Introduction
One of the parts of the FutureFounder Brazil program was the Hackathon which means a group activity that includes technology and social involvement with the purpose of creating a solution for a challenge. Moreover, We had to work with the Design Thinking methodology (DT) that aims to promote innovation and organization that can be able to provide reflection and free expression. Overall, our challenge was to try to solve a current Brazilian problem, we choose the environmental impact area, something that Brazil constantly is facing, because of that, we selected a specific problem: the huge environmental impact of red meat consumption.
The Product
Our first challenge was selecting which problem we wanted to solve, thereby. Our research started from the general problem - environmental impacts due to red meat production. The problem statement was only defined in the Define stage of Design Thinking, which is the second stage, as you can see in the picture below by B.H. Miller, 2017.
Empathy: In the DT process it is crucial that you understand the people for whom you are designing, so in the first stage we agreed that young Adults (18 - 30 y.o) would be our Target Market. This way, we conduct our primary research interviewing and emerging in the target customers’ life. In order to do that, we developed ten questions that would help us understand if the decreased meat consumption was caused by the awareness of meat production-related environmental impacts, or the increasing meat price.
Define: the second stage is when you synthesize your empathy findings into insights, and scope the problem statement. Therefore, we analyzed the data from the survey and we created our customer persona, Valentina. Based on “her” needs, the Unmeat Team defined the problem statement and the insights, as you can see in the figure below.
Ideate: This phase aims to generate radical design alternatives, explore a wide solution space-large with ideas that can help you build prototypes. With our problem defined, it was time to be creative, combining convergent and divergent thinking and drafting our ideas. First, each one of us had two radical product ideas. Then, the Unmeat Team selected five main ideas of all eight, most of them were very similar in principle, such as a creation of an app to give advice or even schedule Valentina Meals.
Prototype: It is the phase where you get your ideas and explore them out of your head into the physical world, this way you can test functionality. Therefore, our process was to create a prototype that would fit both the customer's needs and our ideas. Using the DATA iteratively, we combined our ideas into the ICOMO APP. The Unmeat realized that the ideal prototype was an app that brings multiple features in order to attain the user's needs. The app uses an AI focusing on providing easier, cheaper, and healthier solutions to help people decrease their meat consumption. Thus, ICOMO's four principles are to be Healthy, Affordable, Convenient, and Minimum Environmental Impact. Allows us to create Weekly Meal Plan, personalized diet, offer recipes without meat, Automatic supermarket list, cashback, discounts, Collect data and calculate the environmental impact, and the social community. Our app incentives the user to reduce their meat consumption through challenges and rewards. The figure below presents our prototypes.
Test: “Testing is the chance to get feedback on your solution, refine solutions to make them better, and continue to learn about your users”(Both, 2020 p.5). In order to test our prototype, we conducted a questionnaire with almost 25 people. Handling those results, we were able to find solutions to improve and solve our app deficiencies by integrating the feedback of implementing the money restriction as a feature in our app and letting the rest of the features as they were, improving the diet idea to become more attractive and interesting for the possible customers.
FutureFounder Demo Day
Finally, with the prototype already developed and with all the new changes, we had to create a slide presentation, called pitch that It is necessary to show all the creative process of our product and also try to sell the idea considering the profit aspects, group team characteristics, previous survey, and competitors. To do so, the FutureFounder team invited Sam Magee, from Harvard’s Lemann Center for Entrepreneurship and Creativity along with Fabio Hauagee do Prado to give us feedback on our pitch and product. During the presentation, we were asked about why we chose Valentina’s customer persona instead of a kind of person that does not change their eating habits, therefore, I had an opportunity to explain more about the research process that motivated our choice. In addition, we received precious advice for Icomo APP, one was to reach our potential customer in places where people would like to change their daily habits, like Yoga classes, the second one was to try to focus on a Healthy market, in other words, bring advertisement about how Icomo would be good for health.
Key Takeaways
I believe that working with DT is challenging and at the same time laborious, however, is an important process to develop a solid solution and avoid some human bias. Therefore, for those who would like to try it, it is important to prioritize time management and a multidisciplinary team to aim the diversity of ideas and also innovation, in addition, when we talk about Brazilian issues, it is important to look at how the different dimensions are connected and how historic and complex they are. After all, I noticed how important have a good work team is, where everybody is able to participate and contribute with your skills, something, that fortunately, I had with Unmeat Team.
Thank You.
Gustavo Pasqueta is an International Relations undergraduate student at the prestigious São Paulo State University (UNESP). He is the co-creator of the Pod-RI podcast and is also participating in FutureFounder Brazil. Gustavo loves movies and considers himself a "pseudocult."
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