Reflection-Learning Launch

Challenge

I am the Director of an Agro-based company in Kolkata,India.Kolkata is situated in West  Bengal, in India which is the hub for manufacturing rice.The by-product of rice is rice-husk and  I have an idea to prepare nano-cellulose out of the rice-husk in order to act as a cheaper and  steadier alternative to plastic as a raw material.Plastic is particularly being used in packaging  and hence in order to use nano-cellulose for preparing the package of products,it is really  essential to check for its viability and response.

Nano-Cellulose even though widely used in China is a relatively newer concept in India.It  would definitely be a challenge to establish it as a substitute for plastic and to verify the  consumer response for the same.

Selection

I have chosen the “Learning Launch” tool of Design Thinking for the purpose of the evaluation  of my challenge.Learning Launch essentially refers to the application of an idea or a concept  in an actual marketplace for a smaller sample of people to check for its effectiveness and get  the feedback from the target audience.I found this tool of Design Thinking to be pretty  attractive as it helps us to get a real-life feedback for the idea before hand and is in alignment  with the mantra of-“Fail early to Succeed for the rest of your life.”

Application

I have applied Learning Launch, by initially getting a set of samples that could be used as a  package out of Nano-Cellulose.Additionally, these samples were then presented to the  potential consumers, which were the brands which were the brands that could utilise nano- cellulose as the package of their products.I decided to target smaller brands as it would be  easier to get them to adopt Nano-Cellulose as a packaging alternative to plastic.Moreover,  since these small brands are not very quality-conscious about the packaging, they can easily  adopt it.Hence, the samples were provided to these brand owners and they used it for  packaging their products and for supplying them in order to evaluate the quality,strength and  resistance of the packaging.

Insights

The Learning Launch tool proved to be quite beneficial for us as it helped us to look at various  aspects of our idea which we had not evaluated until the idea had been launched to be tested  by the potential customers.For example, the customers were not very satisfied with the  resistance of the Nano-Cellulose Packaging,which is something that we learnt through the  Learning Launch Tool,and we shall work on improving the resistance by adding certain  chemicals.

Approach

The next time, when I would implement the Learning Launch Tool, I would like to implement  it in the initial phases of Idea/Product Development itself as it would help me in making the  necessary modifications in the Idea/Product simultaneously.This time, I chose to implement  the Learning Launch tool after completely developing the product and hence it would be a bit  more challenging to make modifications in it.

