An innovative start-up project, combining my design and business knowledge.
Innoviral was an innovative business project that was curated during my final year of study at the University of Sydney through the subject Innovative Design Studio (DECO3101). This was a multi-disciplinary group of two designers, and two business students. Throughout this project I was the design lead and project manager.
Innoviral:
March, 2020
The project aim was to develop a start-up that provided a service or product which would effectively mitigate contagious behaviours within Australia the COVID-19 pandemic. The development process of Innoviral consisted of a design process, which will be detailed throughout this webpage, and also a Business Case, which involved a business model, path-to-market strategy and other elements to showcase the business elements of Innoviral. This may be viewed downloaded and viewed here.
This following promotion film was created by myself to promote our start-up to potential investors, and provide an overview of the project.
How did Innoviral achieve this outcome?
Over an 8-week period, the group was able to go from a problem to a solution following this design process, which has incorporated several business elements to ensure Innoviral did not just develop a product solution, but create a viable business.
Discovery
Initial Research
Our initial research into the problem area centralised around several topic areas that would provide a holistic view of the current situation and how our business idea could successfully launch. By collating broad research into the problem area of COVID-19, we have been able to understand how different countries have responded to the virus through policymaking and innovation. This provided a strong overview of how our product and business will need to be able to adapt rapidly, as COVID-19 evolves. We also conducted research into existing stakeholders, user disruptors, organization disruptors, existing products and future predictions of the outbreak. Through this provided information, a broad target market was able to be identified.
Stakeholder Mapping
Due to the nature of this viral disease, CORE stakeholders include everyone. Meaning that all human stakeholders are responsible for mitigating the contagious behaviours and collectively bear the consequences. However, out of these stakeholders, specific roles may differ in the efforts to reduce the effects of COVID-19. People in lockdown, self-quarantine and remote workers are the largest portion of the population and people who are most affected and therefore listed as a CORE stakeholder. Whereas, authorities like public health professionals, police, and the government are DIRECT stakeholders as their decisions have strong influence on the actions that the CORE stakeholders need to take. Plus, retail workers and neighbours also serve as people that allow the community for CORE stakeholders to continue their livelihood. First indirect stakeholders include healthcare workers as the healthcare system depends on their capacity. Their decisions do not directly affect CORE stakeholders unless they have been related to the COVID infections.
Existing Products
The research was conducted into the many different ways in which countries have responded to COVID-19. These methods whether it be that of technology or physical products have essentially aided in the battle against this pandemic. Whether it is with the distribution of information and updates through an Application such as the one the Australian Government has created. This application not only displays the “...important health advice to help stop the spread and stay healthy and gives a quick snapshot of the current official status within Australia...” but essentially is a guide for Australian’s to keep up to date with the on-going updates on cases and symptoms.
Countries such as the USA and Korea have turned to methods of amber alerts that are sent to every mobile device as a form of “immediate and wide-spread important information”. As these virus cases continue to grow worldwide, no physical product has been created to help defeat or prevent the spread of this illness. Basic medical supplies such as masks and gloves can be used but are not completely efficient in stopping the spread of this virus.
Countries worldwide have used military force and government policies to stop social and physical interactions between people. Italy’s Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, for example, passed the “I stay at home” policy. This policy states that “All citizens are advised to leave home only for work, health reasons, and emergencies.” Furthermore, aiding into the isolation that is required for the COVID-19 cases to start to decline.
Situation Projections
Within Australia, the population recognised the severity of the outbreak in March when Australia closed its borders and began imposing strict quarantine, self-isolation, and social distancing regulations. These regulations were placed in the hopes of decreasing the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak. Elle Australia reports that “many specialists expect the virus to peak between June and August, which coincides with our regular flu season”. Additionally, in early April, NSW Police Commissioner, Mick Fuller, stated: “Quarantine will easily last for a minimum of 90 days, or roughly three months”. Furthermore, Australia’s state and the Federal Government have warned that the COVID-19 pandemic quarantine measures could “last up to 10 months with 40% of the workforce sidelined by illness or caring for family”, reports The Guardian. Subsequently, the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, warns that the disruptions could continue for “at least six months … and it could be much longer”.
With all of these overwhelming predictions, it would be a safe assumption that the quarantine measures will stay in place, and potentially become more severe, until August 2020 at a minimum. Whilst this will impact many people negatively, this is positive for our business and design idea, as there is and will be a future problem space for our solution to fill.
Defined Target Market & Users
In order to conduct remote user research, we created an online survey through Google Forms to gain a better understanding of the concerns, fears, and daily activities of people currently social distancing. Our survey reached 90+ users, ranging from university students to nurses to unemployed workers in order to gain a wider understanding of how the COVID-19 situation is affecting a diverse population of people. After collecting our research, we used both qualitative and quantitative methods to better understand and consolidate the key pain points and insights from our users. A visualisation of our key user insights was created.
Persona’s
We made a series of four personas in order to represent the different user types from our research that may use our product. Creating personas adds a meaningful human element to our design research, which will help us better understand and empathise with our users’ needs, frustrations, experiences, behaviours, and heavily impact not only our ideation but also our product development phase.
Value Proposition
Essentially, a value proposition allows for a visualisation of the business ideas and their viability. It depicts whether the products and services that the business provides meets the customer needs or solve their frustrations. The Innoviral value proposition has been curated through extensive research into our target audience and our surrounding competitors. The graph below depicts how our products and services meet our customer needs from a business perspective.
Initial Research Insights
The initial research conducted has been visualised in the following infographic to provide a visual summary of the findings.
Create
Brainstorm
At the conclusion of the discovery, a thorough understanding of our user needs existed so our concept ideation and refinement of our business idea begun alongside the initial phases of developing our business strategy.
Crazy Eight is a design methodology that can be utilised in the early stages of an ideation process to quickly develop a lot of varied ideas. We decided to use this technique as it is a great way to loosen up creative muscles and generate a wide range of ideas quickly. Here are the ideas we came up with:
Concept Ideation
This is the first iteration of our final product, the blueprint for how our product will solve the user needs identified. A personal Pandemic Pal. Out first iteration of how this could transform into a physical product was along the lines of a glove, as shown in the sketches. However, when we presented this concept to our academic staff, it became apparent that our product was going to be unsuccessful due to the lack of a defined target market. As a group, we decided to re-shape our physical product and essentially look at a larger picture of what our product needs to be to aid in ‘mitigating contagious behaviour’ within a clearer defined target audience of Australian House Mates.
Decision Matrix
In order to ensure the personal pandemic pal concept was the ideal solution, a decision matrix was implemented to solidify this verdict. Decision matrix techniques are used to define attributes, weigh them, and appropriately sum the weighted attributes to give a relative ranking among design alternatives (Kaung-Hua Chang, 2015). The use of this method is essential to weigh in each idea and to compare those with others. Four ideas were explored and analysed. As seen below are the results of which the criteria to determine which idea would be chosen as our final concept.
