My work throughout the semester in Design Thinking for
Business Innovation has led me to gain hands-on experience in topics completely
new to me. My time in this course has been incredibly insightful and unlike
anything else I have learned so far in business school. Throughout the team
project we worked on for Target, I felt I learned the most about two key concepts – business models and prototyping.
After completing this project, I feel I have a much better
understanding of the concept of a business model. Because of my time in
business school over the past 3.5 years, I had already possessed a general
knowledge of what the term meant. However, studying the business model diagram
and analyzing both Target and Nordstrom’s business models for different class
projects helped me gain a much more in-depth understanding of the concept. The diagram we studied was especially useful
for me. When analyzing different companies, I am now able to study their
business models from a visual lens and use the diagram to distinctly categorize
various key components of the company. During the final phase of our
semester-long team project, I gained even deeper insights into the concept of
business models through our analysis of the business model impact for Target caused
by implementation of our prototype. This section of our project required us to
extensively analyze the business model before and after a major
innovation occurred. We had to think critically about which areas would be most
impacted by a significant implantation like the in-cart child gaming experience
we were proposing. Analyzing these two before and after states of the Target
business model required a very extensive understanding of the retailer’s
business model as a whole. This was very helpful to me because it allowed me to
see first hand how different business decisions can affect the business overall
on a larger scale. Furthermore, it painted a clear picture of how seemingly
small innovations can create massive change within a large organization. I am
very grateful to have learned more about the key concept of business models through
this real-life project, and I know I will apply this deeper understanding to
many more business projects in the future.
| Business Model Diagram for Target following implementation of our prototype, the "Target Your Treasure" in-cart gaming experience for children. |
Unlike my prior familiarity with the concept of business models, I began this project with no previous experience with the process of prototyping. One of the things I have enjoyed most about Design Thinking for Business Innovation has been the opportunity to gain experiences with the prototyping process. It’s likely that I will never have another class during my time as an undergraduate that teaches students about prototyping, so I love that I had the opportunity to learn about something so new through this class. In my opinion, our time working on the prototyping section of our project yielded the most dynamic teamwork, creativity and engagement for our team throughout the entire semester working together. After spending so much time to understand our persona, it was thrilling to then leverage and apply our insights in order to create prototype solutions for our particular segment. This showed me the importance of sincerely understanding your target market on a very personal level in order to truly deliver solutions that satisfy their needs. When looking back on the semester, it has been incredibly interesting and useful to learn more about the prototype process through both the team project and in-class experiences, such as our analysis of prototypes for Coleman during class lectures. As a marketer, I know I will use this new understanding of prototyping as a means of creating innovative solutions for consumers based on the insights I gain.
While I do feel that every component of the project was
valuable and necessary in its own way, I was most confused by the research
design component. While I understand this section was needed in order to gain
insights in a structured manner, it was a very difficult task to tackle with
such a limited idea of what our main objective was for the research.
Furthermore, it was difficult to plan our research when our team had such
limited access to our target segment. Because we chose Hispanics in their upper
20s who were married with children, it was hard to have immediate access to
people in this particular segment. This made it difficult to realistically plan
out our research when we weren’t even certain how in fact we would be able to
find direct access to people who met our target segment criteria. McCombs
students have had limited experience with carrying out qualitative research
because most skills we have mastered have been in designing experiments to gain
predominantly quantitative data. With vague guidance on this section of the
project and no previous experience with the process, I felt I gained the least
value from this part of our project.
This project would not have been doable without a team. When
it came time to finally create our prototype after leveraging our segment
insights, it was absolutely necessary to have a team in order to think
creatively and generate various out-of-the-box ideas. My team members were all
incredibly creative, and we worked very well together when it came time for the
actual idea generation process when designing our actual prototype. By that point in the project, we had
established open communication with one another. This enabled us to freely
bounce ideas off one another and come up with a solution that we could all be
proud of. The biggest struggles we faced as a team occurred only when it came
time to set meetings and compile the final project. With a team of five, it is hard
to coordinate everyone’s schedules to find enough time to meet as necessitated by
the extensive depth of the project. This made things complicated when working on
our final presentation deck because we had limited time to work together as a
team since there was just one week in between the Phase 4 submission and our
final presentation. That being said, I do feel very confident in my team
members and in our final product. I feel we performed our best given the time constraints
we were facing.
Images of our prototype mock-up design:
