Innovation Practice – Week 8 Report

The 8th or the final workshop for Innovation Practice was held on Wednesday, November 27, 2019 at VBL Office 2nd floor, Higashi-Hiroshima Campus. We had 12 participants from undergraduate to postdocs to make final presentations, the CEO and three more representatives from Hirotuku Co., Ltd. to provide feedback to their final proposals.

The group “FuwaFuwa” proposed the following three;
1. To promote Tsukudani to international students through regular gatherings or events held on campus,
2. To create a short movie of a HU student as a main character. She enters HU as an undergraduate, but struggles to catch up. She recalls her hometown from Tsukudani as a soul food, which motivates her to carry out her academic life.
3. To distribute promotional items (bookmark, key holder, etc.), with the QR code of the above #2 movie URL printed, as small takeaways at each event (#1), expecting the participants there to reach out Hirotuku website later on.

The group “Innovators” presented their proposals in two pillars. The first one is to promote Hirotuku business in collaboration with HU, ideally starting to add their products at HU cafeteria and canteens. It sounds effective, but they had to share their findings as well that it would require HU top-management decision to add new products there. The second pillar is to improve the company website, which has been left non-updated for the past 20 years. They had created a cool demo site and shown the areas for improvement step by step, following the online-marketing theory. The top page needs to show their products and their description first, so that the online site visitors can quickly identify what the site is for. It also enables users to add them to the cart on spot. It also navigates them to the side pages to introduce popular recipe or to the blog that visualizes dialogues between Hirotuku and customers. It also has SNS icons on the top page as well as PR movie available there to attract more people into Hirotuku.

The group “GIFTs” picked up Japanese customs to send gifts each other at seasonal events, such as summer gift (Ochugen) and winter gift (Oseibo). Based on the results of the survey they conducted, they built a hypothesis that people might prefer to receive Tsukudani as a gift, instead of buying them as a part of their daily foods, and developed their proposal focusing on packaged products for gift use. They also emphasized the importance of the package design with citation from previous research and some success cases. As quick-hits for package change, they have shown company logos in greyish colors (popular to youth) as well as a prototype “Hirotuku-Christmas” gift package they made with one-dollar materials. They have proposed to collaborate with the companies specialized in package designs or printing.

After that, each group presented their footprints, or the end-to-end flow of how they have developed their proposals to the final version, repeating try-and-error cycles based on the survey results, feedback from Hirotuku to their initial proposals, etc.

Q&A session followed at the world-café style, involving representatives from Hirotuku. Quite active discussion was held at each table, to find out the best model to improve their online sales. Takemoto CEO gave us closing remarks, “Thank you very much for your interesting proposals full of wit. This is not the end. This is a start to change. It is up to us how to leverage your ideas/proposals to develop for change.”

After the class, a quick reception was held to re-taste Hirotuku products, which was another good opportunity for everyone to exchange cultures. Contrary to our expectations, Tsukudani matched with rice flour bread. It was eaten up by everyone in 5 minutes!

Some of the participants were interested in carrying on a project to realize their proposals. We would be looking forward to how their proposals would grow in the future.