Project Reflection

Hey everyone! After a while, I am back on the blog. This blog post will be my last one for the course but I might think to continue blogging on my own. Today, I am going to provide my reflection on the design-thinking project. I will try to reveal as much information as I can within the outlined structure to help you make the course and the project better.

To begin with, this project was full of interesting insights and small discoveries. It is rather difficult to outline one major concept or skill. But if I were to pick one, I would choose the generative research techniques. As most other business students, I was well aware of the traditional segmentation-targeting-positioning approach. However, I did not know that the companies go that far to create personas. Similar to that, I had some prior experience with survey research, focus groups, and interviews. Ethnographic, netnographic, and generative research seemed to be buzzwords that were underdeveloped and difficult to apply. I used to support the opinion of one of this project’s research participants: “These techniques are impossible to evaluate. Hence, all the insights you are trying to gain, will be lost in these maps, diagrams and sentences you gave me”.

This project helped me change my mind. The first extensive exposure to generative research techniques helped me to gain a better understanding of the concepts. In particular, while working on the second stage of the process “Emphasize Part II”, I learnt who to structure these tools to answer the big research questions. I learnt the guidelines for application of generative research methods outlined in the lecture on gaining insights. Specific examples were very helpful in enriching my understanding and getting inspiration for the project’s research design. Finally, I learnt how to evaluate the insights gained using generative research tools and turn them into actionable information. This was probably the major lesson I learnt during the project. With new design-thinking experience, I have changed my mind to become a supporter of generative research techniques.

Visualization is the next skill/concept that I have learnt thanks to the design-thinking project. I have been always a supporter of the idea that appropriate picture is worth a thousand words. However, prior to the project, I believed that visualization was the field of designers and not managers or entrepreneurs. I also had a feeling that I could create something visual but I lacked creative ideas and tools to implement them. The book “Business Model Generation” outlined the importance of storytelling for business and the course book “Designing for Growth” suggested storyboarding as a visualization tool. Using these insights and the technique, I volunteered to create a video for the first project update (“Emphasize Part I”). I was excited to test whether I could record my series of sketches and create a good-looking video. The implementation was challenging, though. Despite the fact that I wanted to become an artist till I was six, I cannot say that I am good at drawing. Therefore, the sketches were less visually appealing than my mind was visualizing them. Nonetheless, it was as good experience. You can take a look on this video below. Since it was largely assumption-based and was created prior to the actual research stage, it should not contain any proprietary information that the project's client might consider as data leakage.

In addition, the fifth blog post, though not directly related to the project, provided another opportunity to practice my visualization skills. Creating infographics in PowerPoint is definitely not the best way to create such documents but it was worth a try. Although my attempt resulted in a mix of infographics and infauxgraphics, I learnt the distinction between them. I used these insights to enrich the third project update (“Define”). And I felt that I learnt from my blog mistakes while creating visuals for the update. Finally, I had a chance to visualize the prototype of our solution. Using the tools discussed in class (namely, AppCooker and several screen recording programs), I aimed at creating a tutorial/promotional video of a high fidelity prototype. The tools turned out to be very useful and I can envision using them later in my career if I decide to stay in the mobile app industry.

Despite the overall positive experience and great lessons learnt, there are some minor points that could be used to improve the design-thinking project in the future. In particular, I believe that the abundance of generative research techniques played a trick on me. I completely agree with Professor Walls that we learn by doing things and the best way to familiarize ourselves with different tools is to apply them in the real life. It would be a perfectly valuable argument if the application of the tools did not depend on other people, namely research participants. Encouraged by the positive feedback, we included nearly a dozen of different research techniques into our research design. This way, we ended up demanding considerable commitment from the research participants. Not all of them were willing to commit substantial amount of time to complete all of these tools. Different timing for research tools also did not help much. Some of the participants gave their consent to take part in the whole project but only completed the discussion log and the shop-along. This created additional difficulties for the research team, since we had to find a replacement within very short time period. In the end, these high demands and expectations lead to concern and slight disappointment.  

The things did not go as they planned and I felt that certain artificial constraints might be useful. I would have really appreciated if the feedback contained a warning with regard to the number of research techniques applied. In addition, encouragement to focus exclusively on the most interesting and promising techniques based on the expert's opinion might have been beneficial. I might be wrong with this suggestion since I do not have substantial teaching and research experience. However, I believe that this way, expectations management could be improved which might result in enhanced overall learning experience.

I believe that this suggestion has close connection to the last part of the blog post, my emotional state during the project. I would like to say right from the start that I was very satisfied with my team. Random team assignment was definitely a good idea and gave me an opportunity to learn from different people with different experience, expertise, and opinions. I was lucky to be in a hard-working team and really enjoyed working with my teammates. Experience with the instructor was also very positive. All of my questions were clarified in an expert and prompt manner. I felt that this guidance significantly enhanced my understanding of the class concepts. The openness of the instructor to spend time to clarify challenging and complex issues was also very helpful. The team and the instructor provided a very good combination for good learning experience. Apart from the above mentioned slight disappointment with participants’ willingness to complete all research steps, I am very satisfied with the project. Looking back, I believe that I have taken a lot of tools and concepts from this project. Now I feel much more creative and innovative than I used to. In a word, design thinking has become an integral part of myself. And this is a good sign and my personal measure of a successful experience.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Ethics of Insights

Hey everyone! After a while, I am again active on my blog. Today I am going to guide you through my understanding of the research ethics. This blog post is a good opportunity to explore my thoughts, ideas and perceptions. Presented ideas will be highly subjective and sometimes even controversial. However, I feel that this approach can generate interesting insights.

To begin with, there is no unanimity among academics and practitioners with regard to the ethicality of gathering information and insights. Some researchers, including Valentino-DeVries and Davis, believe that greater amount of data about consumers will result in more successful customization efforts. Others, such as Kozinets and Rayport, think that tracking consumers, though acceptable from the legal standpoint, cannot be tolerated in research and business. Both views have numerous supporters and opponents, but I tend to support the position of the ethics defenders. I think that research and business should self-impose limitations with regard to the amount and types of data they collect and analyze.

To provide grounds for my opinion, I would like to describe major propositions of Kozinets and Rayport and explain my reasons for supporting their standpoint. In the book “Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online” (the one I am also using for my paper), Kozinets devotes time to determining ethicality of the netnographic research. Although in the world of big data and social media there is a temptation to use observation data without any constraints, the author strongly believes that research should not cross the ethical borders. For a netnographic study to pass the ethics barrier, several criteria should be present. A researcher should fully disclose his presence, affiliations and intentions to the online community. He or she should also ask for a permission to observe behaviors of online community members and get informed consent to use the gathered data. Finally, researcher should cite, anonymize and credit research participants. Only if the research program meets these requirements, it can be considered ethical.

I feel that this approach to conducting online research finds a reasonable balance between research goals and respecting privacy of data obtained from research participants. Although full disclosure might result in resentment of community members that are being studied, a researcher will get these insights prior to conducting the study and will avoid disappointing online users. Suggested tools are aimed at building trust with community participants and might result in more comprehensive research results.

Rayport (2011) goes a bit further in his propositions and elaborates on the guidelines for companies. To avoid alienating customers, companies should follow a set of four ethical principles. First, they should be clear in their practices and let users know that their data is being collected. Second, users should be in control of the privacy settings that should be intuitive and simple. Third, companies should adopt a privacy by design attitude. They should protect data and make customer privacy a guiding principle. Finally, companies should reward customers for using their information. This could be done through either better customization or additional rewards.

I consider Rayport’s guidelines to be very reasonable, concise and actionable. They do not require considerable investment but demand cultural change. For instance, many search companies might have problems with the third principle, since the latest initiatives include appearance of customer photo and name on the product reviews. Users should invest additional amount of time to find the hidden check box in the privacy settings to protect the privacy of their data. It might also indicate that the company has failed in terms of the second principle. Therefore, though I support these guidelines, I understand that their implementation might be challenging.

I feel that my personal experience supports this concern. I have several personal examples dealing with data privacy for research and business purposes. Whenever I am conducting survey research, I try to avoid asking sensitive information if it will not help me in reaching research objectives. I believe that much of the information could be inferred instead of directly asked. For instance, there is little value in asking consumers about the importance of product attributes. This will result in extremely biased results that could not be used as a reliable estimate. A better way would be to ask customers about their beliefs and infer the importance of the attributes or factors. This way, I will be able to avoid soliciting sensitive information without sacrificing the quality of the analysis.

Another example is associated with data collection for business purposes. While working for a mobile app developing company, I was a strong advocate of the data privacy. I always felt very skeptical about the developers’ attempts to push for even more permissions. I could understand and justify the need to access phone's storage and network. However, reasons for a dictionary app to access the phone calls are beyond my understanding. This information is not a prerequisite for a successful functioning of the app. Hence, it represents an excessive demand from consumers that might feel puzzled if asked for such permissions from an app. Since the company cannot make use from these data anyway, we decided to exclude such permissions from the list.

On the other hand, the ethical issue should be considered from the consumer’s point of view. As a customer, I feel that some amount of information should be revealed to tailor offerings to meet my needs. Nowadays most consumers are bombarded by special offers, discounts and other promotional messages. It has become extremely difficult to pay attention and spend time on sorting the useful offerings out of the bunch of completely irrelevant messages. In most cases, all offerings and promotions go directly to a trash folder without even being opened. I am aware that I might lose a potentially beneficial deal by adopting this approach but I just cannot lose time sorting things out. Therefore, I and probably many other consumers are prepared to share some information to receive truly customized and useful promotions (Valentino-DeVries, 2012). However, for this to come true, several conditions must be met.

First, companies should inform consumers about a possibility to tailor offerings in exchange for information. Hence, the consumer should be empowered to decide whether he or she accepts this offer. This approach will be more challenging for the companies than currently employed methods, since the acceptance rate might be low. However, I have no doubt that it is more ethical and better suited to creating credibility and trust between the customer and the marketer. Rewarded opt-in scheme is a good instrument to increase the acceptance rate while maintaining credible long-term relationships with customers. In this regard, I completely agree with Roberts (2012) who considers informed data collection in exchange for rewards a morally acceptable practice.

Storage of the data is the second condition that is crucial for me to let the company gather information about myself. I strongly believe that any information that could identify a person cannot be stored and should be immediately deleted if gathered. In a way, my reasoning follows the guidelines suggested by Valentino-DeVries and Singer-Vine (2012) with respect to personally identifiable information (PII). However, I strongly believe that anonymization of gathered data is not a way out of the problem. Currently, we often experience leakages of private data as in case of LinkedIn in 2012 and Adobe just recently. I am not aware of the ways these companies stored the data but I assume that they might have anonymized them. Nevertheless, the data was stolen and de-anonymized. Although I agree to share information to the particular company, I have not authorized data transmission to any third party entity. This fact motivates me to support Roberts (2012) that storage of personally identifiable information (such as images) should be prohibited.

In a word, I believe that companies and market agencies should conduct research in accordance with the suggested ethical standards. They should inform participants of their activities and the intended use of the gathered data. Although consumers are prepared to share some information, researchers and companies should self-impose a limit and avoid gathering and storing personally identifiable information. Non-PII gathered data should be properly protected. This way, we might find an acceptable balance between research/company goals and consumers’ desire for customization.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Thoughts on Creativity

Hey everyone! It is my second post this week but it is going to be completely different from the first. By the way, feel free to check out my previous post on visualizing insights and possibly obtain inspiration for your own work. As usual, you could use the current blog post as another opportunity to gain more insights about my personality, my thoughts and ideas. Today, I am going to guide you thorough my perceptions and experiences with creativity, both individual and organizational.

I would like to start my post by providing my definition of creativity, as it could answer some of your questions upfront and eliminate possible misunderstandings. I define creativity as an ability to see unusual solutions and opportunities even in the most common situations and traditional things. I believe that creativity is a skill and not a personal inherent trait. That means that a person working in practically every sphere can be creative. All he or she needs is unconventional but structured approach and environment that caters creativity and serendipity. In this definition, I agree with Jonah Lehrer (“How to be creative”) and Todd Henry (“Accidental Creative”) from the class readings.

Using the described definition of creativity, I believe that I have some experience of being especially creative. The creative process comes with hard work and is associated with ebbs and flows. I usually feel creative after I framed the problem and started to envision the possible solution. The ebbs of creativity come with implementation challenges. To overcome these challenges I pay great importance to relaxation and daydreaming. I used to be skeptical about the usefulness of such short breaks during the day. However, since the amount of information and number of tasks are constantly increasing, relaxation becomes crucial to generating creative ideas and protecting myself from burnout.

I will give you an example of my creative process. It seems to me that I was rather creative at the Iron Entrepreneur Case Challenge. The solution that I came up with was below the surface and required time and creative effort to find. The structured creative effort was extremely helpful. I spent nearly a third of the time allocated to the solution on framing the problem. It helped me to focus my efforts on finding and developing the optimal solution. I suggested that the technologies of artificial intelligence should be used for automation of call centers. At the time of Case Challenge that seemed to be quite an unconventional and feasible approach that was rewarded by the jury.

Now, I feel that it is time to discuss organizational creativity. To avoid misunderstandings, organizations are the groups of individuals and organizational creativity for me is the way to enhance the creativity of the individuals working in an organization.

I have worked and interned for several companies that tried to create a culture and environment that caters creativity and innovation. Most of them are high-tech companies meaning that innovation is the core component of their business activity and market positioning. I will outline the steps these companies have taken to enhance creativity and describe my personal experiences with creativity while working there.

Some companies did extremely good job in creating places within the offices where employees could come together, take a break and exchange ideas. Nowadays, unconventional office layouts could be considered to be a must-have in the high-tech industry. But even based on these tough standards, the described companies were perfect. Below I will present a couple of real pictures for you to get an idea of this office space.

