PowerBridgeNY
Helping Clean Tech Startups Bring Their Ideas to Market
Role: Innovation Consultant/Account Manager/Project Lead/Workshop Producer for ORGE Innovation
Innovation Consultants:
Eileen Ellis, Carlos Teixeira
Project Lead:
Workshop Producers:
Eileen Ellis, Janson Zhi Yuan Cheng, Aya Jaffar
Knowledge Brokers:
Cameron Hanson, Ricardo Dutra Gonclaves, Azul Ceballos, Nate Binzen, Stephanie Lukito, Nelson Lo, Amanda Ramos, Takao Umehara, Sarah Abiya, Guilherme Curi, Carolyn Concepcion, Isabella Brandalise, Sneha Srinivasan
Designers:
Yuchen Zhang, Jessica Corr, Steven Huang, Anze Zadel, Miodrag, Sichun Song, Andrea Burgueño, Sooji Han, Maria Claudia Narvaez, Dan Formosa, Elliott Montgomery, Christian Schneider, Antonio Iadarola
Clients:
PowerBridgeNY provides company development support for early-stage clean energy technologies coming out of institutional research laboratories in order to validate and scale these technologies. PowerBridgeNY is the result of a collaboration between two clean energy proof of concept centers funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, as well as large utility companies. The collaboration is led by Colombia University and NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, with support by Brookhaven University, Stony Brook University, Cornell NYC Tech, and City University of New York.
ORGE Innovation Consulting is a design-led innovation consultancy that provides organizations structured methods to help them stay innovative. ORGE Innovation offers services in the areas of Knowledge Brokering, Open Innovation Consortium, Design Strategies, Project Framing, Innovation Capacity Building, and Leadership Mentoring.
ORGE Innovation Consulting worked in collaboration with PowerBridgeNY on an ideation and innovation workshop for newly accepted startup entrants as part of their Bootcamp. The partnership between ORGE and PowerBridgeNY aimed to introduce design strategies to the clean tech startup world and brought designers, mentors, investors, scientists, and experts together to help improve the technological concepts and develop new business models to create new products to be tested in the market.
Open Innovation Consortium
ORGE linked its network of design professionals to PowerBridgeNY's own subject experts and mentors to assemble multidisciplinary teams who worked with startup members to create new systems and concepts.
Project Framing
The workshop was created to hone participants' unique viewpoints and direct them to particular aspects that comprise the first steps of user-centered product and business development.
Knowledge Brokering
Workshop facilitators acted as coaches throughout the workshop, working with teams through each activity flow to finesse the knowledge input into coherent end concepts.
Design Strategies
Frameworks were designed to extract information from participants in a visual manner, to help designers and non-designers create an even ground for communication and work.
Innovation Capacity Building
Startups were given specially-designed frameworks which were worked on within the workshop, but also were intended to be added to as additional experimentation progressed. Various experts also learned firsthand ORGE's way of ideation and process thinking.
Leadership Mentoring
By helping the startup members think through their offerings visually and with a methodology that emphasizes constant testing and experimentation, they are able to use the tools to constantly improve and innovate upon their ideas.
Workshop Structure
Deconstruction
Since the startups admitted to PowerBridgeNY's proof of concept center had technologies that were purely lab tested and scientifically complex, the first step was to describe the technologies simply so that the designers within the workshop, as well as the general public, could understand the end product.
Stakeholder Mapping
In order to frame their product offering, the various stakeholders who would be involved in the life cycle of the product had to be explored. This not only included users, but also the customers, sellers, suppliers, resource providers, etc. This framework was constantly revisited and added to during the workshop.
Personal Imagery, Key Player Profile, and Day in the Life
Choosing and understanding a number of key stakeholders was the focal point of the series of frameworks, and building the personalities, preferences, and struggles helped the startups better develop a product that would fit into their customers' lives.
Concept Ideation
A new product was created from the lab-tested technology, and the concept not only explored the content of the product, but also its potential revenue stream, cost/benefits in the market, etc.
Value Proposition
The most important deliverable of the workshop was the definition of the new product's value proposition, which was unpacked into smaller parts in order to be more easily explained to others, especially investors and the customers.
New Use Cases
Prompted by novel industries and scenarios, startup participants were better able to design new features and revise their old product designs to possibly fit these new situations.
Innovation Insert
A list of new aspects to consider were given to the startups, based on the book, 10 Types of Innovation. These new innovations were compared to the current status of the product and applicable ones that would improve the concept were inserted.
MVP Plan
To have a workable plan that they could continue past the workshop, the participants mapped out a plan to produce the first Minimum Viable Product.
Key Player Scorecard and Assumption List
A way of checking the strength of their concepts was designed, to emphasize that the product was created for a certain number of stakeholders and was based on a set of assumptions.
Role-Specific Tasks
Project Leader and Account Manager
I was the main client contact and worked with them directly to negotiate the timing, strategy of the workshop, and its envisioned role as part of the startup bootcamp. I also led our main production team as well as trained them on how to produce and execute the workshop and train others since it was their first workshop leadership experience and I was on location for another ORGE project that was completed at the same time.
Workshop Production
The workshop production was completed by Aya, Janson, and myself. My role included working with the client to determine timing and budget needs, acquire knowledge brokers and designers to participate, and train Aya and Janson on how to create a visual workshop planner, how to train the facilitators, what is required for a workshop space, etc.
Workshop Design
Janson, Aya, and I all worked together to create a workshop flow and activity design from the overall strategy that I had planned with the client, and we all took equal part in the creation of materials.
Workshop Materials Creation
The workshop materials were designed by Aya, Janson, and myself first on white board, then completed on Adobe Illustrator.