Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

When I was at the university, I participated in an entrepreneurial fair with a team of other 3  students, and the challenge was to create a new, innovative product or service that satisfy an  existing need in the society. This was a very big challenge for me and my teammates due to the  importance of the fair, because if we won that fair, we get funded by the university to implement  the idea. Additionally, it was a challenge because we got a very restricted timeframe to do this  (approximately 2-3 months) and we had to have a finished product/service almost ready to scale it.  Also, part of the challenge was that we were industrial engineering students and we were taught  about doing a business case and using a lot of data to develop new ideas and to decide if an idea  was good, so thinking differently (with a Design Thinking approach) was a big challenge for me.

Selection

After doing a proper research of different groups of people in our university and city, and  understanding what was their true needs and desires, we come out with an innovative hygiene  product that we thought it would satisfy the needs of an specific group of the population that has a  specific need. This specific group of the population was suffering all their lives about a problem  (excessive sweating), but there was no product in the market that helped them in a proper way  against this issue. So, instead of doing financial projections and trying to meet a return rate, we  decided we need to test the idea doing experiments.

We decided to do a learning launch to learn about our idea and to see how the customers react to  it. Also, we selected a learning launch because it was a fast and cheap way of testing our idea in the  field, and the best way we can truly learn how the potential customers interact with the product. At  the same time, we select doing a learning launch to truly accomplish the challenge and create a  product that truly satisfy a real need and not a fake need. It is like what it was explained in “the IBM  story” were their team experiment their new way of doing a trade show in “Sibos” in Amsterdam.  In this case, we experiment the prototype of our product in supermarkets to learn from it and to  see if our assumptions were correct.

Application

After deciding that we wanted to do a learning launch we contacted 4 big supermarkets in our city,  and we tell them our idea and explained them what kind of experiment we were planning to do.  They were excited about our new product and accept the idea of doing the learning launch in their  facilities. The learning launch consisted on showing the prototypes of the new product in the  hygiene aisle of the healthcare/hygiene sector of the supermarkets, with us promoting it and talking  with the potential customers, explaining the benefits and the way of using the product, and showing  an example of how the product works. We conduct this experiment during the peak hours on  weekends to try to learn the most about it.

The learning launch was implemented effectively because we could hear what customers thought  about our product and we could prove the assumptions we had (that there was an unsatisfied need  in people with excessive sweating problem). At the same time, we could learn about the experiment  on how customers feel about their excessive sweating problem, and how excited they feel in  knowing there were a product like the one of us.

Insight

The learning launch give me an insight about the true problem of the people suffering with excessive  sweating. It makes me understand the true reason why people were suffering about that issue and  the true need they had in nowadays world. The learning launch also makes me understand that the  best way to see if an idea is good is to test it through real experiments were customers participate,  not just doing financial projections and analyzing historical data. In addition, this insight makes me  think different about the challenge, by understanding that the most important thing was not  winning the contest but helping the people who suffer of excessive sweating and do not know how  to solve it.

Finally, Design thinking, in general, help me to think about innovation in a new completely different  way. In away that I was not taught, with customer empathy. I understand that observing and  listening the customer is the best way to accomplish a good innovation that really make an impact  on people, instead of just imagine a profitable product without thinking about the customer.

Approach

Next time I would use the same tool (Learning launch) because I think it is a “must” when testing if  an idea is good and to understand the true need of the customers. But I would do something  different related to the places in which we made the learning launch. In my case, I selected 4 big  supermarkets to perform the experiments, and I did not take into account that those kind of  products also get sold in small corner stores /grocery stores/convenience stores and not just in big  supermarkets in the city. So, through restricting the experiment to just the big supermarkets, I could  miss any important insight about the customer´s problem and needs. That is why, the next time I  use a Learning Launch I will stop and think with my team in which places I have to do the experiments  so I can learn the most of them, instead of rushing into the first places I think are the best to make  the experiments.

