Innovation camp

The 1st day:
We were totally excited by the new and beautiful place with our friendly fellows. A promising unforgettable trip!

Everything went well in the first day since we could quickly get into our task with loads of ideas were created immediately.
Some explanation about the tool we used for brainstorming: we sat in a circle of three people, each member thought about a crazy idea that is impossible to happen and wrote down to the note. After that, the notes would be given to the next one and that person would make those ideas more reasonable. The notes were again sent to the next one in the circle. This time, the ideas would be adjusted to be real. Finally, we read out loud all the ideas and discussed about them.
By repeating the process, we came up with quite many things.
We all felt good!

The 2nd day:
It can be called an eventful day since we went through quite many different states. The morning started quite nice with the echo of an effective day yesterday. After having a quick meeting with the couches and the other groups, we continued with our work. A lot of papers and notes were spread over the table.



With the idea of making different scenarios for our task, we almost had the 1st one completed by noon and planed to make the 2nd one in the afternoon. We were grateful to have the help from the couches. Open sharing made the atmosphere comfortable.
We have a good lunch and good walk together around the area after that. The weather was nice with sunshine and the view right next to the sea was beautiful!
In the afternoon, work was continued. However, the situation changed a bit when we had another advise from the couches which directed to a different direction. We got confused. And tired. Our spirit was down. However, we tried to work with the 2nd scenario as the solution for the issue.

Late in the afternoon, a new task of picking one thing from the hill that can present for what we were doing was given. Our answer for the task was the picture taken from the watch-tower on the top of the hill.


There were two messages that we wanted to show: first, it was about the grocery company that we were working on. It might be on top of the industry at the moment, however there will always be the risk of someone building the higher "tower" to surpass this peak. Second, the "thing" required to take from the task can be touchable entity, but it can also be whatever like a picture.

We turned back to the main task in the evening with the idea of having all the papers done. We were ready to close the task and hoped it will be not too late. However, the fact were completely different. We had a quite strained argument with the couches in the last minutes about what we have done. It ended up with the unexpected effort to work more on our task. We stayed late till 1 am and felt both tired and disappointed.

The last day:
We did not have so much time since we needed to clean up the place before leaving by noon. Our three people quickly wrapped up the task with some small discussion about how much was done and what was improved from the previous night. Although not everything went well as we were expected, we know that we did try hard and we learned from both good and not good experience.

What we learned:
- "Sounds easy" task can be big challenge for being radically innovative and having breakthrough ideas
- Motivation is very important for a good performance.
- Failure accepted attitude is necessary for an innovator (The disagreement between our group and the couches can be seen as a failure and we need to overcome that "pain" for having better work).

09.4 - The 4th work day

Sometimes to find more new ideas we need to change small things. That's what happened with our group during the 4th day. Unfortunately our group was not presented fully for the session. That's why one of our members joined another group. We think that it helped our team to gather new ideas and learn new design tools exploited by other teams.

Talking about work during the 4th day, the task was to help lady from Charity Company called Kummit. Even in the beginning it was hard to see the main problem because there were so many of them, in the end of session the team was able to point the main one. The person who was working in Turku office did not have enough time to pay attention to all company's issues. Therefore, the team provided with some interesting ideas how to find the 25th hour in a day. One of these solutions was an idea to involve celebrities in company's activities.

We think that even our team was not able to participate during the las work day; however, it was a good experience to work with other teams. Because in real life we will have so many situations when we will be forced to work with other teams and people from other companies/departments.

27.3 - The 3rd work day

This time, the scenario of "flying to the year 2040" was brought into the workshop. At the same time, our group was broken to form new groups with other members in the class. We could not make the common products together as usual, however there are some pics collected from us when we joined and discussed around with all the groups:

Working environment in 2040 & actions needed in 2020

The second part of the lecture we gathered with our original group. We were given the task to think about the grocery store again. Now this time it was about how to destroy the industry. We were supposed to come up with 40 different ideas on how to achieve this goal. It sounded like a lot in the beginning, but we quickly came up with around 20 different ideas. We wrote the ideas to pieces of paper, kind of like what we did with mind mapping and brain storming, combining them. We tried to think about the subject on many different angles, including the producers, customers, suppliers and so on. After this the assignment was changed to on how to prevent the destruction of the industry. We just basically went through every point we made and tried to make a counter argument to them. I think this assignment was nice, since it helps on understanding how quickly you can change the mind-set from a destructive one to a preserving one. Our group has really become good on understanding how the grocery industry works. 

Some comments on the workshop:
- Turning around with new groups, new people brings a new and motivated atmosphere that is good for creating new ideas
- Time limitation (in this case) fosters the speed of thinking.

20.3 - The 2nd work day

Our theme was "Buying behavior in groceries"
The ideas flow started with the "tree" as an analysis tool. Below is the outcome:

After that, the tool of Logic Thinking was employed into the process. We ended up with a bunch of sub-elements deployed from the previous analysis (the tree):

We finally combined all of the "available resources" to make a mind-map in which we found how the actors in this industry connect together.

The highlight points of the workshop:
- Colours is good for relaxing while working! (we enjoyed decorating the tree, did not matter how it looks by the end)

- Simplicity can be friend with effectiveness. We worked very fast and smoothly with the chosen tools which can be considered as very basic.

13.3 - 1st work day

On friday 13th we met at Handelshögskolan vid Åbo Akademi and tried to create a phenomenon out of Time Trek.

Here are our results that were created together with group FINPACHA.

ACTORS MAP:


Time Trek with some added features that would make the trek more pleasant:

3 service design tools

TOMORROW HEADLINES

Design tool as ‘tomorrow headline’ is used in order to understand the customer attitude to company’s product/services. By using ‘tomorrow headline’ designers create a fictional article in newspaper or journal by projecting the company in the future and investigating what impact product/service might have on a target group.  In other words, designer try to create (design) estimated future. 

By doing this exercise, designers ask themselves a question how new product/service will be presented and what reaction it may cause. Moreover, managers should answer questions such as 'What does it bring new value to?', 'What does it make less desirable?', 'What does it bring that was redundant?' and ' What would be the negative effect when pushed to extremes?' (enhance, replace, revive, backlash) Also, it give a chance to how to develop and maintain relationship with a target group. 

The future can also be communicated using videos, comics, or any other form of visualisation.

ROLE PLAYING

Role playing is one tool for examining the service with the involvement of a group of people. The scenario of offering the service to customer will be made. Each participant will perform one role in the play in which the person who play the role of user/customer will experience the service and then give his/her idea/feedback about it. The same scene will be performed several times with the rotation of actors in each scene. Therefore, the service designer can understand the different reactions of different users/customers.


There are some tips for using this tool effectively. First, the situation and the service need to be explained clearly from the beginning, so that the participants can understand it and start thinking about it before playing their role. Second, the play needs to have enough details to make it like real. Third, the people involved need to try to put themselves into their assigned role, try to imagine that they are really in that situation. Fourth, the roles have to be changed between actors so that the same problem can be seen from different perspectives.

ACTORS MAP

Actors map is a service design tool where all the actors in the system are presented in a graph with their mutual relations. The graph is built through the observation of the service from a specific point of view that becomes center of the whole representation. For example, if the selected subject is the user, the graph shows all the actors starting from their relations with him.

Actors map provides a systemic view of the service and its context. It makes it easier to design processes dealing with or involving extended social networks. In particular the map reveals what actors are involved in a given network, how they are linked, how influential they are and which goals they have.

Kick off @Forum

On Friday 6th March we met in Turku city centre in Forum. Forum has a perfect location, but still it's empty. Here's a video of our ideas to improve Forum's spirit and to get people in!