changetheriver

Over the last seven months during the Designing a Business module I experienced the learning process with a different approach: learning by doing. For the first ever time I heard about Design Thinking… What is Design Thinking? “It is a system that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business can convert into consumer value and market opportunity. Tim Brown, IDEO.”
The journey has been faster than a cannon ball, seven months just like seven long intense days. Nevertheless the module ends with several insights for the future and a strong will to try it again. The weekly blog activity goes under the following words ‘Change the River’. This title disguises into the posts that describe the natural journey of designing a business. So, here is the question that triggers the last post: How could a river change in a time lapse of six months?

At the outset in September 2014 the lean start-up weekend with Dan Lockton put in place a pathway. For the first time we touched on design for behaviour change and interviewed other students at the Kingston Campus as part of the task’s research. Afterwards the discovery began by creating a team of people willing to join together, to share ideas and most importantly, consider a common vision for the next six months or maybe longer. My primary curiosity was to understand each profile’s perspective and enjoy the opportunities to enhance this experience in the business environment in a meaningful way.

The Mirus project was born in October last year and I fully involved myself in collaboration with other four students from different countries, with different backgrounds, different ideas about a product to pitch in the real business scenario. During our first meetings I realised my eagerness to challenge myself to learn from others as much as I expressed my positive attitude to build and coordinate expertise and personalities in a team. I didn’t know how and what would come after. I dove into the process and trusted in a daily effort. My real concerns were in that I had never worked on developing a product before. I will never stop being thankful for believing in the team and overcoming that concern with the openness and the supportive value we created together.

During the module sessions I could envision where my business expertise needed a deeper engagement, such as the social media platform and how to handle it. Regarding Twitter, for example, I had never paid attention to its features and the potential springboard to extend networking differently and practice different languages and communication tools. Furthermore, the ability to be concise and powerful – just like in Twitter messages with no more than 160 characters – came useful in the video making process we went through together to launch our product. In that occasion I nurtured my skills of production and assembling ideas in order to reach out to our customers. The module helped to shed light on my personal lack of business model knowledge. Therefore, I started to take up more opportunities to close this gap.

Entrepreneurship hinges on driving resources, tangible and intangible. “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources currently controlled. Professor Howard Stevenson.” Starting up a business generates questions, especially in the very beginning to define the challenge: how to meet the challenge? What about finding and managing the money? How to deal with forming and naming your business, what kind of organisational structure shall I adopt?

Direction sparks a vision for the future. As it happened to me, it gave me the experience on the field on how to apply the Design Thinking approach through the three gears: empathy & deep human understanding, concept visualisation and strategic business plan (Heather Fraser – Design Works: How to Tackle Your Toughest Innovation Challenges Through Business Design). As a team, we built up our code of conduct, pinned down small wins which marked the planning ahead: to develop the idea through the user-experience approach. At the same time the constant commitment I promised to myself on writing every Monday night, no matter what, cast my mind in practicing writing skills, storytelling and effective communication. This attitude is still vivid and part of my background today. I love writing and document the everyday implementation.

At halfway through, the Brand Persona for Mirus Project was the next important piece of the story. As a business, you need to tell a compelling story that can connect the customers on an emotional level. Herskovitz explains that the “brand persona creates a long-lasting emotional bond with the audience because it is instantly recognizable and memorable, it is something that people can relate to, and it is consistent” (Herskovitz and Crystal 2010, p.21). Good examples of companies that have a strong brand persona are McDonald’s, Nike, Disney and FedEx. All these companies have a clear personality associated with their brands. These companies understand that by placing that persona into stories that work with and help strengthen that brand persona is what makes the difference between strong and weak brand associations. The brand persona should drive the continuity of the overall brand message. After putting a lot of thought and detail into our brand persona, we came up with the Mirus character.

The developing phase brought us to come up with a sturdy concept – an educational product for children, not only for those with learning disabilities, but also with lower cognitive levels. We tapped into the area where the human centred experience became crucial and revealing for potential novelty. Feedback and prototyping, as Rob Fitzpatrick explains interestingly, means to get yourself out there and listen, listen and observe over and over again. The idea is to talk to your customers without saying much, so to prevent them from bias as much as possible.

We visited many schools to create connections with users – the children – and customers – the therapists. All of them employed great involvement so they vastly supported our reflection process to acknowledge new opportunities. I tried to be there during the workshop sessions at schools as much as possible, because this allowed me to improve my understanding and exchange views with other teammates. This openness, creative and collaborative approach are amongst the hallmarks of the ‘Designing a Business’ module. Equally, these hallmarks portray my current purpose in life.

