Challenge

As a Commercial manager of a Seeds company I often passed through the challenge of testing  and discarding several experimental individuals before one finally gets ready to be launched to  the market.

This process is quite similar as the learning launch tool of design thinking, and we take it that  way. During the evaluation, which is a biological time, it requires at least three years to settle a  normal climate and grow condition to finally define a wide range of individuals to achieve the  last evaluation part.

However, storytelling is also important because we need to tell the right characteristics to the  right producer in order to better select the more accurate individual to solve the producer’s  problems and get the better yield when the seed arrives to the farms.

Selection

To this reflection I chose the learning launch tool because I think to our process is the trigger  to finally find THE correct seed that will change the way of farming, ang gives the farmer the  opportunity to produce more food with less investment nor risk.

As Kaufmann said the first thing, we have is our hypothesis of which individuals will adapt to  the country and field conditions, but we really need to find the answer before we get to action.

That is why this tool is so important to our company, and we cannot go through a design  process without it.

Application

As I said in the introduction, seeds must be tested at least three years before the commercial  launch, and of course this tests are being executed in our fields but also in some selected  farmers fields in order to get more information about their approaches, needs, and specific  points of view.

We are sending to the market prototypes to particularly be evaluate for the future consumers!  Imagine the risk! That could be very well or terribly bad…

Well, in order to minimize the bad chances, we previously evaluate the farmers, how they  produce, how they interact with technology, how they share their thoughts and conclusions,  how they communicate, and how reliable they are. So, the learning launch is not always for the  product (seeds) itself but for the testing farmer also.

Insight

This double track has become a very interesting marketing tool, because when we have a  winner individual, we are sure that we also have a potential client which has a nice story to  tell, and when we have to discard individuals in the selection process, the farmer who tested  each individual, joins us to generates the needed information to arrive a conclusion and  participates in the final decision. So he also have the right answer and the right story to tell.

Approach

After taking this course I think that working in a more profound storytelling, which tells the  whole process of selection, may be our clients will rely more on our products, because we can  say for sure that the individual seed we propose to the market is a result of several tests  performed by others farmers, the same as them.

We have approaches and improvement suggestion directly from our potential customers, and  that is a powerful way to stay in the line with what farmers need and think.