I actually miss these pouffes where we sometimes used to develop new promotional strategies.

The next extremely important area that had direct influence on creativity is work schedule. One of the companies I worked for introduced a flexible schedule. You could work whenever you want if you deliver results. Since I was not an early bird, I really appreciated the opportunity to sleep an additional hour or two. I typically came around 10-11 am and was still one of the first in the office. This approach to work schedule enabled me to increase my productivity by providing me a certain degree of flexibility within the boundaries (as suggested in “Accidental Creative”).

Another best practice in inducing organizational creativity is a sense of community. I am talking not about a large community of all employees but rather of smaller subgroups based on interests. I like cycling and I was surprised to learn how many other cyclists worked in the company. We were spread all around the company’s departments but still managed to create strong network ties. The company even organized a bike trip for our sub-community. When working in such a community, you are eager to give back, work more and come up with creative ideas in a prolific way.

Unfortunately, I also had a bad example of an environment that impeded creativity. In my case, it was the way my ideas were treated within the organization. I really appreciate constructive feedback as I believe that it helps me refine the project and, hence, improve its quality and feasibility. I am definitely not a person with a “no critique” attitude. Therefore, I was disappointed by an organizational practice when ideas were disregarded or ended up undeveloped due to a bureaucratic organizational structure. At the beginning, this approach made me work harder to come up with better solutions. However, gradually, I started to lack incentives to deliver more than directly asked. I believe that this was an indication that the change was needed.

The next interesting aspect of creativity I would like to cover is the relationship between group and individual creativity. As mentioned earlier, I believe that every individual could be creative. It is just a matter of practice and environment. However, to ensure sustainable creativity output (just as sustainable competitive advantage) individuals need help, support and critique from others. In our world of specialized professionals, we are required to collaborate to enhance the output of our creativity efforts. In this aspect, I completely agree with the reading “Brainstorming does not work”.

However, not every group could be more productive than the sum of the individual creativity efforts. Having had numerous meetings discussing useless things, I feel skeptical about the group creativity and suggest an alternative approach to group creativity within an organization.

I believe that every member of the group should do a thorough preparation before the brainstorming or other group idea generation activity. This way, all team members could contribute the most out of their specialized area to the overall result. Discussions and debates will be more productive and team members will be less likely to sit back and let others do the work (as suggested in “The Rise of the New Groupthink”).

Then, during the idea generation session within a group, participants should be provided with basic boundaries (let’s say budget) and freedom in all other aspects. Preparation for the previous stage should result in well-thought, criticized and refined ideas. I am aware that the number of ideas under this method might be lower than by the traditional techniques. But I believe that organizations should look for quality and not quantity. Moreover, a careful framing of the problem and more efforts spent on this activity might result in better, more creative and unconventional outcomes.

The last point with regard to group creativity goes hand in hand with the topic of organizational creativity, discussed earlier. I believe that suggested approach depends heavily on the geographical proximity of people in the group. In the multinational corporations, this recommendation is extremely difficult to follow. However, telephone conferences utilized now as a primary source for group idea generation activities pose additional constraints on creativity. They do not include body language, non-verbal signs, and lack supporting material. Video-conferences might be an acceptable trade-off to capture the missing elements and advantages of a diverse group within an organization.

Different types of creative problem-solving approaches are another interesting subtopic within the bigger discussion on creativity. I do agree that creative problems are different and often require different approaches. Sometimes, the best way to start solving the problem is to think about it in solitude, whereas in other cases, group discussion is essential to a great solution.

There is no doubt that that the creative processes might be different and each individual should pick a process that best fits his or her perceptions. Intuition or general sense could guide one’s decision, which process to apply. However, I feel that the general framework to approach creative problems is a better guide for our decisions. In my understanding, this framework is quite universal in most cases. I feel that if we start with framing a problem, move on to considerable preparation and then discuss the initial findings in a diverse group in an innovation-friendly environment, the likelihood that our efforts are fruitful is higher. This way, we will take the best from every creative process.

In the end, I expect creativity just as any other skill to improve with practice. The more you practice a structured approach to generating creative ideas, the more skilled and experienced you become. This is definitely not a universal solution. There will always be geniuses who follow their own path. But for ordinary people, just like me, reliance on the sense and intuition in creative process is not always the best way to follow. Structure and effort are the two components that could help us succeed in generation of creative ideas.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Visualizing Insights

Hey everyone! This blog post is a good opportunity to explore my visual and creative side. You should not expect a lot of written text this time, as I will focus most of my efforts on visualization of the insights.