As part of all these small steps my blog depicted the junction between action, research and mindfulness. For instance, networking activity is pivotal when you want your idea to reach out to as many people as possible. The Kingston Trade Fair in January gave a little spotlight to keep getting feedback from our stakeholders which are therapists. The therapists were our customers as well as our advisors on how to develop our product. The insight we gained was that we should focus on emphasising the social stories which meant to find an illustrator as soon as possible. Again, I found in myself the willingness to underpin our purposes as soon as possible. Quickly, I thought of a specific basketball team I knew where a friend of mine was a graphic designer. One week later he joined the Mirus Team and started sketching concepts for our discs. This process engaged all my expectations and skills, and these connections mirrored my belief in what I was looking for unconsciously.

In any journey throughout the route, ups and downs are always meant to show up. We figured it out around February that our product, our beautiful ‘Once upon a wheel’ discs, according to therapists, might need more development and need to be turn into an application for iPad teaching. This was a setback that we handled quite well. We had a long discussion and decided that we would carry on until the end of the programme with the same existing format which was the colouring discs on paper. We could not afford outsourcing or hiring a programmer to build an app. Although we were fully aware that our commitment to Mirus Project would end as the course finishes, I still think there was some room for innovation through risk-taking. This real example linked to a topic we discussed in class in terms of storyline. This was our “struggle” that could turn into another experience in the future.

If I rewind the reel of this blog which means our product and our story, I can draw upon many moments that belong to my professional and human development, both current and future. My transformation is in progress these days and it will be alive for the rest of my existence. Initially our project team’s brainstorming started out with tons of ideas and we followed the idea of Halloween costumes for disabled children on wheelchairs. It was back in October. We ended up with a better idea after we narrowed down our focus. The round-format circular shape of a disc enhances the social skills through social stories. This process, where I got to know Design Thinking for the first time, worked as binoculars for the past as well as for the future. Once I wore it, I could see the meaning of past, my five years spent in freelance Event Management. In this interesting and exploratory time I was seeking for game-changing questions, meanwhile I was nudging. The ‘Designing a Business’ experience reinvigorated my view. I explored my curiosity as the tools in the MACE course and the actual business strategy were absorbed along the way: Social Media, Marketing, Digital Tools, Branding and Sales Strategy will be important tools and knowledge for my future, no matter what direction I go.

The Dragon’s Den presentations were important to see if we could communicate our organisation as well as our brand. Public speaking was one of the most emotional efforts where I learnt to deal with my boundaries and push them through practice and belief in what I was doing. Confidence in the communication skill is as important as the ability to articulate your thoughts effectively and clearly. At Kingston University we had two chances to showcase our product and know-how in skill presentations. It entailed the coordination of the content according to what our contributions were. Finally, it was essential we made sure we verbalised our passion and goals in a powerful way.

I believe that managing change by design is my future direction. The vision is the use of “design tools which enable the organisation to embrace change as a normal part of managing its business.” (Peter Coughlan and Illya Prokopoff, Partners at IDEO) I aim to embrace the future with all these methodologies and tools I have gained in this module. Design Thinking is the engine of my personal research project which will summarise the whole course. Therefore, it will be a paramount part of my path, my pursuit in the long term. In terms of how I see the world, the modes of thinking, there are two kinds of logic. One is inductive – moving from specific observations to broader generalisations and theories –, the other one is deductive – informally called “top-down approach”, proving through reasoning from the principle that sometimes ‘must be’. Then Designers suggest the third type of logic: abductive reasoning – the logic of ‘what might be’ (Jeanne Liedtka, Business Professor). By rendering Roger Martin’s words, I am passionate of Design Thinking as a source of thinking to advocate a different style of work. I have decided to call this blog ‘Change the River’ as I took inspiration from a natural phenomenon known as widespread trophic cascade. In the Yellowstone National Park, after 70 years absence, wolves were reintroduced in 1995. They changed not just the entire ecosystem of the park, but also the physical geography. Before I started my MACE pathway, the river of my knowledge was dry and without a solid direction. This module has been one of the most important ones for my ever-changing transformation process. It equipped my mind-set with the ability to recognise and to boost new opportunities to grow with intrinsic motivation, to innovate my own processes through collaboration, to tell stories that inspire values in any work environment I will tap into.

