Innovation Practice – Week 3 Report

The third workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at K202, Graduate School of Integrated Arts & Sciences, Higashi-Hiroshima Campus. We had 14 participants in total from undergraduate to postdocs.

First of all, the participants were broken up into three groups, mainly by language preference. The first group work was “Wallet Challenge”. It was an exercise developed by Diana Kander. They’ve got assignment to create a wallet with color papers with limited resources in 6 minutes and promote it to “a customer of the day”, Prof. Misu. A “salesperson” from each group gave aggressive sales pitch to Prof. Misu in 30 seconds, but all failed to sell their handcraft wallets. What was this exercise for? They spent 6 minutes to work on products none would purchase. An entrepreneur gets and idea, builds it, brands it and fails to find a customer to purchase it. He/she goes back to brainstorm/rebuild idea again – “Startup Loop of Despair”, named by Kander (2014). For a successful startup, it is most critical to find customers first.

Based on this learning exercise, they have started brainstorming to discuss how to improve Hirotuk’s online sales. Most of them have never experienced a proper brainstorming session before, where they learned from scratch, such as a principle to write down one idea in one piece of Post-it. They have gathered respective pieces of idea onto a whiteboard and categorized them into small groups, using KJ Method. They thought about the relationship of each idea using respective arrows to organize fragmented ideas. Once they started to see some stories in between the ideas, each member voted to three ideas/categories to find preference of the majority. Quick presentations were made from respective groups to the classroom to share the growth of their ideas. They had some similarities, but each group had started to develop different stories.
 
To wrap up the session, Assoc. Prof. Makino gave us lecture on “How to create a PAYING customer,” using a practical example of a food chain sales strategy, which made us stop and shift our thoughts – not trying to develop ideas first, but to identify customers first.