United States Army Academy- Learning Launch

Challenge

Jamar is a publishing house based in Jordan, that is specialized in publishing  and translating books related to Design and Entrepreneurship. We usually sell our books  through several channels like: Bookstores, online stores, our own online store, and other ways,  but one of the most important channels is participating international book fairs. We participate  yearly in 6-8 international book fairs that sells Arabic books, and we do extremely well at it, due  to our specialization. But after the universal Lockdown, all the book fairs were postponed. And  our sales dropped down severely. And as my crucial part in sales and Business Development and  Innovation department, I must find other solutions to overcome the losses, and to create new  revenue streams, and to make use of our existing products, or let’s call it (our value proposed)  using new channels or new value creation. So as our management team sat and discussed what  is our deep offering, we discovered that we don’t sell books (only), we Publish Knowledge by  any means, whether books or other ways. We do what it takes to spread the knowledge,  therefore, we Decided to try a new Selling Concept, which is United States Army Academy, which is  giving Short Courses  (2-3 Hours) Amended with a Certificate of Completion based on the  materials given in our books.

Selection

Our Innovation team is familiar with other Design thinking approaches, so at the beginning we  Gathered lots of information about our target audience and through empathetic interviews to  understand what motivates people to learn, and we visualized the concept through basic  sketches to make the idea more visible to the interviewees. And after that we Selected the  (Learning Launch) approach to test the idea through 3 Phases, to validate the appeal of the Idea  and the viability and feasibility of it.

Application

Phase1: Free Workshops

Using the Learning Launch form, we set the text as the following

At this phase since it’s for free, we knew many people would join and the total number of  participants were 4500.

And to check an example of those free online workshops, follow this link  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4fO_NAFQ3c

And we collected as much feedback as possible from the audience and they were interested in  more in-depth lectures and many asked for Certification of attendance to add it to their  portfolio.

Phase 2: Paid Live workshops

Key assumptions to test  Launch Number 2

We Believe, people are welling to pay for  value if a good content is presented and that  people are more motivated when they get a  certification of completion

Who: Free workshop Attendees, and email  marketing to Entrepreneurs and Designers.  Where: Using Zoom and a Landing Page to  register.  How: make secured exclusive 2 days  workshops for attendees.  Cost: 200 USD to Build the landing page and  zoom subscription, plus cost sharing model  with the lecturer.  Time: 4 weeks preparation and to get  feedback between each workshop.

As a Result of this experiment, we learnt that people are really welling to invest in themselves,  and the first paid workshop we had around 30 people who registered and Paid 150 USD to  attend those workshops.

To check the Landing page of the event created, follow the link  https://www.japublishers.com/events/ws2/

Key assumptions to test  Launch Number 1

We Believe that people are interested in  Creating new solutions and our Material is  very appealing to them, so we will hold a  Free Workshops for people to learn

Who: Use our data base from online store  and Social media followers.  Where: Using virtual medium like zoom  How: Advertise for people to join for free and  benefit from the best books authors and  learn.  Cost: around 250 USD for the whole program  Time: 2 Weeks preparations and 1-week  actual program

Phase 3: Launching the online Academy

Key assumptions to test  Launch Number 3

From our experience we Believe people are  welling to invest in themselves with the right  content and with an award of completion, so  we will offer a short inexpensive online  course from our books and have short  quizzes to attain their certificate, and we will  start with a free short course to validate the  assumption.

Who: Workshop attendees and our online  shoppers.  Where: Unique Online Platform on our  website  How: Short Videos about certain book  designed by the innovation team.  Cost: Cost of Production of each Course to  create and edit is 300 USD  Time: 3 weeks Shooting 3 weeks Editing and  Marketing

As a start we made a promotional video to see interaction, to check an example follow the link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWEqiyia-Qs

Insights

In Applying the tool and make small investments to test the market before spending too much  money, we have learnt how successful this tool  can be, we have learnt that spending 800 USD is  better than falling in love with your idea and spend 8000 USD to create the perfect Platform and  then fail, we still do not know the final result of the viability of the overall project, but we can  build on facts rather than assumptions, and if it fails we can say from experience why it did fail,  and without losing a fortune, also it gave the team a sense of agile management approach, since  everyone were somehow involved, sales people in making the material, accountants in making  the budgets, Developers in setting the pages up, Creative Design team, in making the ads, and  everyone else were part of the process.

Approach

In the Next Projects, I could think of Practicing Storytelling along with Visualizing, because in the  Empathy Phase or the What is phase, people got a little bit tiered and maybe bored, so mixing  some stories from people we met in Book fairs or regular life experiences and give it a bit of  informality during the focus group session would help us to get more deep on people’s  thoughts. Also, maybe to use the Napkin Pitch method would help people involved to fill it as  they understood the concept. And express in their words, what is the Big Idea, what are the  benefits, how to execute it and how to make it feasible and viable to the business.