Follow the link to enjoy the sort but powerful video on how wolves change rivers:

 

References & Links

Rotman and Design – Martin and Christensen

Designing for Growth – a designing thinking tool for Managers

This is Service Design Thinking – Stickdorn/Schneider

Design Works – Heather M.A. Fraser

Heather Fraser – Design Works: How to Tackle Your Toughest Innovation Challenges Through Business Design

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_xjb7LB7VY – Accessed on 15^th of April 2015-04-24

The essential brand persona: storytelling and branding – Stephen Herskovitz and Malcolm Crystal

http://www.learningdisabilities.org.uk/

http://www.ldonline.org/article/6173/

 

Here we are and the sales play has started. The video is one of the tool, crucial tool in which plenty details comes in to accomplish a good first contact with your target. Voice, music are important and we could have considered other options. Perhaps we might occur to edit a new video in the future for Mirus or individual purpose in the future. Design a Business module is going towards the end.

In one month the journey will land on the Dragon’s Den presentation which is scheduled on the 25th of March. We will unleash all the emotions and tales of the last six months in in six minutes presentation. We will share a report of our story financially, our strategy, the ambitions and the customer relations. We will have a meeting next Tuesday to showcase our product and we will find out if we can celebrate our first sell.

March is almost there and it is gonna be last hectic month.  Concrete attempts will be exciting and we are planning out tasks and effort to be ready to the unknown. I really enjoy the process whatever will come next.

You will read something else at the end of the road, at the brink of a new route.

Thank you Mirus project to let us find out this new inspirations…

http://mirusproject.com/

Mirus project is on the brick to sell. We have four weeks to compete in the market figure out sales process as quick as possible. Hence, we do not have enough time and money available to deploy reasonable resources and implement the product.

MVP’s (minimum viable products) is what we can use in this last chunk of time. A minimum viable product is “that product which has just those features and no more that allows you to ship a product that early adopters see and, at least some of whom resonate with, pay you money for, and start to give you feedback on”.

” But why minimal? Because your time and money are severely limited. You want the biggest “bang for your buck”: maximum learning with minimal effort.” These words comes from an useful source on line, Blog called ” Scaled my business”. Tomorrow we will bring forward our packaging and get the disks ready. The talking with the customers will be the opportunity to understand how far we can go with our products. In the following video, there are great tips from work experience through which Rob Fitzpatrick explains interestingly.

Hard to tell if our selling process will allow the product to understand more about the Mirus Project team. Across the team tasks are assigned and we are going to launch the promotional video by the end of this week. Me and Amro have deployed our ideas using the very beginning inspiration. Julia and her skills in writing and expertise for arranging storyline helped us to set the framework. Then Prezi platfrom will be part of the video making.

Moving on the selling process we are on the brink to approach customers which are schools, kindergartens and hopefully we could unveil the vinyl with our 20 discs, colouring discs. It turns out I am in charge of customer’ hunting in the hope to arrange meeting as many as possible. There are six weeks left before the final Dragon’s Den scheduled on the 27th of March.

Although we have very small chances to sell our product, we have still something to enjoy as well as to make the best out of this experience. Design Thinking, personally, embodies my drive and passion to find out through ideas and experiment in order to boost values.

Design Thinking is an incredible messiah. Our product is the son of the design thinking process just a bit speed-up in 4 months so far. Our disks will never stop spinning around perhaps they will end up digital or maybe will sparkle on some wheels. Right, I put this pieces together, no worries, so you will understand where I am coming from. I still leave myself off this process.

Today we had an important meeting with a therapist in Bedelsford school, which just next to Knight Park campus. Me and Mikkel cut and sorted the discs and had walking of…literally 60 steps from the campus. Peter , the therapist, was extremely helpful, honest and gave us the big picture of our journey so far. Even though we are supposed to be focused on production and selling I guess we are still fully in prototyping phase. According to the agenda we have 8 weeks to carry on purely on commercial view. Then we will greet the lovely dragon’s den with their c(l)ash.

It is very interesting time as we will make a decision tomorrow about the way to go forward in this trip called Mirus Project team. All I can say is I am learning how to unlearn quickly when an assumption is made when a line is drawn when a light seems to be the guide. I believe in facing conflict for the opportunity to grow and grab the uncertainty just like a friend you haven’t seen for ages and you can spend just one day.

Design Thinking is my daily friend , every day different and inspirational.

Participation, conversation, sharing your present actions will underpin your purposes. I find myself doing my utmost every day in Kingston Universities  campus. Kingston Hill where Kingston Business school is based I spend 2,3 days a week then Knight Park campus has captured my soul to recreate a den to empower my dreams and small actions. Penhryn Road campus has the gym where I train twice a week I also play basketball.

Yeah, sport is another enticing field where events and forward actions meet each other as ever-green hallmark. Let’s question what is the link about with Mirus Project and “Once upon a wheel ” product ? Right, Ben Eager will be the magical  hand and the creativity that give life to our disks. Well, we play basketball together for Kingston University team so this how I got to know about him. He was supposed to only bring me to the right place to ask for an Illustrator. Randomly he told he was keen on drawing. He liked the idea and he is in.

