My Practical Innovation workshop scored very well last week with Sepnet 2nd Year Physics PhDs, so I was asked to share more about what went on: Positioned for those who wanted to change the world through innovation; commercialise an idea or just find out more about business, participants told us this was a “…fun, engaging, informative, interesting and interactive…giving a realistic view on how to propel a product out of the lab…”
Using case studies, we sketched, discussed, laughed and work-shopped through four questions:
1) What problems we could solve for who?
2) Could these be at the heart of a sustainable, repeatable and profitable business model?
3) What is the biggest and riskiest assumption we are making?
4) How could we go about finding evidence to support this assumption before spending time and money on solution development?
These big-physics-brained-participants embraced both the step by step approach and the iterative discipline of gathering incremental evidence before taking big steps. I certainly do fancy a career in new product development for many Physics PhDs I meet – as entrepreneurs or within a company. Feels like we’ve more to do here!