Experiencing something new seems so easy and interesting a lot of times, but that of Innovate For Africa (IFA) Fellowship is a new level. As a fellow, I have been taken beyond my comfort zone. Within only 5 days into the Innovation Readiness Training, I have learned more than I could have learned in a month if I was to do so on my own. One of the fascinating parts of the program is what we learned about problem-solving using design thinking.
Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It’s extremely useful in tackling complex problems that are ill-defined or unknown, by understanding the human needs involved, by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways, by creating many ideas in brainstorming sessions, and by adopting a hands-on approach in prototyping and testing. We had to practically experience the design thinking process in the form of a hackathon which is an event where people of different specialties collaborate to solve problems in different sectors by building a valuable product.
The amazing part of the hackathon is working in a team with people you just met within 7 hours and solving problems virtually without ever seeing each other before, not even through a video call. Even in a physical team, there’s usually a lot of friction talk less of a virtual team. The name of my team is DigiSkills and that is the name given to the idea we are working on. We had to work together as a team to define our problem and come up with a problem statement in addition to the customer persona. Above all, we are already at the stage where we embark on product market research by interviewing potential customers to ensure that we are solving their pain point.
The problem we are solving in my hackathon group is that “Youth need ways to land great jobs but they lack in-demand digital skills”. To solve this problem, we had to go through Primary Market Research (PMR) by conducting interviews.
The following are the questions we asked at our Product Market Research Interviews;
What are you currently engaged in?
What is your dream career/place of work/company?
What skills do you need to achieve this career path?
What steps have you taken towards achieving your set goals?
What challenges/ difficulties have you faced trying to reach
What We learned at the PMR Interview
We learned that the problem is not that youths lack the skills to get a job. The challenge they are facing is that they don’t have platforms where they could practice what they know and continually grow from there.
How our understanding of the customers changed
We were able to understand that the core problem of our customers is not lack of skill or training as we initially perceived before the PMR Interviews. We were able to know that their problem is lack of access to internships, fellowships and others of sort.
Overall, the IFA Innovation Readiness Program has been truly innovative because I am learning a new perspective of solving problems and a complete new angle of identifying the problems in my environment.