Innovation Practice – Week 5 Report

The fifth workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, November 6, 2019 at VBL Office 2nd floor, Higashi-Hiroshima Campus. We had 12 participants in total from undergraduate to postdocs.

To begin with, we checked whether everyone is properly using HIRAKU-PF to post messages via Bulletin Board, then confirmed the direction of our projects. The primary objective of Week 5 workshop was to narrow down the idea.

To pursue the objective, we first learned a tool called “Business Model Canvas” to clarify the value proposition, customer relationships, customer segment, etc. Each group has filled in the template to check whether their business model is applicable to the market or not and identified which components are missing in the model, etc. Out of the 9 components, each group has further dug in details of the value proposition against customer segments to check whether their proposing values are matched against the targeting customer needs. This helped them narrow down the scope of their idea.

After that, we tried the well-known exercise “Marshmallow Challenge.” Three students/postdocs teams and one instructors’ team were first given 24 sticks of spaghetti, one marshmallow, 1 yard of tape and 1 yard of string, to build up a tower to set the marshmallow on top as high as possible. One of the groups was trying to tie a few spaghetti sticks into one to strengthen the columns of the tower. Another group was trying to create a spaghetti frame at the bottom to fix the tower. A call of “Last one minute!!” made all groups start putting the marshmallow on top of the tower they had managed to build…. “ah……” “oh no….” We found most of the towers leaning with screams due to the unexpected weight of marshmallows. “Time’s up!” It seemed the team of instructors had successfully built the tower the highest, but when they tried to measure the height…. it fell down miserably. What’s the lesson here? We can’t notice till the last minute how heavy the marshmallow is, if we too much focus on building the framework. When we start up a new business, we tend to focus on the framework and sales strategy, before identifying the core vision, the real marshmallow. We should test the marshmallow at earlier stage to find the fatal mistakes upfront. Then we can repeat try-and-error cycles over and over to refine the business, not to fall off the marshmallow at last minute.

To conclude the day, each group spent the remaining 30 minutes to start preparation for the med-term presentation scheduled next week, narrowing down their idea, identifying the target customers as well as the hypotheses to test, etc. What kind of proposals will they make next week?