Innovation Practice 2018 – The 3rd Workshop

The 3rd workshop of the “Innovation Practice 2018” was held on Wednesday, October 31, 2018 at VBL Office, Hiroshima University.

It started with a download session from the fieldwork on October 17. Each group presented and shared the insights from the fieldwork and exchanged opinions/feedback from each other. The group #1 got some clues from various trial usage of the rooftop at Lucks, Co., Ltd, and came up with some seeds of ideas through the history and the current environment of the region learned from the Ota Memorial Hospital. The group #2 focused on the insights obtained from the observation at the event space “Ripple” owned by Planning Supply Co., Ltd, and felt some potential opportunities to leverage the location and facilities prepared there. The group #3 integrated their findings from the PESTLE/SWOT Analysis and shared their opinions to tackle anticipated future crisis the newspaper industry faces, based on the current situation, history and the future vision, shared by the CEO and the former CEO of Koizumi Shinbunho.

Based on all of the above insights and findings, each group set up the theme to create future scenarios in 2028 and mapped out the information collected against the theme by certainty and impact. They have learned a new theory as to which part of the information map they should try to focus on to be innovative. We tend to focus on the information with higher certainty and higher impact, while innovative ideas can be generated more from the information categorized under the lower certainty and higher impact. Some of the participants seemed to be struggling to shift their focus.

At the last part of the session, they started to think about the detailed future scenarios based on the above information. They’ve learned another new tips here. They first came up with common sense or highly potential scenarios from the theme set up upfront, then got asked to think about the completely opposite situation to be innovative. Struggling to think about the opposite from the common sense at first place, but they have gradually got a point and started to enjoy creating interesting scenarios from various angles.