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‫الجامعة السعودية االلكتونية‬

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‫االلكتونية‬ ‫الجامعة السعودية‬

‫‪26/12/2021‬‬
‫‪1‬‬
College of Computing and Informatics

Introduction to IT and IS

2
Mindsets and Practice of Technology Innovation
 1. Idea Generation
2. Need finding and Empathy
3. Prototyping and Experimentation
4. Identifying Viable Business Opportunities
Contents
 • Students will investigate how innovative and
entrepreneurial ideas come about.
• Students will understand the basics of design
Weekly thinking, including need finding and empathy,
idea generation, prototyping, and
Learning experimentation.
• Students will understand how to apply an
Outcomes innovative, entrepreneurial mindset to do
something new.
Recommended Reading
Read the following to prepare for this week
• Required Readings
• E-learning module: Mindsets and Practice of Technology Innovation Lecture and interview on Stanford Online

• Recommended Readings
• Experience Prototyping by IDEO
• Entrepreneurship book https://openstax.org/details/books/entrepreneurship
Weekly
Learning In-Class Quiz
Outcomes
Discussion - Study Questions
• Recap on E- learning Module

• Instructions
• Form a group of 3-4 students,

• Discuss study questions – 5 minutes

• Group leader can share ideas/ results of the discussion

Study Questions
• What are examples of innovative products that you use everyday? How do
these products help you? What do you find innovative about them? How
would you improve one of the products you listed? How many people do you
estimate would be interested in the improvement you envision?

• How can you tell whether an idea is suitable to pursue turning into a
business?

• Reflecting back on the journey delay in the previous module, what mindset
change(s) are needed to make a better traffic system possible?
Weekly
What is technology innovation?
Learning
Outcomes
Technology Innovation
• Innovation
• Adding extra steps of developing new services and products that fulfill unaddressed
needs or solve problems that were not in the past.

• Technology Innovation
• Focus on the technological aspects of a product or service rather than covering the
entire organization business model.

• Part of successful innovation processes include generating a wide variety of ideas and
expanding the solution space beyond the obvious.
Brainstorming
• Brainstorming is one technique for identifying numerous solutions to a given
problem in a short time frame.

• Brainstorming rules
• Defer judgment – separating idea generation from idea selection.
• Encourage wild ideas – breakout ideas are right next to the absurd ones
• Build on the ideas of others – listen and add to the flow of ideas
• Go for volume – best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas
• One conversation at a time – maintain momentum as a group. Save the side
conversations for later.
• Headline – capture the essence quickly and move on. Don’t stall the group by going into a
long-winded idea
How to set up a brainstorming session
• Recruit the best people
• Watch out for groups larger than 8 people.
• Involve people with different areas of expertise and who you know to be good
brainstormers.
• Set the stage
• Bring toys and props - related and unrelated to your brainstorm. Props can give you
something to play with and can jog your thinking in unexpected directions.
• Be mindful of seating and layout – not too far apart and facing each other.
• Pick a space where there’s lots of writing space on the walls.
• Bring lots of paper and markers –encourage everyone to use them.
• Review the rules and ask group to self enforce them
Weekly
Learning Activity: 101 Uses
Outcomes
Activity: 101 Uses
• Instructions
• Form a group of 3-4 students,

• Discuss study questions 10 -15 minutes

• Group leader can share ideas/ results of the discussion

Activity: 101 Uses
• 101 Uses is an activity to think outside the box and share your ideas with
your team.

• In small groups, each group should come up with 101 uses for old
magazines (or unused cardboard boxes, or outdated computer materials).
Brainstorm as many ideas as possible within ten minutes.

• Share your insights from the activity. The teams need every conceivable idea
their classmates can offer to approach the target number. There is value in
building on each other’s ideas and not inhibiting ideas from others.
Weekly
Learning Need finding and Empathy
Outcomes
Design Thinking
• What is design thinking?
• A method to focus the design and development decisions of a product on the needs of the
customer, typically involving an empathy-driven process to define complex problems and
create solutions that address those Problems.
Design Thinking Process

Empathize Ideate

Define Prototype

Test
Empathize

• Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The

Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context
of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do
things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about
world, and what is meaningful to them.

• Why empathize?
• The problems you are trying to solve are of a particular group of people; in order to
design for them, you must gain empathy for who they are and what is important to them.
How to Empathize ?
• Observe - observe users and their behavior in the context of their lives. Some of the most
powerful realizations come from noticing a disconnect between what someone says and
what he does.

• Engage - Also called ‘interviewing’. Prepare some questions to ask, but expect to let the
conversation deviate from them. Elicit stories from the people you talk to, and always ask
“Why?” to uncover deeper meaning. Engagement can come through both short ‘intercept’
encounters and longer scheduled conversations.

• Watch and Listen - Combine observation and engagement. Ask someone to show you how
they complete a task. Have them physically go through the steps, and talk you through why
they are doing what they do. Ask them to vocalize what’s going through their mind as they
perform a task or interact with an object.
Define

• The goal of this stage is to craft a meaningful and actionable problem statement – which is
called a point-of-view (POV). This should be a guiding statement that focuses on insights
and needs of a particular user, or composite character. Insights emerge from a process of
synthesizing information to discover connections and patterns.

• Why define?
• An endeavor to synthesize your scattered findings into powerful insights.

• Synthesis of your empathy work that gives you the advantage that no one else has.

• Discoveries that you can leverage to tackle the design challenge.

How to Define ?
• Develop an understanding of the type of person you are designing for – your USER.
• Synthesize and select a limited set of NEEDS that you think are important to fulfill.
• Work to express INSIGHTS you developed through the synthesis of information your have gathered
through empathy and research work.
• Articulate a point-of-view by combining these three elements – user, need, and insight – as a
problem statement.

