Ten hours over – 14 more to go

What happened in those 10 hours? Innovation coach Julia explains the time-line of the marathon:

‘Our marathon is built up in two different but equally important phases: analysis and ideation. Until now our teams used their brainpower to dig deep into the challenge they have gotten from our company partners.

Of great importance in the analysis phase is to clearly understand the customer’s needs. For this reason, our teams left their desks to go out and interview possible customers. (We try to teach our teams beforehand, that every successful innovation matches a concrete job to be done for the customer. Without a need behind it, an innovation will not find acceptance on the market.) With that knowledge in the back of their minds, our teams are now, after a short break to clear their heads, ready to jump into the ideation phase and create different solutions.'

Copyright: Harald Tauderer

‘The customer interviews had a great impact and really made a difference’, the students said in unison. The interviews broadened their horizon, for instance without interviews it would have been hard to imagine and figure out what is important to older customers. A good example for this is the topic of autonomous driving: whereas younger people seem to have high trust in new technologies, older target groups are more concerned about privacy and safety issues.