Blog 8: Project Reflection

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: