08 December 2016 – pvc

Design Thinking - Assignment

Learning Launch

1. Challenge & selection

Beginning of 2015, with some colleagues from various teams, we were considering to  participate to an internal innovation contest. We work in an asset management company,  who aims at helping clients to harness the power of investing to meet their financial goals.  We were under the impression that the company could do better at helping our clients to  understand financial markets, in order for them to take better decisions. Hence our idea of  building and launching a MOOC, like this one, on Asset Management. We were convinced of  the potential of such format to contribute to a better client education.

A few of us had already followed such online courses with the impression that the format  was ideal for many reasons. Following additional meetings and discussions with employees  from 2 MOOC providers, one being Coursera, we decided to embark in the adventure,  persuaded that we knew enough to prepare a case. But we soon faced various issues,  realising that we had in fact not enough data and feedbacks to structure rationally this  project. Facing limited means and time, we had to find an efficient way to validate our  thoughts, both from a time and cost perspective.

The only free and quick solution we found was to check all our hypothesises through  structured meetings with small & diverse groups of people, from different horizons, both  internal and external. The target was to test our ideas in order to have them validated or  refined until we reach a good level of comfort and credibility, before submitting our project  to the internal contest. Without knowing it at this time, we had in fact decided to enter into  a learning launch process. I am glad to learn that what we were about to do was in fact a  proven valid tool.

2. Application

The scope of our clients is really large, from big global companies or central banks to  individual clients served through intermediaries. As such, the level of sophistication and  knowledge of our counterparts could vary a lot. We had to find the right balanced to ensure  the content offered was both accessible but serious and technical, with the required level of  pedagogy. For that reasons, we decided to select a number of people from different  backgrounds, internal or external, and for internals, colleagues in contact through various  channels with different types of clients. We had also in mind that some of our colleagues are  also individual clients of our company.

With our small team, some only observing, we presented to each group our idea, the  hypothesis behind it, and some visualization (through power points slides) of what it could

08 December 2016 – pvc

look like, with the objective of getting their reaction and feedback on what was presented. It  took us a few weeks to go through the whole process, meeting more than once each group  in order to adjust and retest the idea until we get something robust, and far more  elaborated than our initial thoughts.

3. Insight gained

As mentioned, we collected lots of insights, some confirming hypothesises, some other  leading us to rework the project, among which we can retained 3 absolutely crucial ones  which forced us to revise the entire offer. Firstly, as a corporate, there was a very high risk  that the content produced, though of quality, could be disqualified as pure marketing,  leading to destroy our credibility. This led us to consider a partnership with a top university  who would be fully in charge of the most academic content. Secondly, many people insisted  on the fact that for clients, pure theory and financial abstraction would be useless if not also  put into the context of what an asset manager does with it. The third one was about the  targeted audience. Initially, the project was about client education only. But throughout the  discussions, we realised that at least two other categories could be interested, colleagues  and potential future employees. Colleagues not directly working in the financial markets  expressed their own need to better understand the activity of an asset manager, from back- office or IT functions to sales people. And candidates or future employees could also benefit  greatly from understanding how we work, who we are and what we do. This had a large  influence on the educational content itself. This “Learning Launch” has had an additional  great interest. Some of the people interviewed spontaneously offered to contribute to  design the course and to participate to the video shooting, which led this project into a real  transversal project at the company level. All that contributed to an internal innovation  award, followed by a new course launched on COursera in partnership with HEC Paris called  Investment Management in an Evolving and Volatile World.

4. Approach

One of the lessons gained is that the tools supporting the design thinking process are not  only great at the beginning of the process, but also throughout it, with caution though. And  this was a second lesson. We used the same learning launch process twice, the second time  to structure the course content itself. This second try was not a success, mostly because it  was not the right tool this time. We were literally flowed with suggestions and it took us  quite a lot of time to hierarchize the comments and to structure it into chapters. I now  understand why, having discovered the “mind mapping system”. We learnt it the hard way!

