Ahmed Elnemr // Reflection – Learning Launch

Challenge

I am founder and president of an art and culture association in Milan, Italy. Since its foundation, this association has  had the goal to engage foreign students and expats living in Milan and the Italian society in a dialogue through cultural  events. For this purpose, we design and produce numerous cultural events (mostly concerts) during a year and this  requires a comprehensive knowledge of the audience. Initially, to understand better our market, we relied on  traditional market research methods. Thus, we sent out surveys to define our target audience’s taste and preferences.  However, the results were not satisfying. Non-Italian respondents were interested in cultural events that would not  attract the Italian audience, therefore, they could not result in the desired interaction between these two  communities.

Moreover, we wanted our cultural events to be of high quality and have a positive impact on the cultural taste  of our  foreign community. Cultural events which precisely matched this community’s taste could not result in their cultural  growth, and thus did not satisfy us as cultural activists. Our confusion and lack of experience resulted in a dramatic  failure of our first project. We organized a high-quality jazz event in one of the best music halls in the city. This event  cost us a lot of money and energy, but, unfortunately, our ticket sales were not even close to satisfying and the  expected interaction between foreigners and Italians, of course did not happen. Following this defeat, we decided to  take a different path and try a new approach.

Selection

After an extensive discussion in the association, we decided to try the Learning Launch or the experimentation  approach. We decided to follow the suggestion of Dennis Lehmann that he made in his lecture: “The key is to do experiments  that are fast and cheap”.

Application

After convincing other members of the association, we decided to design a higher number of smaller and more  affordable projects which could be implemented more frequently. This allowed our learning-by-doing and to helped  us to improve our cultural events in process considering feedback from the audience and other stakeholders. Since  then, our cultural events were prototypes, designed and planned in collaboration with our audience, which was  enabled to express its opinions and discuss the event’s content, schedule, timing, etc. on our social media platforms.

After each event, we conducted surveys in which we asked the audience’s opinion on the event and their expectations  regarding our future activities. We also made in-depth interviews with those who had more to say. Moreover, we  tried to understand to which extent our events influenced our audience’s taste and how much they facilitated their  interaction with the local society. This new approach proved to be highly efficient. In few months, we started to make  profits and were able to invest more in new projects. We also had less disagreements with our audience over taste  and had a better understanding of our events’ identity and our brand. Furthermore, we had a more balanced  presence of Italian and non-Italian audience at our events.

Insight

After few successful experiments, we learned that planning and designing cultural events based solely on simplified  customer surveys results is a waste of time and energy. Products (here cultural events) have to be designed based on  a deep understanding of the market that can be gained through an anthropological study of the consumers.  Moreover, we cannot expect a comprehensive market research to lead us to a single product which will perform  perfectly. An organization has to have a set of prototypes which are designed based on research and tested early in  the process, so that if not successful, they can fail fast and cheap. This model allows the organization to test, improve,  and review the product on the iterative basis. Continuous experimentation allows not only to find the product that

matches the target market’s expectations the best, but also triggers innovation. Users’ feedback may lead to discovery  of new products and services.

Approach

In few months, our association is planning the first edition of an annual music festival. This festival’s program and the  list of performing bands and musicians will be decided in a collaborative process between the potential audience and  the organizers. Though, a slightly bigger weight will be given to the organizers’ choices, because we do not want the  festival’s genre to be completely defined by the taste of the audience. However, design and organization of this  festival again relies upon the Learning Launch approach and Experimentation. Beside the main program of the festival,  there will be a parallel event in which a variety of smaller concerts that are not precisely selected and curated will take  place. These events target different groups of people and will allow us to observe reactions and explore trends which  we could take into consideration for the next edition of the festival.