We needed an Illustrator for let images and stories jump up on the stage of our designing a business show. I am extremely passionate about all these happenings. Profit, incomes, loss in our balance sheet will never accomplish what a team of people could experience together. This process is insightful and whatever happens I trust in the process, in Mirus Project team which opens doors to other experiences and influences.

Welcome on board Ben Eager. Check this out….

http://bargainbucketben.tumblr.com/post/93585584123/bandit-ben-self-portrait

Last week the fair at Kingston University was an interesting warm-up for the Mirus project. We displayed accurately our prototypes, the wheelchair that inspired our designing process was there with us. Networking with professionals in the known turned up at the event. Positively we keep getting feedback from our stakeholders which are therapists. Aware of the nature of our product it was the informative approach the very effort during the fair.

To boot, it s a supportive experience to help each other as well as reaching out with customers. We made sure they grasped the concept and the educational aspect of our colouring disks. Coming back to the involvement as paramount value during the developing process, we will shape again our production as the feedback was insightful from the SEN  – Special Educational Needs –  therapist who came along to our booth.

This week will acquire more input about our financial plan. Also it will be important to forge strategy for the next couple of month until the Dragon’s Den event. In the meantime we will carry on to delve into this unpredictable and amazing time-machine called Design Thinking.

Look at you. Look at your expectations.  Imagine to drive on a long road, open fields around you. At some point you pull out to look at your map. It has changed just like lights goes down and shadows give you insight where to go. Sounds unreal but  that is how creativity might work and you can read it through your choices, passions, obstacles, pain, emotions.

Mace souls are off to go for the second and most intensive term. All the bets are on with the project team. First trial to   launch the product will happen this coming Thursday where we will deal with our networking skills and teamwork spirit at Kingston Hill campus.

Mirus team seems ready to arrange all we have got so far. Our prototype with all the drive and energy we put into it. we want to figure out what comes next according to our plan and expectations. Our market is focused on therapist related to school for learning disabilities’people. Therefore our aim is to exploit this chance and train our interpersonal skills to inform them about our vision and what we try to tackle. On Wednesday we hope to engage audience about how and when they feel uncomfortable if they sit on a wheelchair. This point of contact will spark off reactions that will open feedback about our product.

So, here we are again. New modules has started and the personal research project knock the door because the game has started. The landascape and its echoes invite us to draw with courage and burning power to build up a change in our pathway, in this course. Apparently MACE jumped up on18th position in the world for arts management Masters degrees.

I firmly believe that the course should be by the first ten by 2015.

We are on the run so speak you soon.

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music?utm_source=facebook&source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

The Mirus project meets 2015 with the best wishes to succeed. Our endeavour has wisely carried on over the Christmas time. We surely rested as well as managed our tasks and deliverable on Podio which is our clever workplace on line. Mikkel, our Marketing Director, shared with us this very useful tool. He is very important in our team.

Consequently our bond with Kingston school for learning disabilities, we are set to arrange next meeting. The goal will be find out more with their therapist so that we will be aware how to shape better our product according to their professional view. We realised how important is to create medical support in this pathway. However, the networking activity starts out again in order to team up with other entities.

Quite often the new year sparks off fresh purposes along with energy to achieve greater goals. The Mirus project wants to evolve naturally the team effort in a sustainable social value. We will do the utmost to make it happen.

The story goes on….

Delightfully.. a colouring disc called Mirus bring ideas to life. Mirus is our seed that we planted together more than two months ago. On 5th of December we enjoyed the thrilling feeling to present in front of potential  “Dragons “. It was a trial for the real one in March. Then we will have to tell to the world the story about Mirus and how will contribute for a progress. Yes, that’s right. After the session the feedback was powerful and our idea to develop something for learning disabilities people is enticing.

All the skills in the group are coming up so useful that it is time to challenge them and lead for higher level. Kingston is where we found our first positive contact to foster our prototyping. Bedelsford school is already history better off to say our touchstone and bolster our product and business development.

Amro brings forward the production side of our business, The Berlin Julia is busy with pricing product and support the creative development. Mikkel is leading amazingly in the marketing field as much as we went through the Brand persona process. We basically defined our identity as company as well as product. The Wien Julia is real talent in writing and taking notes. She makes sure all together we forged the idea giving them..colours and chance to breathe in all his force. This emotional wave is abstract, is unreal but it is incredible vivid in our deeds.

2014 is wrapping up and Mirus really wish to all group in Designing a business the best in 2015.