As a source of the quantitative data for this blog post, I used a summary of a Mintel report “Frequent Travel Programs, US, August 2013”. The report summary briefly outlines three major and connected parts: General Issues, Specific Issues and Implications. You might want to take a look on this source of data. If that is the case, feel free to download the issues and insights section of this report from Mintel database.

Using the lecture slides on visualizing insights and chapter 3 from the book "Designing for Growth" as sources of inspiration, I decided to visualize the data from the report in the form of infographics. I feel that this way I will be able to present a big picture of the research outcomes and at the same time guide you through the relationships between them. The outcome of my work is presented below.

This infographics is aimed primarily to provide you with a big picture of the report insights.

To get a better feel of the relationships and links between different data and sections, take a look at the embedded pdf version of my infographics.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Personalized Topic Report

Hey everyone! This blog post is another great opportunity to learn about my interests and passions. This time I will guide you through my own brainstorming session. A well-developed idea for a semester paper should be an outcome of my endeavors. I am extremely excited to see what I will come up with. I hope you will also enjoy it.

As briefly discussed in class, I am interested in writing about netnography. In its essence, netnography is “online ethnography”, a technique that analyzes behavior of people online, primarily in user communities and forums. Although netnography is generally believed to make primary use of text and context analysis, nearly any website (including YouTube, Flickr and Blogger) could serve as a data source for netnographic research. In fact, someone could be conducting a netnographic study on my blog while you are reading this post!

With the development of this tool, netnographic research became more and more focused on identifying patterns, norms, rules and relationships in online communities. It embraces everything that could be described by the term “culture”. This could sound a bit too broad and scientific. I also got a similar impression. Therefore, I decided to dig deeper and narrow the application of netnographic research to a specific topic.

Zooming in the topic brought me to the issue of lead users. This term is used to describe a sub-type of innovators in the typical innovation diffusion model. All lead users have two distinct characteristics: first, they are ahead of trend and needs of mass-market consumers, and, second, they expect to benefit a lot from a solution to their problem. Lead users are present in many markets but could be found most easily in the sphere of sports goods and sports communities. Identification of lead users in other industries could be a challenging task. I know that there is a number of traditional techniques for identification of lead users (like pyramiding and broadcasting). Recently many researchers started to view netnography as another method for lead user identification. Hence, I would like to apply netnography to identification of lead users. Still quite broad for a topic of the semester paper.

Going even deeper required me to choose the industry where I would like to look for lead users with the help of netnography. This was the easiest part. I am fascinated by telecommunications. I interned at a telecommunications company and collaborated with telecommunications providers during my full-time job. This industry should also have a decent amount of lead users due to the consumer nature of its products and services.

Now I have to combine these three components together. Thus, I envision the following name of my topic: “Netnography as Lead User Identification Method in Telecommunications Industry”. The restrictions on the scope of the paper encouraged me to narrow the topic even further. I believe that I should focus on creating a plan for a netnographic research focused on lead user identification.

The structure of the paper that I envision now should include (1) introduction, (2) brief description of netnography, lead users, application of netnography for lead user identification, and connection of these terms to the class concepts. Then, I will focus on finding and (3) describing the most likely distinct characteristics of lead users in the sphere of telecommunications based on the secondary research. As a central part of the paper, I would elaborate on a (4) set of recommendations for a netnographic lead user identification project by a telecommunications company. This section will include different aspects of the netnography's planning stage (e.g. research question, methods of data collection, limitations and further guidelines). Finally, I will (5) conclude the paper. This structure is still tentative and I am sure that I will revise and refine it during the course.

I feel that it is crucial to explain why netnography, lead users and telecommunications are so attractive to me. A short story might be helpful. Last year I was working on a project team that tried to identify lead users in a diaper industry (yes, Pampers and Huggies offer highly innovative products). Despite more than 60 patents protecting a modern diaper, many innovations in this industry come from users that are dissatisfied with the performance of the current products. I could perfectly remember how difficult it was to identify these grassroots innovations. We were struggling and nearly desperate. We applied pyramiding and broadcasting (interesting but not very effective traditional techniques) but still failed to find the traces of lead users. Till the time when we accidentally found a post from a user in an online community. Upon analysis of the post’s content, we could not believe that we found someone that could potentially be a lead user.

Sometime after the project was finished, I accidentally learned about netnography. I was fascinated by the structured approach to online communities it proposed. I could imagine how much time we could have saved if we applied netnographic research right from the start! Now I would like to learn more about netnography as a lead user identification method in a context of the industry that I am eager to work for, telecommunications. I am glad that Customer Insights class provides me with an opportunity to tailor my time to something that really makes me tick. I am not sure whether I could find motivation and, most importantly, time to learn about this tool if this opportunity was not in-built in the course design.

