Last week marked the end of a local restaurant festival where patrons from all over the city were able to try out a myriad of new restaurant menus. It was an ideal experience for connoisseurs from all walks of life to celebrate fantastic food, but to also give feedback to chefs.
Cookhouse Lab provides a similar experience by creating an ongoing experience that incorporates customer feedback into everything we do.
In week 1, we focused our attention on defining what innovation meant for everyone and introduced our Design Thinking methodology. I shared in last week’s progress that a diverse team can drive innovation acceleration.
We established that each week, we will invite several customer personas to the lab, to share their pain points with us in their context. Being able to interact with customers is an extremely valuable experience, as many of our members may not have this direct opportunity in their existing roles.
During week 2, we were able to uncover several insights that led to our initial problem statement.
“Insurers don’t know how to show existing customers that they care about them.”
As the foundation for our innovative “care-based” digital experience, we went through several ideation exercises to produce low fidelity prototypes that we plan to iterate throughout the coming weeks. Working alongside our in-house designer, we further refined some of the most compelling concepts into reusable resources as we trek towards the creation of our Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
We capped off the week with an exercise using the lean startup canvas to balance creativity and innovation with business value. Surrounded by customer insight, the team debated, discussed and collaborated on completing the canvas by utilizing several Design Thinking tools and exercises.
“Great innovation concept, I’m excited to vision and create with such a spectacular group of people.” – Tim, Cookhouse Lab Member
A substantial amount was accomplished this week! Personally, it was refreshing to experience an environment where traditional competitors can work together to improve the industry as a whole. It truly emphasizes the need for organizations to physically be “off-site”, interact with peers outside of their own surroundings and have the right support and infrastructure in place to innovate effectively.
Up next week…MVP partnerships!
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