Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge & Selection

As part of a student organization I ran a project to familiarize students of our university to the topic  of social entrepreneurship. As it was a group effort I will generally speak of “us” and “we”. We  decided to establish a series of workshops where participating students would be challenged to  explore areas of problems, come up with possible solutions, test those solutions and finally create a  business model that contributes to the solution of their chosen problem as well as sustain itself  (basically they would use the design thinking process as well). After we have outlined this broad  concept as well as several ideas and content for the workshops, we wanted to receive feedback if  our ideas create value for them. For this reason, we decided to conduct a pilot workshop – which in  this course was described as a learning launch. In other words, we would run one workshop with a  small group of invited students (we selected them according to persona profiles), including the  elements we wanted feedback on.

Tool Application

The first step towards our learning launch was to come up with the elements we wanted to include  in this pilot workshop. Some members had already participated in similar workshops, so we included  mostly elements we had not experienced ourselves before as well as the elements we believed  would work differently with our group of participants. From all this elements we designed a three  hour long workshop for roughly 8 to 12 participants. It turned out that we would focus on generating  business ideas on a set of given problems. Elements would be different brain storming techniques  (triggering diverging thinking) as well as frameworks to evaluate those ideas afterwards (triggering  converging thinking).

A second step was to choose our participants. For this we used a set of personas we have come up  and used in an earlier stage of our project. Already approaching potential participants was part of  the experiment and we would document their behaviour or responding and trying to find out why  they rejected to participate or why they were willing to participate. We already could use this  information to improve our personas and get a first idea how we have to communicate if we would  scale up the project after the learning start.

The third step finally was the execution of the workshop. The team would split tasks: While half of us  would be moderating and facilitating the workshop, the others would observe and document what’s  happening. After the workshop was finished, we sent out a survey to all the participants to collect  further data.

Insight

This above described learning launch was two things for us: a lot of fun and extremely useful. It was  very helpful for us to see with our own eyes what ideas worked, what inspired but also what created  confusion and disengagement. In retrospect, we realized that with our intuitive distinction between  workshop activities we already knew and the ones we only read about in secondary sources was  basically a distinction between existing data and new data, and the learning launch helped us to  validate these concepts. Through the learning launch we also learnt things we were not expecting.  For example what kind of food/snacks they wanted to have. Generally the most valuable learnings  came from observations. For example one observation was, that groups voluntarily decided to skip  some of the breaks because they were so involved in their work, which served as very good feedback

for that task, while on other activities we could observe that groups were always finished before  time and not having a high-quality result.

Approach

We have been quite content with our first learning launch. It was definitely the right tool at that  point in time. But there were a couple of things we could do better the next time. One possibility  would be to follow the learning launch process outlined by Bine in one of the video more  stringently and applying a more structured approach compared to our rather intuitive approach. This  would include to design more specific tests for each element/activity in our workshop, rather than  just do the workshop and observe what happens. This would have helped us to make sure that we  receive the exact data we needed.

