Insights from Business Innovation!

First of all, this class was totally a new experience for me. Coming from a finance background, I have always had to take courses related to numbers. Every question had a ‘right’ answer, and hence it was not too hard to figure things out. But this class was very different. Being ‘creative’ is what I have heard many people speak of, but I had no clue I would taught mechanisms to come up with creative solutions business school. Yes, being creative is one of the core skills I learnt in this class!

Coming up with our persona for the Target project, and the process of how our persona evolved was such an interesting process. I never knew I had to think of in depth details of a persona while coming up with marketing strategies. My internship my project at Dell was to recommend a sales strategy for the security product offering. I had no idea what a persona even meant; it turned out to be small business entities. This was in contrast to the effort and detail we as a team put into our persona for the Target project – Racheal. Firstly we thought of Rachel’s age, interests, education, income level, but in addition we also learned about her best friend. When the professor suggested us to do this, I had no idea why. But it was during the midpoint of our project, I realized our solution to Target was based mainly on the characteristics our interviewees said they admired the most of their best friend. For example, one interviewee said – I love the fact that my best friend remembers the most important events in life. Not only does she remember to wish me on my birthday, but once she sent me the right flavors of Tiff’s treat cookies I loved. This made me feel so special. Why was it important to consider what she felt about her best friend? Well, we inferred that remembering her birthday and receiving a customized gift made her feel so special and remain loyal to her best friend. Therefore our solution was turned out to be - providing loyal customers with a customized gift during special life events such as birthdays and graduation. This would greatly help Target in getting a loyal customer base with time. 

The second take away from this class was again related to being creative – coming up with a prototype. I always thought a prototype was the final perfect model of the real product. I was surprised to know that a basic first sketch could be a prototype. We had two prototypes for this project – the smart panel and a shopping app. We first drew a rough sketch of the app and the smart panel. The next step was for us to think of a nice way of making them both user friendly. We never came up with that ‘perfect final prototype’ I always thought existed, but the process we followed was quite amazing.

We brainstormed within our team, and always tried to draw things as we spoke, usually we drew things on a white board or sketching software. Fortunately we saved each of these sketches and it is quite nice to actually be able to see how the prototype evolved – a rough sketch, to a sketch with the right products to finally a prototype with bundled goods students would like to purchase. Finally we thought of the places with high student traffic to place these panels. We actually walked around the entire campus on a freezing Friday afternoon (we were unfortunate to have done this on a day with freeze alert) and imagined the panel being placed at different points within campus, and thought if we were undergraduate students, would we order groceries from a panel at that location. We followed an iterative process all along.

Putting together the final presentation for this project was also a new learning. The presentation slides I have done so till this point, have been big on data and pictorial representations of data. But this particular one was very different. We did video recordings using our mobile and recorded one of our team member’s voice over it. Also coming up with the script to speak, places to shoot, and pictures to record was very creative. We ended up talking quite less during the presentation and instead let our work - the video - do most of the explanations. If I had to do my internship project all over again now, the approach I would take would be very different. I would change my mechanical numbers based approach to a very innovative one. So yes – being creative was the key skill I gained working on this project.

I did not feel that any part of the project was not useful, as in everything we did helped us learn more in terms of coming up with an innovative solution. But if I could change one thing, it would be the time lines. The time lines were so tight, that we could not come up with a properly functioning prototype, we could have done much better had we got more time. But I do understand considering it being a one semester long class, it would be hard to fit in longer timelines. A suggestion I could think of is to try and fit in more in class working hours for the project, if that was a possibility. Also we spent a large amount of time conducting generative research using the two concentric circles, but we never figured how to fit those findings into our final solution. It would have been better, if we were able to incorporate those findings into the project.

The emotional reactions my team went through were similar to a roller coaster ride! There were times when we had a large number of arguments, especially because of the tight timelines and contrasting views. We all came from different backgrounds – one from the gaming industry, one from advertising, one from writing and I from finance. So our thoughts were so different. I always try to think of things in a structured manner, but my team mates would pour in ideas. I loved the way our team finally put all this together. We would eventually agree on something, by choosing the idea which had the most number of votes. Our team meetings turned out to be fun rather than manual. I liked the fact that we got to work with non MBAs – Megan was a student pursuing a degree in advertising, and the ideas she came up with were so unique. The way she opens up her MacBook immediately, and starts sketching out whatever we spoke about amazed me. I doubt I could have done even 10% of the work we did, if I had to do it myself. I just loved the team I worked with, and if I had a choice to work with them again – I definitely would!

Learning from professor Walls was also a very unique experience. He did not stop with just lecturing, but he showed us real life experiences and also allowed us to practice the frameworks he taught us in class. For example – the exercise we did on coming up with a prototype using materials provided in 30 minutes was challenging yet super fun. The best part was - Professor Walls never would say an idea was bad, but would suggest ways to improve. It was very pleasing to hear, ‘I love that idea’ from him, and yes he said that to me twice J