform really specialized tasks. Nevertheless, despite of the boom that data  science and artificial intelligence has in developed nations, in my, people don’t  seem to like applying that kind of technology, maybe because they are not aware  of it and think they do not need it in their business.

In order to identify if our ideas would succeed and if people have the needs that  we are assuming, we decided to do a small learning launch, not providing the  real service but trying to sell the idea and our services to some companies. This  tool would help us in order to test our hypothesis and fail fast if needed.

Application and Insight

We made an appointment with a medium size manufacturing company that sells  rubber products, asking for their time and help in order to know more about their  problems and needs. We went to the factory and received a complete tour,  including a detailed explanation of their processes and main problems. After the  tour, we presented our ideas to some executives, including the chief officer. Later,  they told us some feedback that allowed us to find all the insights that we needed.

What we found from the point of view of the company’s needs was that there are  many problems related to handmade tasks which required a lot of precision and  are the bottleneck of some of the processes. This kind of trouble can be attacked  using devices with artificial intelligence embedded. By the other hand, they are  not digitalized at all and there is plenty of data that can be collected and used  for data analysis, so that they are able to have a better control and predict many  useful variables in order to increase productivity.

What we noticed with the executives was some rejection when we talked about  technology, they were interested in increasing the efficiency and knew that data  is really important, but they think that artificial intelligence and data science  can’t solve their problems and it sounds more like science fiction.

All this knowledge made us confirm that there is some rejection to A.I. Sadly, we  realized that this repulsion can be bigger than we thought, even though  administrative people are aware of what is important in order to increase  productivity. However, we discovered that there are many areas of opportunity  where our solutions can be applied.

Approach

This learning launch helped me to understand more about the market and its  needs, it also saved time and provided me the insights needed to adapt my ideas.  Next time I will use a Journey mapping to understand more about the specific  problems that we saw last time.

