Learning Launch

Challenges   I am one of the co-founders of a start-up which focuses on solving the needs and problems  associated with International students who are travelling to a foreign land for the first time.  My role in the start-up is to facilitate scientific methodologies that I have learnt from my  course (MSc. Management- Innovation & Entrepreneurship). Our first approach is to collect  or brainstorm the problems irrespective of its complexity and ability to solve them. Being a  student myself, I had faced most difficulties in getting adjusted to the new culture, legal  prerequisites and a completely new language. Likewise, other team members came up with  hundreds of other problems which they encountered as a foreign student. Advantage of  having an interdisciplinary team brings different perspectives to the table but the next  difficult task is to curate it.     Selection   As we decided to use a scientific approach in our start-up, we choose learning launch  method that helps us to test our ideas in the real marketplace and the flexibility it offers to  experiment and iterate constantly.     Application   In first learning launch, we focused more on adapting a structure and transparency within  the team. Starting with the project scope, where we listed all the activities that needs to  done to bring our product to the market (i.e., Ideation & Brainstorming, hypothesis testing,  customer interviews, building prototype, iterations based on customer insights, start-up  registration, approaching investors, etc). Then comes the work breakdown structure, who is  responsible for the tasks, the time and cost required to achieve our milestones. Then comes  the extensive research where we did qualitative research, that includes extracting the key  information from secondary data, conduct informal interviews based on Delphi method  (The Delphi method is a process used to arrive at a group opinion or decision by surveying a  panel of experts. Experts respond to several rounds of questionnaires, and the responses  are aggregated and shared with the group after each round). After gathering all the data, we  prioritized the key information that needs to be addressed soon.    In second learning launch, we started building different prototypes based on the feedback  received (needs and expectations) from our stakeholders. Here, we followed the Agile  methodology to build prototypes by using Atlassian Jira software to communicate with my  team members flexibly and the tasks were very clear from the beginning. Whenever there  was a lack of information or knowledge then we approached the expertise in respective  fields (university professors, alumnus, entrepreneurship centre at my university). Lastly, we  conducted conjoint analysis to compare different prototypes and to decide which one  would perfectly match the actual needs of our customers.          Insight   We were not really sure about the methodology that we want to follow throughout the  product development and in the beginning, we committed lot of mistakes while  brainstorming our ideas without any structure or lack of openness to experiment. After  speaking to our professor, we realised that the scientific approach or learning launch

method is the best way to build a product. Furthermore, I should mention that we were  perfectly on time and utilized all the resources productively. At the moment, we have  incorporated this methodology in accessing the features before its launch.      Approach   As I mentioned before regarding our initial mistakes and there was no other option than  educated ourselves with all the design thinking tools that we used in different phases of our  start-up but honestly saying, I couldn’t think of any approach other than learning launch  which would have helped us in realising our start-up Idea into reality.

