Last Friday, NCSH26 trooped down to the busy Jingan District after work for the first Speaker Series of 2017. Making ourselves comfortable in Chinaccelerator’s cosy office space, we were treated to a night of design thinking and fantastic facilitation by the Principal Consultant at Inly LLC, Alec Walker. Alec introduced us to the novel concept of design thinking, which we learnt was a general problem-solving method. There are 2 parts to it – first, come up with a compelling enough problem and second, come up with options before narrowing it down to a smart, and most viable option to make it a compelling solution. There are 5 steps to design thinking: 1. Empathise Empathise with your user group. While this is the most time-consuming and tedious step, it is also the most important. Observe your customers. Focus on what they do and what they say. Taking note of subtle actions can give you great insight into users’ preferences. Besides observing, this can be done through interviews, surveys or trying to think from a user’s perspective. 2. Define Define the problem, awareness and desire. First, isolate the problem you want to solve. Next, for each problem identify the number of people facing that problem (i.e. market size) and among that population, the number of people who are actually aware of the problem. This seems pretty obvious, but it is important that people are aware of the problem or you will have to spend twice the amount of effort to educate your market. Finally, ascertain the number of people who have a desire for a solution to this problem by assigning a scoring matrix to awareness (yes/no) and rate of desire (1 to 10). Multiplying the scores together will give you a number that indicates the market size for your solution. 3. Ideate Firstly, go for quantity and remove all filters! It’s a sure-fire way to come up with whacky and crazily creative ideas, but be sure that when you filter them out, the remaining ideas remain independent and relevant. Second, remove egoism from your ideas and adopt an open mentality ready for exploring different hypotheses. When you try and fail, you learn. Because with every failure, you are making progress. 4+5. Prototype and Test Yes, we’re cheating by combining these last 2 steps together. But prototyping and testing are extremely intertwined. You have to focus on one idea and take it seriously like a science. Identify the most likely thing to fail, test it and see if your hypothesis was right. If it fails, you learn. If it does not, pick something else. Both ways, you learn and move on. Although we were all pretty tired from a long week of work, it was an extremely engaging 2.5-hour long session and we had a lot of fun with the unique activities Alec had planned for us. NPNT – so here’s us having some good ol’ TGIF fun together. Learning about design thinking through these activities was fun, but Alec was such an inspirational talker that he left us thinking about these 5 questions not about design thinking, but about entrepreneurship in general even after the event.
1. What problem are you solving? Make sure your problem is a real and huge one that needs to be solved. This is the number one question from investors and judges. 2. Do you need to reinvent the wheel? Design thinking is useful, but you don’t have to use it for EVERYTHING. Don’t overthink and use what you need. 3. How important is innovation for a startup? Innovation is easily THE buzzword in this era of startups and entrepreneurship. Radical innovation, incremental innovation, and phrases like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, FinTech. But must every startup be based on innovation? Well, Alec says yes. Existing players already hold market share while solving an existing problem. Startups that want to break into the market and compete for market share will find it tough to compete without adequate innovation. 4. Do you really want to think like everyone else? In the past when Henry Ford asked what people wanted, they said they wanted faster horses. If you think like what everyone else is thinking, it is highly likely you will come up with a set of solutions no different from everyone else. 5. What is the idea most likely to fail? Start with it to save time. Ideas are easy, and it should not matter at all if they fail. You can easily generate more ideas. But be careful with what you’re testing. Time, energy and money are the 3 most important resources, be extremely careful with them. Ultimately, we learnt that failure should never deter you. To quote Alec, “the best thing about applying design thinking is that you always learn something”. As we take a short break for CNY, here’s a little note-to-self to fellow batchmates to keep our eyes and ears peeled for inspiration, and to never stop hustling.
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A batch countdown party is mandatory, of course. We held a countdown-cum-housewarming gathering at one of our houses. The New Year’s Eve was filled with much fun, laughter and FOOD. Everyone brought something for the potluck party and we found some serious chefs among us! We’re talking homemade chocolate gingerbread cookies, curry chicken and chunky mushroom soup. With a (paper) cup of Moscato in every hand, we did the cliché countdown together, ending in a resounding “HAPPY NEW YEAR!!” that probably annoyed some of our not-so-enthusiastic-about-New-Year local neighbours. Chinese New Year is definitely a much more hyped up affair here compared to the Gregorian calendar New Year. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say we partied the night away because nobody went home until a whooping 4am! BUT. Our New Year celebrations didn’t stop there. After spending the 1st of January recuperating from the lack of sleep, we went on a day trip to a strawberry farm on 崇明岛 (Chongming Island) on 2nd January. The whole journey took about 2-3 hours before we finally reached a huge farming area. Chongming Island is famous for its vegetable produce so we found a large, empty restaurant and had our fill of various vegetables there. Even our anti-vegetable friend Douglas approved the vegetable dishes! We found the strawberry farms – albeit with some initial struggle – and got straight to picking. The rates we got were 30RMB per 500g to pick our own strawberries straight from the greenhouses, or 25RMB per 500g to buy from those that the farm workers already picked. Most of the ripe strawberries were already picked by the farmworkers, but you can still see some hints of red if you look close enough. We asked for plastic bags after picking our fill of strawberries...but were told that the ENTIRE BASKET was for us! You can imagine how odd we must have looked back on the Shanghai Metro afterwards. Needless to say, we got some curious looks with our hot pink baskets of strawberries and strange English accents haha. And the strawberries...they were the BOMB. Think crunchy, juicy and just the right mixture of sweet and sour. Totally worth the long journey and muddy greenhouses! The New Year celebrations were made so much more meaningful spending it together with our batch mates. I guess you can say we are each other’s family away from home. Since we ended 2016 and started 2017 right, here’s to an amazing year ahead! *Cheers*
P/S: Batch 27, we’re looking forward to seeing you soon too! |
SHEN
申城 (shen cheng) is an ancient name for Shanghai.
As a group of NUS and NOC students who are in Shanghai for a year-long internship programme, we have named our student organisation as SHEN (Shanghai House of Entrepreneurs). Archives
November 2017
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