The objective of this project is to go through one iteration of the idea-to-demo loop. It need not result in a successful outcome. It is perfectly fine to discover that your assumptions associated with the challenge or solution were incorrect.
This project is to be done in teams of 4. The team will make a presentation on Friday, April 12 in class and submit a report on Tuesday, April 16 on Moodle.
Please follow the steps below. For each of the steps, please present the results of each of the sub-steps.
1. Choose a challenge area and a technology: Each participant will write his/her own Pain-wave-waste areas. The team will choose a pain area or a waste area to be addressed and a technology trend to be used to address the chosen challenge area. Please mention how the possibility of prototyping for the chosen technology area was assessed.
2. Find the adoption maturity of the technology: Identify whether the chosen technology is in (a) innovators (b) early adopters (c) early majority (d) late majority or (e) laggards stage of adoption lifecycle. Mention the reason.
3. Frame a challenge: Frame a challenge associated with this challenge area using a metaphor. Identify an attribute associated with the metaphor. (e.g. photography as simple as clicking a button. Here the metaphor is "clicking a button" and the attribute is "simple")
4. Generate solutions: Apply systematic inventive thinking techniques to generate 3 ideas in response to the challenge framed in step-3. Mention which inventive thinking method is applied to generate each idea. Use the chosen metaphor to generate at least 3 ideas in response to the challenge framed in step-3.
5. Select 2 ideas: Select a low-hanging fruit (easy to implement at low cost) and a high-impact but possibly (but not necessarily) high-investment idea. Between these two ideas, select one idea for the next steps (6-7-8-9-10)
6. Create storyboards: Create a storyboard for the idea selected in step-5.
7. Build paper models: Build one paper model for the idea selected in step-5.
8. Design a 1-day low-cost experiment: Design a 1-day low-cost experiment to test the feasibility of a feature of the idea. Please mention (a) hypothesis (b) activity (c) success criteria and (d) cost of the experiment. The experiment should be doable in 1-day.
9. Testing the prototypes: Show the storyboard/paper prototypes and the design of a 1-day experiment to the following stakeholders (1) 2 potential customers and (2) 2 technology experts. Get feedback. Mention whom you interviewed and the feedback. A technology expert could be a student working in the area, a professor, or a friend working in the industry.
10. Learning: How would you proceed further? Would you change the challenge statement? Would you choose a different technology? Would you pick a different solution? or would you refine the existing solution? Give a brief justification.
