Saturday, 13 April 2013



Hello everyone,
I’m Team Fresh’s new member due to various factors. Here is a short introduction of me :) 
I am a senior marketing and organization and management major at School of Business and Economics at Åbo Akademi University, In the winter of 2013/2014. In the winter of 2013/2014 I will, hopefully , graduate with a master’s degree in business.
I look forward working with my new team and combine our creative minds and start working in Kunstenniemi.
Best regards,
//Alexandra 

Friday, 12 April 2013

A short compilation video of what we have done so far

So Max, Johannes and me took maters in to our own hands and decided to make a short video of what we have done so far just to sum it up a bit... I don't know if the video made it better or worse but I hope you got a picture of what we have done.






My reflection on studying Marketing research

Hola Amigos!


This weeks assignment for me to  the inno58 project was to research and gather data around marketing research so that we will have so much information ready when we hit camp Kuusteeniemi next Monday.

Because i haven’t got any marketing background i decided to start by picking up couple of elementary books from the library to study marketing research from. The first title i chose was The Market Research Toolbox (2006) by Edward F. McQuarrie and Marketing Research (1999) by Alvin c. Burns and Ronald F .Bush to get a grip of the fundamentals of market research.


From these books i have widened my my view on what marketing research basically is and no doubt these will be good books to bring to the 58h project. To get a wider angle on marketing research i also viewed some videos discussing marketing research. A nice video by an unknown author states that marketing researchers have to be as innovative as the marketing campaign designers to get a good results


I also studied some other interesting articles focusing on marketing research and innovation:
Searching for further inspirational texts about marketing research i found an interesting blog post discussing the relationship between marketing research and innovation by the pseudonym sgassee. In this blog post the writer makes a discussion around innovation and doing marketreaserches in







In this blog post brainjuicer.com founder and self proclaimed marketing “guru” John Kearon writes about innovation, marketing research and startupps.
Hope this will give some enlightenment of what i have done so far,


Max





Learning Portfolio - Isabella Seege

My portfolio can be found on: http://inno58hportfolio.blogspot.fi/

It includes all the material I have produced during the course on my own. Other material, e.g. material produced with the group has been posted on this blog or on Twitter.

See you in Kunstenniemi! :)


/Bella

Lisävahvistusta - New group member

Team Fresh welcomes Alexandra Koskiranta from Åbo Akademi to join our fabulous team.
Welcome! 
I will give Alexandra the instructions on what we have been doing and since she has been working on another assignment before, we thought it is just best that she reads everything we have posted on the blog and prepares around the topic "service design for future retail banking".

Alexandra can maybe shortly tell a little something about herself on the blog :) I will invite Alexandra to our Facebook group, give her the instructions, passwords she will need and so on...
I'll soon post my portfolio on the blog too.

Have a great weekend everybody and see you on Monday! :)


/Bella

Four steps for designing services


Marc Stickdorn (2011) outlines a four step approach for designing services:

1. Exploration 

The process seldom starts from the customer, even though the customer is often in the centre when it comes to service design. We need to understand the goals and the culture of the company that provides a service and aks some questions, whether the company knows what service design is and if the are ready for such a process. Due to the reason that co-creativity is a part of service design it is important to agree on the extent to which the service designer has freedom in the creative process. First, we identify a problem that the designer will work on. We need to understand the view on the problem from the company's point of view.  Second, we shall NOT look for a solution, rather identify what the real problem is, i.e. understanding the situation from current and potential customers' point of view. We shall ascertain the real motivations for the reason why customers behave the way they do, meaning getting some insight instead of only gathering some empirical data. The third thing to do is visualise the findings and the underlying structure of the previous intangible services which helps in simplifying complex and intangible processes.  

2. Creation


We shall test and retest ideas an concept and not focus on avoiding mistakes but rather on exploring as many as possible. This should be done as early as possible and learn as much as we can from these mistakes. Service designers tend to have an obsession with sticky notes that help them illustrate associations and relationships, visualise processes etc. during co-creative ideation processes. Since service design is iterative as well during the four stages as within one of them, they work as a visual support to keep track on this quick and repetitive approach to development.   In this stage we gather and develop solutions to the insights we got in the first stage. All stakeholders should be included; we should work  with interdisciplinary teams including customers, employees, management, designers and so on to be able to come up with a holistic and sustainable solution. 

3. Reflection


Based on the developed concepts from previous stage it is now time to build some prototypes and test these with a few customers or experts to get some feedback and  to be able to make some improvements to match the expectations of the customer. There are though great challenges at this stage because we cannot just put the prototype on the table and aks their opinion; the customer also needs a mental picture on the future service. This is where the emotional aspects of the service needs to be considered. By using storyboards  videos, photos etc. we can help to generate the emotional engagement necessary but we will still be missing the user interaction that is considered important. Therefore we shall prototype the service concept i reality or close to it, e.g. through role play. With this cost-efficient method we engage users emotionally and and elicit fun. Creating these kind of prototype situations is not always possible so sometimes we try to create is as a kind of scenery. 


4.Implementation 

Last but not least, it is time to implement new service design concepts will demand a process of change. There are some principles of change management that have to be considered.  The sequence of planning , implementing, and reviewing change are great guidelines. We should make sure that the employees understand these changes so they get a real vision on the service moment, which can be illustrated with the help of blueprints. When implementing these changes there should be support for the employees and problems need to be solved quickly and creatively. The more we invest in these earlier stages, the more likely it is for the transition to run smoothly. Last but not least, it is time to review the changes, i.e. control the success which again will take us to the iterative service design thinking.




/Bella