As part of my Master in Customer Experience and Innovation program, my team of 6 people was hired by Impact Hub Madrid to do a CX research into how to leverage their added value of impact and sustainability in order to offer services to different types of customers.
After analyzing the information provided, we agreed to focus on Enabling for being the most affected pillar out of Impact Hub’s pillars, not allowing the members to grow and achieve their business goals as expected.
From hereon, we followed the Double Diamond Model design process by first creating a research plan timeline that includes our secondary research (company, industry, and competition) and fieldwork (kick-off with managers; visit to 3 hubs: Piamonte, Barceló and Picasso; interviews with 8 regular members, 2 hosts (flex members), and phone interview with 1 member; and attend 2 events in Speed Dating & Classical Music).
Based from the findings gathered, interviews and events conducted and attended, we created a persona of our target audience (we named her "Monica), founders and entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses and expand their network through Impact Hub's support. In addition, we also constructed a journey map, stakeholder map and ecosystem map to better analyze the pain points, relevant stakeholders, and context of Impact Hub's members.
Deriving from the analysis done and proto-insights identified, we reframed our challenge to "How might we equip members with relevant tools and tailored guidance for them to achieve their business goals?".
Moving into the second diamond, we started the ideation process:
1. Pre-ideation
• We used the slicing the elephant method specifically attribute listing method by splitting the reframed challenge into four smaller challenges, easier to manage and to come up with solutions for. These categories are Psychological, Social, Procedural and Physical. We then came up with four different HMW questions to each category.
2. Generating Ideas
• To generate ideas on the four smaller challenges, we’ve decided to intercalate both brainwriting and brainstorming techniques. We started with brainwriting in order to get as many diverse ideas as possible and intercalated with brainstorming to balance out the level of energy in the room.
3. Adding Depth and Diversity
• After generating some ideas for each smaller challenge, we decided to select randomly some of them and use as a new starting point. We did two rounds of brainwriting to generate more ideas associated to the ones we had come up before.
4. Understanding, Clustering and Ranking Ideas
• Once we considered we had enough ideas generated, it was time to take a step back and start understanding their commonalities. In order to give the process some structure, we agreed to use the “Octopus Clustering”. With that, each member had the same opportunity to add their perspective into the emerging clusters. We named the clusters as the final step of this phase.
• After clustering and naming each of these clusters we placed them in an impact vs complexity (in relation to time, money) matrix that would help us see where our ideas stand (Quick wins, Fill-ins, Hard Slogs or Major Projects).
5. Reducing the Option
• To help define which clusters we would develop the ideas further we decided to use the “Dot voting” method and each member of the team voted for the cluster they considered most relevant. Then, with the three most voted clusters in mind, we sat down to develop further five ideas and materialize them.
From the ideation process, we came up with our top 3 ideas for our service proposals: innovation workshop, certification program, and IE challenge partnership, which we collectively called Impulsarte. These initiative programs will empower members to tackle and fulfill their goals and has the potential to maximize Impact Hub's value proposition. These programs can either work independently or be complementary to one another and meet different needs for different members.
To test our prototypes:
1. We designed a 10-week design challenge for the innovation workshop.
2. We have presented the idea of certification program to the hub members and found that in Barcelo they already do something very similar in an informal way and has not been replicated to the rest of the hubs.
3. We tested a partnership between businesses within Impact Hub and IE's master students.
We believe that the proposals presented will enrich the way Impact Hub can enable their members to grow and prosper in their professional careers by closing the gap between the right people, preparing them with the right tools, and coaching them along the way towards their goal of having a sustainable business together.