• A good point-of-view is one that:

• Provides focus and frames the problem
• Inspires your team
• Informs criteria for evaluating competing ideas
• Empowers your team to make decisions independently in parallel
• Captures the hearts and minds of people you meet
Ideate

• The concentration on idea generation. Mentally it represents a process of “going wide” in

terms of concepts and outcomes. Ideation provides both the fuel and also the source
material for building prototypes and getting innovative solutions into the hands of your users.
• Why Ideate?
• To transition from identifying problems to creating solutions for your users.

• Various forms of ideation are leveraged to:

• Step beyond obvious solutions and thus increase the innovation potential of your solution set
• Harness the collective perspectives and strengths of your teams
• Uncover unexpected areas of exploration
• Create fluency (volume) and flexibility (variety) in your innovation options
• Get obvious solutions out of your heads, and drive your team beyond them
How to Ideate ?
• By combining your conscious and unconscious mind, and rational thoughts with
imagination.

• Theme: Separating the generation of ideas from the evaluation of ideas.

• Ideation techniques:
• Brainstorming

• Bodystorming

• Mind mapping

• Sketching
Prototype
• The iterative generation of artifacts intended to answer questions that get you closer to your final
solution.
• Low-resolution prototypes — quick and cheap, but can elicit useful feedback
• Why Prototype?
• To ideate and problem-solve. Build to think.
• To communicate. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand pictures.
• To start a conversation. Your interactions with users are often richer when centered around a conversation
piece. A prototype is an opportunity to have another, directed conversation with a user.
• To fail quickly and cheaply. Committing as few resources as possible to each idea means less time and
money invested up front.
• To test possibilities. Staying low-res allows you to pursue many different ideas without committing to a
direction too early on.
• To manage the solution-building process. Identifying a variable also encourages you to break a large
problem down into smaller, testable chunks.
How to Prototype ?
• Start building. Even if you aren’t sure what you’re doing, the act of picking up
some materials (post-its, tape, and found objects are a good way to start!) will be
enough to get you going.

• Don’t spend too long on one prototype. Let go before you find yourself getting
too emotionally attached to any one prototype.

• ID a variable. Identify what’s being tested with each prototype. A prototype should
answer a particular question when tested.

• Build with the user in mind. What do you hope to test with the user? What sorts
of behavior do you expect?
Test
• Solicit feedback, about the prototypes you have created, from your users and have
another opportunity to gain empathy for the people you are designing for.
• Testing is another opportunity to understand your user, but unlike your initial
empathy mode, you have now likely done more framing of the problem and created
prototypes to test.
• Why Test?
• To refine prototypes and solutions. Informs the next iterations of prototypes.
• To learn more about your user. often yields unexpected insights.
• To refine your POV. Sometimes reveals that not only did you not get the solution right,
but also that you failed to frame the problem correctly.
How to Test ?
• Show don’t tell. Put your prototype in the user’s hands – or your user within an
experience.
• Don’t explain everything.
• Let your tester interpret the prototype.
• Watch how they use what you have given them, and how they handle and interact with it
• Listen to what they say about it, and the questions they have.

• Create Experiences. Create your prototypes and test them in a way that feels like
an experience that your user is reacting to.

• Ask users to compare. Bringing multiple prototypes to the field to test gives users
a basis for comparison.
Prototyping and Experimentation
Experience Prototyping
• Any kind of representation, in any medium, that is designed to understand,
explore or communicate what it might be like to engage with the product,
space or system we are designing.

• Methods that allow designers, clients or users to "experience it themselves“

rather than witnessing a demonstration or someone else’s experience.
• For example, it demands that the designer think about the experience of light rather than
think directly about the design of the physical lamps themselves
Experience Prototyping In Practice
• Advantages of Experience Prototyping
• Understanding existing user experiences and context

• Exploring and evaluating design ideas

• Communicating ideas to an audience

Experience Prototyping In Practice
• Understanding existing user experiences and context

• Goal — to achieve a high-fidelity simulation of an existing experience which can’t be

experienced directly because it is unsafe, unavailable, too expensive, etc.

• Questions to ask in this stage:

• What are the contextual, physical, temporal, sensory, social and cognitive factors we
must consider as we embark on design?

• What is the essence of the existing user experience?

• What are essential factors that our design should preserve?

Experience Prototyping In Practice
• Exploring and evaluating design ideas
• Goal — facilitating the exploration of possible solutions and directing the design
team towards a more informed development of the user experience and the
tangible components which create it.

• Experience is already focused on specific artifacts, elements, or functions to

evaluate a variety of ideas .
Experience Prototyping In Practice
• Communicating ideas to an audience
• Goal — to let a client, a design colleague or a user understand the subjective
value of a design idea by directly experiencing it.

• This is usually done with the intention of persuading the audience — for
example, that an idea is compelling or that a chosen design direction is
incorrect.
Identifying Viable Business Opportunities
• An idea is not necessarily a viable business opportunity.

• A business opportunity is an idea that has the potential to become a viable

enterprise, with a place in one or more markets.
• It comes from recognizing a problem and making a deliberate attempt to solve
that problem.
Identifying Viable Business Opportunities
• For an idea to be worth pursuing, we must first determine whether the idea
translates into a business opportunity.
• Methods for finding new business opportunities
• Develop a new market for an existing product.
• Find a new supply of resources that would enable the entrepreneur to produce
the product for less money.
• Use existing technology to produce an old product in a new way.
• Use an existing technology to produce a new product.
• Use new technology to produce a new product.
Conclusion
• The creative mindset and particular practices enable innovation and
entrepreneurship.

• Try to create and implement an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset

throughout the course.

• Question: If you could change one answer to the study questions you
already completed for this week, what would you change?
Thank You