I feel that my topic perfectly fits into the concepts of the customer insights. To be more precise, several of the readings in our course emphasized the importance of obtaining customer insights. The article “Insights Into Customer Insights” mentioned that valuable customer insights rarely come from quantitative research. Both HBR articles (“Turn Customer Input Into Innovation” and “Better Customer Insights – in Real Time”), and Kellogg Microsoft Office case study outlined the ethnographic research as a method for gathering customer insights. Ethnography was specifically mentioned as one of the methods for indirect acquisition of customer insights in the lecture.

Since netnography is a qualitative method that emerged from the ethnographic research, it could increase the effectiveness of gaining insights online. Netnography goes in line with the principles of the Emphasize Part: it helps researchers observe user behaviors, engage with users and immerse (experience things that users experience).

I also believe that lead users are a valuable source of customer insights. These users by definition are ahead of trend. Therefore, many of their inventions could later satisfy the needs of the mass market. These users are unlikely to be reached by traditional methods (surveys). They are more difficult to find and require application of sophisticated ethnographic and netnographic techniques. In case of lead users, I could see only one significant difference from traditional customer insights research. Researchers ask lead users for both problems and solutions, whereas with ordinary customers mostly problems should matter. To understand characteristics of the lead users better, I am planning to devote one of the paper’s sections to creating a persona for a lead user in the telecommunications industry.

This all makes me believe that application of netnography to lead user identification could help companies become a truly customer insight driven organizations.

I have also thought about the literature base for the paper and come up with a couple of ideas. Since Robert V. Kozinets is the inventor of the term “netnography” and created the theoretical foundations for this research method, I consider his book “Netnography. Doing Ethnographic Research Online” (2010) a must-have for this project. I am perfectly aware that this paper is not a book review. Therefore, I am planning to use the book just as a source of theoretical fundamentals and principles that will guide my research proposal. The book also provides interesting details on different stages of the netnographic research process that are sure to be helpful in designing my research program for a telecommunications company.

In addition to the book, I identified several articles that provide information on lead user identification using netnography. The academic article “Netnography as a Method of Lead User Identification” by Belz and Baumbach (2010) builds upon theoretical foundations of the netnographic research and connects them to lead user identification. The article also provides empirical evidence of lead user identification using netnography in the food market. Specific examples of wording found in the online community the researchers analyzed might be helpful in determining the concrete set of lead user characteristics. Researchers also briefly described the planning process that could be used as an inspiration for my own netnography research proposal.

Finally, the article “In Search of Innovation” by Bessant et al. (2012), WSJ touches upon the importance of lead user research. It does not directly provide any information regarding netnography but presents the typical methods applied to lead user identification nowadays. This article also has interesting information regarding lead users as a source of customer insights. Overall, I am planning to use this article to verify my impressions about the close connection between lead user research and course concepts. This article could also serve as a starting point for identification of lead user characteristics in a telecommunications setting.

Unfortunately, I could not find the versions of the book and the first article that are freely accessible online. The article is available at EBSCO. I have both of them and would be glad to provide them to you if you would like to take a look. The second article could be found at this link.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Generative Research

Hey everyone! After gathering some insights about my relatives and friends (see blog posts “Empathy map” and “Journey map”), it is high time to reveal some information about myself. I hope that the insights that I am going to share with you are not too shocking or unpleasant.

I have to admit right from the start that I have several items that are very important to me. To be more precise, I could hardly imagine my life without them. Credit card, water, phone, laptop and glasses are among these items.  I have attached two pictures for you to take a closer look at this “stuff”.

Some of them are rather obvious (water in Austin’s climate or credit card) but some might seem a little more mysterious.

My glasses play an extremely important role for me. I have bad eyesight and have to wear some kind of eyesight correction devices. After nearly fifteen years, my glasses have become to me more than a simple eyesight correction tool. They are an element of my style. And sometimes I feel that they make me feel a bit more confident in critical situations.

The other item that has a huge impact on my life is my laptop. It has accompanied me in every one of my trips: Malaysia, Argentina, South Korea, and throughout Europe. The importance of the laptop (and Skype) grew considerably since it is currently the only tool that allows me to communicate with my family in Russia.

Apart from the mentioned items, I have several things that are important to me but not vital to my existence. Not to keep you waiting for too long, they includes health, environment, United Nations, soccer and ID (passport).

I have volunteered for the United Nations for nearly three years and I know the value that this organization brings to the world. Having changed my career path I still support UN and care about all its humanitarian efforts and youth programs, world heritage and prevention of war conflicts.

