The assignment: Create a product for people who are at home due to Covid-19.

Context:

For my master Strategic Entrepreneurship at the Erasmus University, we got many lectures dedicated towards understanding the customer and designing products to improve the life of the customer. For this assignment, we needed to create a product that could improve the lives of people in some way. This was in the time of the first lockdown and many people were working at home. My team and I decided to design something for people working at home and create a product to make their situation more pleasant.

Process:

Analysing the problem: we discussed our own problems with working from home and what we heard from our friends as well. We found that most of us found that we had too much screen time and a lack of exiting new things to do. We found that we wanted to do new hobbies at home, but did not know how to start something new, and found that buying necessities for new hobbies to be a barrier.

Therefore, we created a DIY hobby kit, so you could try new hobbies.

The Business Model Canvas

To test the assumptions of our business model, I created the 7 hypotheses based on our assumptions and thought of ways to test this using both qualitative and quantitative customer research.

• The hypothesis:

  • H1: More than 65% of interview participants would like to create something tangible in their free time.

  • H2: More than 65% of interview participants feel unproductive and would like to have a new hobby to do from their homes.

  • H3: More than 65% of interview participants feel that creating something online is not as productive as creating something tangible.

  • H4: More than 65% of the interview participants are bored fast when starting something new, so they would like to keep changing their hobbies once in a while each year.

  • H5: More than 65% of the interview participants spend more than 3 hours in front of a screen time per day.

  • H6: More than 50% of the interview participants  would be eager to spend money to have a new hobby.

  • H7: More than 50% of the interview participants would like to make space in their house for something new (like a tools desk, a painting canvas, a brewing kit or something similar)

  We did in-depth interviews and created an online survey.

From this knowledge, we found out that people want to engage in new hobbies and value tangibility in new hobbies, however they do not prefer creating something tangible in comparison to something intangible.

Also, almost everyone spent more than 3 hours behind a screen each day. We also found out that people do not get bored with new hobbies easily like we expected, which was important for our model to work since we offered new hobbies to try every month.

Through open conversations in the interviews about the working from home, we found that new hobbies was not much of a concern for most people and a more nice to have feature.

However, we noticed that people with kids all expressed great concern for their kids. They talked about their kid’s having a lot of screen time, and having less tangible hobbies for their kids.

We knew that this was a problem that parents cared about a lot. We tested this with a few more interviews with parents. Furthermore, we also found that parents were afraid for their kids to decreasing their development due to lack of good online schooling and that the parents wanted to engage with their kids’ development in a fun way. Many parents were bored with a lot of the games they were playing with their children.

We created an empathy map to further understand the working parents.

From here we created a new business model, with DIY kits that are both interesting for parents and children and develop the skills of their children by age appropriate challenges.

To increase our understanding on how to develop a hobby kid, we did research into the type of games and hobbies for kids

Ginsburg, K. R. (2007). The importance of play in promoting healthy child development and maintaining strong parent-child bonds. Pediatrics, 119(1), 182-191.

• Play is essential to development because it contributes to the cognitive, physical, social, and emotional well-being of children and youth. Play also offers an ideal opportunity for parents to engage fully with their children.

• Important aspects of play:

  -         Active play in which the child has an active role to do instead of passive play or entertainment (eg, television and computer games), where the child is only consuming.

  -         “True toys” such as blocks and dolls, with which children use their imagination fully, over passive toys that require limited imagination.

  -        Allow children to explore a variety of interests in a balanced way without feeling pressured to excel in each area

We would have used this knowledge to develop the first hobby kits, however the research was the assignment and there was no time to develop the actual kits.

Learning points:

Next time, I would do the in depth interviews first to get a broader understanding of the potential customer’s wants and needs. In this case, we would have sooner reached the conclusion that parents working from home had a strong desire to interact with their children to develop their skills. In addition, the questions in the survey were not neutral enough, which might changed the results. I should have checked the work before we used this survey, and adapted it accordingly.