At Jayway we’re always interested in what’s going on in the digital space, and how we in a collaborative setting can inspire people to come up with new and interesting ideas. We currently have our eyes on what is happening within Virtual reality/Augmented reality, IoT and Machine learning.
vive-test
Open innovation workshop
Last Friday, at the <a href=”http://www.iotconf.se”>IoT conference (Ideon, Lund), we facilitated a half day open innovation workshop with the theme:
How can retail take advantage of Virtual and Augmented Reality?
We had a great mix of participants, with companies ranging from startups to larger corporations. As a greatly appreciated addition to the workshop we also invited IKEA to tell us more about the challenges they face with urbanization, how they need to find new ways to reach their customers in an ever changing digital environment and to double their turnover by 2020. All of which helped us form a very interesting outline for the workshop.
Design thinking
In great style, we kick started the workshop with Simon Sinek’s signature question “WHY?”, followed by “WHAT” and for “WHOM”.
To avoid ending up with everyone leaving in confusion and desperately searching for an aspirin, we needed to create an organised structure, dividing it into time framed activities. The foundation of our creative process is design thinking, in which we iterate through four phases; Understand, Identify, Create and Implement. For obvious reasons we only dived into the first three of these phases during the workshop.
The Jayway Design Thinking process
Personas
It normally takes quite a while to collect information and create accurate personas, gathered from actual field research. To fit the time frame we did some preparations with the personas based on information about IKEA’s actual end users, their lifestyles, and context based situations and scenarios. All in all creating personas we could all relate to, addressing the challenges and opportunities we were looking into.
An example of a persona used in the workshop.
Ideation
This open innovation workshop was limited to 24 participants separated into 4 mixed groups. Each group got to work with one persona at a time, and after the initial round we removed all the personas already used, to have them continue working with the ones not used.
Sweet spot
By the end of the ideation session each group had generated a bunch of new and exciting ideas that were clustered and then voted on. Only a selected few made the cut, the ones that hit the “sweet spot” where viable, feasible and desirable align.
Storytelling
We finished the day with having the groups to storyboard their winning ideas, and do a short presentation in form of a storyboard walkthrough, where each group presented the one solution they believed would create most value for the persona and the business.
Objectives
The objectives of the workshop was to:
- Be inspired by existing AR/VR trends and where it might be in the near future.
- Explore how challenges and new opportunities within retail can strengthen products and services.
- Generate a broad spectrum of ideas and concepts; ranging from safe to bold.
- Learn how to continue generating ideas within your own organizations.
So, how did it go?
Well, based on the energy in the room and on the incredible ideas that were presented by the end of the day, we’re extremely happy with the end result.
The participants generated many ideas ranging from quite safe and doable to really bold and challenging.
Inspiration
What would a workshop about Virtual Reality be without some hands-on inspiration?
To help get those creative juices flowing and to set the tone, we brought along a HTC VIVE prepared with some awesome demos, including the current IKEA VR Experience on Steam. People were jumping for joy, and screaming in awe… need we say more?
A big thanks to all the participants for an awesome day!
Further reading:
Writing apps on Hololens emulator
Augment your life with Hololens I – idea and planning