Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am an Engineering student and I minor in Entrepreneurship. As I’ve taken several classes

focusing on entrepreneurship, I’ve had to deal with the classic idea generation process and

tools many times. I´ve had to write a lot of business plans, to draw or elaborate many

prototypes and to write some journey maps. The interesting thing about these processes is

that in none of them we’ve come to a real-life project and it never passes the step of the

hypothetical calculations, statements and results. Clearly, this is demotivating and, as it is

said by one of the guests invited by Ehab, ends up being a waste of time and

resources. Having this in mind, this semester I am taking another course about

entrepreneurship but, this time, it is different. In fact, it aims to give us the opportunity to

change our experiences from previous courses, by giving us a financial support in order to

help us build and develop our business ideas –among other initiatives held by the professors.

Luckily, I started taking this course at the same time I started learning about design thinking,

and it helped me see an immense opportunity of using many of the tools this course gave us.

Selection

As I said before, I want to combine the things I learnt during this course with the project I

am undertaking for my entrepreneurship course. I intend using almost every tool we learnt

because, as Ehab and her guests taught us, they all have a wide range of

applications and their impact on organizations is huge. Nevertheless, this reflection will be

centered on the use of the learning launch tool. As I have told you before, I have written some

business plans for the projects I have done and, as the guest I mentioned before told us, they

are characterized by having many assumptions for financial projections and they aren’t the

best approach because, when your assumptions don’t reflect reality, you have to start pivoting

and changing some of them, which ends up taking a lot of time and resources from you.

Instead, learning launches let you place small bets in the marketplace and help you answer

questions without compromising too much. Keeping this in mind, I chose to use learning

launches for my project this semester and I will write my reflection about this.

Application

My story about applying the learning launch tool is interesting because it is currently

happening. For this week’s class, my professor asked us (my group and me), to think about

everyday problems and the way we could solve them in order to develop a business idea

around it. My group wanted that every student proposed two or three ideas so that the day

before the class we could vote and decide on which idea we would work. Instead of doing

this, I told them that we could do a different process that would help us get to a better

understanding of the question we are going to work on and of the ways we could solve the

problem we would choose. Therefore, I explained them a bit about the design thinking way

of proceeding and facing problems and I explained them particularly the learning launch

notion. I told them we needed to start by choosing a problem related with something

customers want, something we can do and something sustained by the economics and by the

budget our University gave us because, as you may know, the intersection of these three

conditions is the Wow Zone. Consequently, I asked my group to pick ideas directed to a

specific group of customers, who have a specific need, which is met by the idea they proposed

and to try to establish a proposal being better than current alternatives. When we met, each

one presented their ideas (in the structure of napkin pitches) and we chose together one of

the problems we proposed. Now, before making the fast and cheap experiments directly in

the marketplace, we are staying in the question for a moment, trying to understand it and

searching for higher ground, as we use design thinking as a collaboration tool and taking

advantage of the fact that each one of us studies a different career.

Insight & Approach

Through the use of the learning launch tool and the process it involves, our group got to

examine each of the ideas we proposed and choose the best one: an idea that can become a

real-life project and that will be destined to solve the customers’ needs, from an empathetic

point of view. Moreover, it helped us face the situation from a different point of view, using

new tools and being a lot more creative.

The most important insight I gained from applying this tool and, mostly, from the whole

course is that it really opened my mind. When you are an engineer, without noticing it, you

can get used to see things from a statistic and mathematical point of view, leaving apart things

like creativity and flexibility and you tend to become like the personage Ehab

told us about in one of our sessions. This new year I have set one of my goals to be less

worried about uncertainty and to believe that if you put effort in what you do and have your

objectives clear, life will open the doors for you to get where you want to be. Therefore, I am

thrilled to keep directing my mind towards a growth mindset and I look forward to using the

other tools this course gave us and to keep learning with the other courses this specialization

offers!

For next time, I would try to use another of the tools proposed because when you get to apply

the concepts you saw in class to a problem of yours, you really see its applications and the

advantages its use gives you. Design thinking is more than a set of tools and methodologies

for you to face problems. It’s a different way of thinking and proceeding and it helps you

become a better person and a better professional, no matter your field of application.

References

Tena Ehab, her guests and the University of Virginia, Design Thinking for Innovation.

Available at Coursera.

