Innovation Practice – Week 7 Report

The seventh workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, November 20, 2019 at VBL Office 2nd floor, Higashi-Hiroshima Campus. We had 10 participants in total from undergraduate to postdocs on site.

It started with progress updates from each group. Based on their med-term presentation, each group representative shared with the class room how they are modifying/shifting their business proposals and how they are planning to finalize them.

The group “FuwaFuwa” was trying to propose a “Target Marketing”, based on the findings from the last week. On the other hand, they have determined not to pursue halal certificates, in response to the feedback from Hirotuku, who have shared with us the difficulty of finding Halal-compatible ingredients (soy sauce, soup stock, etc.) as well as cost implication to create halal-oriented production lines in their factories. They have, instead, determined to expand the product promotion to approach wider community of diversified nationalities.

The group “Innovators” has determined to narrow down more details of their ideas to refine Hirotuku Homepage, sch as to add more movie contents like introduction of employees, production lines in the factories, etc. as well as to enrich recipe page, and so forth. They will also consider to approach CO-OP canteens at the campus to sell Hirotuku products there. They are also thinking how to make Tsukudani appearance accepted by international costumers.

The group “GIFTs” came up with a new proposal to add messages to the Tsukudani gift as a “surprise” factor. A customer X sends a special URL to a person Y that X wants to send a gift. Once Y enters his/her name and address to the site, a Hirotsuku gift set will be sent to Y as a surprise. They will also consider to improve the packaging.

Makino-sensei then gave us lecture on the life cycle of the technology commercialization, starting from Imagining phase to Incubating phase, Demonstrating phase, Promoting phase and Sustaining phase. Since the engaged stakeholders differ by phases, the end-to-end work flow is not going to be straight forward, but to be advanced in circulation at each phase repeating try-and-errors to get approval from each set of stakeholders. We are all at the Imagining phase at this moment. The objective of this class is to have our stakeholders interested in our business proposal to get their funding and support.

In order to convince stakeholders, we have to make our ideas crystal-clear and realistic. It is critical to identify the benefits to deliver, the business value and the expected growth in the future. To make it happen, we have to refine and narrow down our proposals, including the specific product/service details, sales platform, price, promotion method, etc.

After that, we learned TIPS of appealing presentation through the well-known TED TALK, the common techniques used by the successful presenters in the world. They show a “what is” stats first and show “what could be” nest, then show how big the gap is between them. Each team resumed preparing the final presentation, based on the TIPS.

At the end of the workshop, we held a Q&A session at world-café style, so that more people can speak up. It produced quite active dialogues, which further helped each group further improve their proposals.