Innovation Practice – Week 4 Report

The fourth workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at VBL Office 2nd floor, Higashi-Hiroshima Campus. We had 14 participants in total from undergraduate to postdocs.

At the beginning of the class, Assoc Prof. Makino gave us a lecture on basic data analysis tools, such as R2 value (Coefficient of Determination) and Correlation Coefficient, as one of the indicators to show the correlation of multiple data. It helps us find some trends at marketing, for example, we may estimate the sales of the new shop, finding some proportional connection between the sales of the shop and the number of passengers at the nearest station. Each group worked on some exercises to learn the analytic techniques. Other than that, multiple regression analysis and ABC analysis was introduced.

After that, each group shared the inventory list updated as an assignment from last week. Learning the other members’ research fields and available networks, it will help them assign the appropriate roles and responsibilities for each to advance the project. It is expected to leverage each member’s specialty to make a better proposal to the client.


We learned at the previous class (Week 3) that it is critical to clarify the customer needs or to find the paying customer. At Week 4, we set a “Persona” (a specific and real target user) as our end user (who actually uses a product) and tried to create his/her profile such as gender, age, how to spend a day, etc., to identify their real needs. Brainstormed in a group to narrow down the features of the “Persona” and discussed where he/she is located in the matrix to identify how attractive and how accessible as a targeting end-user.

A new assignment was given to start an interview to the target end-user, based on the accessibility information obtained through the inventory list.