How We Got To An Idea That Won $10,000

How we obtained to an idea that won $10,000 | By Amit Singh It was the most effective of occasions, it was the worst of instances, it was the age of knowledge, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. This is the journey of an idea from its inception stage to winning “Thought for Food” Challenge. It all started, when considered one of my associates heard about a competitors referred to as “Thought for Food Challenge”. It is an innovation competitors, which aims to develop breakthrough ideas to feed 9 billion individuals. It supplied $10k to the winner and free Europe journey to all the selected finalists. At that point the ignorant me, noticed it as an opportunity for a free Europe trip. Little did I know that it will become such an integral a part of my life. So, we went forward and fashioned a four member staff of diverse people who had gained a number of competitions prior to now. Now, all that was left to do was think of an thought to Well, that appeared easy sufficient. All we ha d to do is, determine a means to try this. Surprisingly, it turns out â€" it is a very hard downside to unravel. Our complete idea technology process may be summed up in 5 phases: The rules of the competition had given us a starting point. Atleast we had a generic drawback to unravel. Our sector was “Food Security”. Maybe, you gained’t have this, when you are serious about an thought. Then, your first step could be â€" to determine a generic drawback to resolve. Thereafter, we started by making a Idea Garage. A simple spreadsheet document wherein we had concepts organised by 2 filters: 2. Competitors whom we may get inspiration from From round 50 specific issues on Food Security, we shortlisted four we needed to sort out. Ours were: Then, we started out by following Stanford D School’s Design Thinking framework. As now we had a short thought of what particular issues we may do, we embarked upon the Empathize phase of Design Thinking. We talked to individuals who could be sta keholders in Food Security. We checked out ourselves and what abilities we had (and that eradicated In-vitro meat, as no one in our group had a biotechnology background). We developed tough research on each of the ideas. Now, we discussed every of those studies, their professionals and cons, feasibility and our staff’s expertise. We had been engineers so we knew, we wanted to build a product and not just present a service based worth proposition (nicely, this modified later). Result of this brainstorming â€" we knew that we were going to deal with the issue of lack of storage solutions by constructing a pre-fabricated storage unit. Now we had a imprecise concept about what we wanted to do. What exactly? We didn’t know. So we went forward in attempting to determine that. Because mere people, we already had a biased concept of which features our solution ought to have (although we had not talked to our clients/market until then). Initially, we imagined our product to be this. We r esisted the urge to go forward and construct the product. We thought we should outline our thought additional. We went ahead and talked to fruits and vegetable distributors, people who operated refrigeration devices, our professors who labored in similar area. We wished to include Lean Methodology ideas as early within the product growth cycle as potential. Infact it's due to incorporating feedback from our stakeholders, we heard about new options like â€" pre-cooling and compelled air-cooling, which had been revolutionising the best way storage was done. We used Business Model Canvas to outline our enterprise mannequin. It turned out to be a fantastic brainstorming train. This is how our initial BMC appeared like: This is the place issues got ugly. We talked to lots of people about what they considered our idea. Some were optimistic. Some have been adverse. Some mentioned it might by no means work (and we requested why?). What we have been lacking, was a structured way to validate our thought. We appeared a couple of of our options: Because we were an offline answer, constructing a Facebook or Google Adwords campaign to measure demand was not going to work. So we selected to do a complete offline survey. We prepared a questionnaire; talked to lots of farmers. Visited their farms. Talked to them about their problems. Talked to retail chains. Understood how horticulture supply chain works. We received to know that possibly our product was too pricey for particular person farmers. We knew that something needed to be done. Now that we knew that something needed to be carried out. We went forward to determine â€" what? Every particular person we talked to had his own opinion/recommendation to do things. We didn’t know who to listen to. This is when we decided to vary our elementary bias. We went ahead, and altered a product primarily based worth proposition to a service based mostly value proposition. It was a very exhausting factor to do; however we knew it was the right thing. This modified our whole business model. But, made our answer extra scalable and possible. It decreased sales cycles and gave us extra freedom. We went forward and did a pilot testing to see if the brand new business model actually works. Well, it did. Now that we had a strong business model and a pilot take a look at to prove that. All we had to do is â€" communicate it. Few of the issues we stored in thoughts while doing this: And this, is how we did this â€" Tools we used: We didn’t really felt much need for a project management answer like Asana, Trello or Basecamp. But, our group size was simply four people. (The article initially appeared on Medium as written by Amit Singh) Enter your email address: