Our Innovation Design Workshop in London

Trip to London

April was a very busy month for us when it comes to events. We were a partner of the DMWF Conference (we made an event application) and were the organizer of Innovation Design Workshop at Huckletree (we did an awesome training). So a few days in London gave us a lot of excitement, and work of course.

We set up the journey at 4:30 am on Saturday, so it was quite a painful experience. But luckily we managed to wake up so early and start our adventure. After accommodating, a short sightseeing tour, Pho soup and a few drinks we prepared ourselves for the next days.

DMWF Conference

On Monday morning we went to DMWF conference to learn, exhibit and meet people. DMWF addressed digital marketing and social media issues across two tracks:

Content & Social Marketings,
Data, Disruptive Tech & UX

I won’t tell you much about the conference, as sessions were rather trailers than deep insights. But what I want to share is an observation about a strong direction marketing is going in. Most of the topics were built around collecting and processing data. And most of the exhibitors were companies selling tools for publishing and analytics. Although you often hear about analytics, there is a lot of inactivity in that field. Seeing companies gaining competitive advantage based on processing data gave me a different insight. So if you don’t do it yet, don’t think your rivals will wait for you.

Innovation Design Workshop

But let’s come back to our busy schedule. On the third day, we hosted Innovation Design Workshop at Huckletree coworking space. We came together with engineers, designers, managers to work on real-life projects. Using design thinking methods we wanted to gain a bird’s eye view of the experience we’re all providing to our customers. Our facilitator Selin Yigitbasi helped us to go through the innovation process – we asked a sequence of questions trying to find the right answers. We worked in three-person groups in order to come up with new ideas for our existing offerings. Each group worked on a chosen brand and tried to define:

persona of the chosen brand
persona of the target group
common elements for both personas
problems to solve for the target group
problems prioritization
ideation of solutions
evaluation of solutions
prototyping one solution

Topics we covered can be presented by the following diagram: The creative part which I am always keen on was not the only part I enjoyed. The prioritization matrix was something which I found very useful – it helped us to focus on the biggest win (which sometimes is difficult).

In the era of strong competitive struggle and a large amount of information, innovation seems to be the final bastion of differentiation. It is good to revise if things that we are focusing on are the things which are the most important for our business. We don’t always have time to do it right, so such a workshop is a good stopover from everyday tasks.

I’m adding persona schemes, which you can find useful for your projects.

File 1 – nameFILE

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