“Innovation Practice 2018” Day 1 on October 10, 2018

Day 1 of the Innovation Practice 2018 was successfully completed on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 at VBL office, Industry-Academia Collaboration Center, Hiroshima University. Participants varied from graduate students/postdocs to representatives from proposing companies, which covered quite a wide range of generations.
It started with an overview of the end to end workshop, followed by the self-introduction by all participants, including his/her profiles, strengths and hobbies.

Tetsuo Yamada, CEO of Lucks, Co., Ltd, Masanori Tagi, the Area Manager of Planning Supply Co., Ltd and Tunenori Suzuki, former CEO of Koizumi Honpo, and his wife, Junko represented each proposing company to present profiles, histories, business strategies, background of proposing challenges, etc. Colors of presentations were quite different per each, but they were all filled with passion and enthusiasm.

Then the participants were divided into three groups per challenges to start group work. They first tried the “Innovation Map” to analyze histories of each company, identify key products/services, turning points and innovators and map them out on the paper to find the key strategies or direction running throughout. One of the students said, “Good tool. We can leverage this map to analyze our research as well.”
 
After that, participants have learned the ground rules for ideation through “Let’s plan your party” exercise. Also learned a basic concept of “bracketing” to think out of the box.
It was a learning experience “to say yes” to keep positive and add on others’ opinions to pile up ideas and “to bracket the knowledge, stereotypes, experience, pre-informed concepts, etc.,” to set them aside to come up with brand new ideas.
 
Based on the findings from the Innovation Map exercise, each group analyzed the values of the companies, applying the Aaker’s Product Value Proposition. Assignment was given to all, to think about the expected current and changes in 10 years from PESTLE perspectives, and to identify the viewpoints to observe and questions to ask at the fieldwork scheduled a week after.