Health, which is the other thing mentioned, might seem quite a vague term. I am very conscious about my health and sport plays an important role in my life, I have placed a picture of my sneakers as they help me keep fit while jogging and preserve my feet every day when I am going somewhere. Of course, jogging is not the only way I keep myself healthy – I also enjoy mountain skiing, swimming and cycling.

Passport might sound as an extremely weird thing to care about. But let me explain my reasoning for putting it on the list. I am young and in a foreign country. If I lose my passport, I will lose my identity :) I will not be allowed to enter any bar and more generally stay in the country. That makes a passport an important item that should be with me every time I am going out.

The next area that might contain interesting insights about me is my digital ecosystem. This could sound complicated and academic but in reality, it is quite simple. In fact, these are the ways I use to obtain news, information and any other online content.

My digital ecosystem includes three major areas: search engines, online newspapers or news portals and social networks. The picture below should provide a structured view of my ecosystem.

Online editions of nation-wide newspapers are my primary source of social, economic, and business news. For me it is important to keep up to date with the world’s events. Whenever I read the news (which typically happens several times a day), I try to think about potential consequences of, say, a political speech on the investment climate and businesses. It is always interesting to understand the facts and analyze the journalists’ assessment of events and form my own opinion about them based on several standpoints. Although this might be time-consuming at times, I go through two or three news sources before making comments about an event or news. This approach helps me remain open to different points of view and assess a situation in the best available manner. I also believe that online resources are less biased than the traditional TV or newspapers. Therefore, using online news portals allows me to develop my critical reasoning skills and protects me against brainwashing of certain news providers.

Social networks, primarily blogs, represent the next source of information that I use daily. Compared to online news portals that offer generalized facts, blogs provide me with updates regarding issues of my particular interest. I am an active follower of several blogs on LiveJournal and other blogger platforms. The range of bloggers and topics that interest me varies considerably. For instance, I am fond of several travelers’ blogs that post pictures of distant places with a short description to them. These blogs expand my knowledge of different countries and their places of interest. I often use the information gained at such blogs as a starting point when planning my vacation in a foreign country and creating a list of places to visit.

But I am also interested in gathering information about my hobbies, such as skiing and biking. Blogs and communities created around them help me follow the recent trends and rent different alpine skies whenever I go on a skiing vacation.

Finally, as many other representatives of the Millennial Generation I am actively using search engines. No matter whether I am looking for electronics, patents or presents for my friends, I typically go on Google first. This search engine offers one of the biggest results selection within an incredibly small amount of time. I am well aware that the recent developments in terms of targeted search might result in biased search results. However, using Google has become a true habit that I am unable to give up. And, to tell the truth, I do not really see necessity for doing so. With an exorbitant growth of world’s knowledge and available information, the only way to capture a fraction of this knowledge and get through the noise associated with it is to use web search. Search engines have made my life easier and thanks to that fact I consider myself a very loyal user of this online information channel.

Now let’s move to my typical weekday. To stir up you interested to this topic, I have prepared a small diagram (attached below). It describes the phases of my typical weekday and contains insights regarding types of information I “consume” during these stages. I hope that my handwriting is clear enough to read. If it is not the case, feel free to post questions about the diagram in the comments.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.

Journey Mapping

Hey all! Glad to be here again. Today I am going to create a journey map for the group vacation of my friend Paul.

Paul is 23 and we did our undergraduate program in Russia together. Expression that best describes Paul is “study hard and party hard”. Paul was great at teamwork. We conducted together several projects and he often came up with brilliant ideas. But when the partying time came, he was able to paint the town red nearly every time. And his group vacations were typically as crazy as his parties. Paul was very kind to tell me about one of the summer trips he organized.

The original goal for the trip was to take a rest from a difficult semester in a group of nice like-minded friends. As Paul recalls: “it was more like a tradition to go somewhere with friends in summer. We went on a hitch-hiking tour last June and it was awesome. For us it was clear already in March that we need to do something this summer, too”.

But this time the planning process looked a bit differently compared to previous years. Recognition of the need to start vacation planning happened during the birthday party of Paul’s girlfriend, Jess. Her best friend was showing the pictures from her last vacation in the Caribbean, when Jess exclaimed that she would like to go to the seaside. Paul was flabbergasted. He was planning something completely different than lying on a beach for two weeks. This trip promised to be less exciting than previous ones right from the start. Interviewing Paul via Skype I could perfectly see his facial expression. And this seemed to be the first of the several moments of truth that I have noticed during this interview. Such moments are essential for the creation of a deep-dive journey map (for further details, take a look at Designing for Growth, Chapter 4) and I was glad to capture them.

Let’s go back to Paul’s reaction. Though he was not completely satisfied with this suggestion, he did not want to spoil his girlfriend’s party and mood. As a result, the group vacation turned into a trip to the seaside.

