It was great pleasure to participate in the workshop on March at Stanford GSB of Me2We event with Silicon Valley Design Thinking Club (“SVDT.club”) together with EPAM Systems through our Capstone Project called “Design Thinking Sandbox”. After starting my Stanford GSB LEAD Corporate Innovation Program started from 2018 March, I had an opportunity to take part in voluntary project called LEAD Capstone project, led by Joe Anthoney with an idea of utilizing what we had learned throughout the program. This includes various courses including Design Thinking: From Insights to Viability and Business Model Analysis and Design.
Throughout our LEAD Capstone Project, we had decided to form in groups of five members to start our “Design Thinking Sandbox” Project to streamline our design thinking process so that people can use the platform anywhere at anytime. In order to prototype our business model, we had a privilege to organize workshop event with SVDT.club and EPAM System. The content of the 4 hour session was shown below provided by different tables led by each facilitators:
Content
Over 60 participants who had attended the workshop had divided into 8-9 members per table who will rotate with each topic guided by each facilitators to experience the design thinking steps starting from Research, Ideation and to Testing the Prototypes below.
1. Research (40 Minutes): Topic of how can we improve the passenger at San Francisco Airport
2. Ideation (40 Minutes): Topic of improving the welcome area of Kaiser Permanente
3. Test (40 Minutes): Topic of testing 2 types of mobile application that helps support people who want to donate their kitchen cabinets and appliances to Habitat for Humanity ReStore
4. Test (40 Minutes): Topic of testing 2 prototypes of Design Thinking Sandbox, which is a platform that helps Entrepreneurs/Employees who wants to start their own business
Takeaways for Design Thinking Sandbox Testing
During our consideration of business model, I was lucky to hear from Misha Bykov and Pavel Azaletskiy whether we wanted to participate in Me2We workshop event by SVDT.club to test our prototypes. This was a fantastic experience for us hearing from over 60 participants, Stanford GSB LEAD program alumni with valuable feedback. As we go through our design thinking process of our business model, we had drafted two personas we wanted to test.
1. Tom is an entrepreneur. He is passionate about building his great idea into starting his own business. He needs an easy way to validate his ideas and gain the skill set to start his own business.
2. John, our entrepreneur who works in Silicon Valley, needs a project workspace with best-in-class design thinking templates, tutorials, communication tools, project file capability, calendar, task management, and notepad to help launch his / her idea.
By explaining each prototypes step by steps, we have gathered important feedback from Feedback grids, including 1) Likes: what they liked about, 2) Criticism: what changes they would like to see, 3) Questions: what questions did it make you ask, and 4) Ideas: what new ideas did it inspire you?
We would often have some new ideas which you would think you may want to test, but before joining the Stanford GSB LEAD Corporate Innovation program, I simply had no one to share the idea with others. After joining the LEAD program and meeting the great mindset of people, I had gained a great resource of members to brainstorm any new idea by using our concept of design thinking methodology and business model design other courses which we had learned throughout the program. Our Design Thinking Sandbox is still at infant stage, but we were able to gather great feedback so that we can fine tune our prototype. I had strongly felt that people who has any idea which you would like to test will benefit taking part in this form of design thinking workshop.
I would like to thank Juana Catalina Rodriguez, Scott Butcher, Wayne Cheung and Katie Nicholos to initiate this “Design Thinking Sandbox” project starting from October 2018, Misha Bykov , Pavel Azaletskiy and Julia Somoylenko in SVDT.club, Joe Anthony who had initiated the LEAD Capstone project, Johnathan Lupo and members of EPAM Systems, and the faculty members of Stanford GSB LEAD Program including Professor Stefanos Zenios, Professor Haim Mendelson, and Marineh Lalikian, Director who had inspired me in many ways.
