It’s time to write about our last study project together with Innovation&Business students. Writing is such a good way how to save an experience for a reference with a high level of details 
The course we are taking now is called Participatory innovation - one of major user-driven innovation approaches. And this project was a complementary part to lectures and discussions. We had to 1) find a real company, 2) get an innovation project and 3) fulfill it with methods that we were taught of. Project was meant to be 8 weeks long.
To sum up we worked together with company Dimaps on their route planning software. We made reasonable ideas and scenarios which were based on our user studies. However, there were some problems with inner motivation, communication (different mind-sets) and in our case – presentation of results. There is one of the scenarios above that we have extracted from user studies and co-ideation events.
In this project I have learned:
- There is need for one leader in a team, who helps to make teams’ decisions in a way that everyone is satisfied. That person needs to be charismatic, knowledgeable, a fast-thinker (to evaluate everyones’ ideas) and has to have a big picture in a head. Such person must not lose composure. By having many people who are willing to be only the one leader, makes decision making hard. Having bad or no leader in team, results in low motivation and incoherent group-work,
- Team of 7 was too big in our case, just 4 people were working,
- Presentation is how others perceive your work, good presentation means for most that group had a good work together (and it is mostly true),
- It is important to be quick in capturing and interpretating data. Aim could be having 1-2 user-study videos per day, that would help to better and faster co-ideate in a group leading to richer ideas,
- There is little value in having a shallow look at user-study materials (videos) and interpreting them 1:1. Question why they are doing that is important in order to create good user-centered products and services.
- I have got a good insight in participatory innovation,
- Consensus based group-work is slower, especially if members have different mind-sets, that requires to discuss each decision.
I am going into more details below.