Paul started planning the trip with friends by checking upon the disposable funds for the trip. Paul was working part-time during that period and had some money available. He was well aware of the summer trip and started saving early enough to cover an average trip’s costs. The initial check of funds confirmed Paul’s expectations. He was content that he could go on this vacation without borrowing any money from his parents. Financial independence was the thing Paul always worked hard for. Hence, Paul and his girlfriend could proceed to the next step, inviting friends.

Paul called his best friends, the ones he had already traveled with during several summer vacations. Although they had different kinds of obligations and commitments, all of them were able to find a two-week time for this group vacation. This way, the last two weeks of July were established as vacation dates. Paul’s girlfriend also called a couple of her friends. One of her friends (Jess really wanted her to travel with them) had already committed to an art workshop in New York for exactly the same dates. Paul’s girlfriend was certainly upset by this outcome but had to stick to the dates that satisfied the majority of the group. Paul mentioned, “I was glad she could not make it. It meant more time spent with my friends and girlfriend instead of exhausting shopping tours and dull art galleries. In the end, it was vacation with friends and not a traditional visit-all-museums-you-can trip”.

Desire of Paul’s girlfriend to spend vacation at the seaside considerably limited the list of available destinations. Paul and his friends had already visited Greece and Turkey and were unwilling to go to the same place or country twice, which created additional restrictions on the location choice. Paul remembered how desperate he was, trying to combine everyone’s preferences and funds available for the trip. In the end he just went on Google maps (present analogue of the school globe model) and picked Italy, primarily for its great, but reasonably priced resorts. Going from north to south of the country Paul considered all major resorts on the Adriatic Sea. Finally, he decided for Rimini, a city that was known for its combination of sea, clubbing and various tourist attractions. All members of the group were happy with this choice.

Since the friends have already agreed on the location for the trip, finding accommodation was quite an easy task. With the launch and development of booking.com website it has become possible to compare virtually all hotels in a city with just one mouse click. To make this website even more attractive, some hotels often provided special offers to reward early bookings. Browsing booking.com for hotels and hostels in Rimini, Paul was lucky to find one of this offers. He got a 50% discount for a three-star hotel located in a five-minute walking distance from the seaside. Also, the hotel was near the clubbing area and offered free bike rental. “This hotel had everything we needed. For half price”. I could still (after nearly three years!) feel how pleased Paul was with this hotel that offered great value for a discounted price.

With accomodation booked, Paul could move on to considering transportation options. Russia and Italy are separated by several thousand miles, therefore, the only transportation option considered was a plane. Paul used to be a participant of Alitalia’s frequent flyer program for several years and gathered the necessary amount of points to qualify for the reward flight. That exerted the major influence on his buying decision. But while purchasing plane tickets Paul experienced “the worst disappointment ever”. Just a week before Paul started the flight booking process, the airline changed its policy. Paul was now lacking several hundreds of points to get the flight. Paul was counting on this reward flight as a potential money saver. Moreover, two of his friends bought tickets earlier and qualified for the reward. Paul had to pay for the flight from his own pocket and was extremely upset about the whole flight booking experience.

The next step identified by Paul was purchasing insurance. After an injury in French Alps several years before the trip Paul never neglected buying medical insurance for vacation. This procedure is easy, cheap and could be finalized online. However, as Paul’s uncle works for a major insurance company, he decided to purchase the insurance directly at his uncle’s office. He also advised all of his friends to purchase insurance there. “It was not the matter of money or saving. I was happy to help my uncle reach his sales quota and get a quarterly bonus”, Paul recalled.

The milestone of obtaining a visa could sound weird for US and EU citizens but as a Russian you need to get a travel visa for trips to nearly all major tourist destinations. Application and visa issuance could take anywhere between a couple of days and several months. This explains the fact that Paul mentioned this step. “The whole process was usual but pretty fast”, as Paul pointed out, “we gathered all the necessary documents, printed our tickets and accommodation confirmation, and paid the application fee. Our visas were ready in just three days. Unbelievable!” The embassy issued all the documents on time and the last obstacle to the trip was removed.

The final step in the process involved planning possible activities while on vacation. Paul was not fond of booking every excursion or tour beforehand. Hence, he simply looked through the guidebooks and travel websites for information regarding good places to visit. To his surprise he found a picturesque castle and a bike route to it. “The hotel offered free bike rental. And the castle was just several miles away. A good alternative to wasting the whole day on the beach”. All of the friends agreed to undertake this small adventure upon arrival.

That’s it for today. I would be glad if you would post comments, make suggestions and provide constructive feedback. Take care and see you next week in my blog or in person.