Re:public Inc.
Re:public Inc.
Re:public Inc.
Human-Centered Innovation has come to be known as the central discipline in the entrepreneurial arena. Through three-years of directorship at Innovation Studio Fukuoka, a “citizen-led” innovation incubation platform in Japan, multiple approaches have been investigated and thus learned a successful to-be-entrepreneur him/herself has to co-own a concern with potential customers that evokes him/her a mission to pursue, that is beyond simply understanding customers with empathy. We witnessed ethnographic approach well facilitates the to-be-entrepreneur to meet an unaware yet intrinsic personal concern and nourish to co-own it with the customers. We also discuss what and how ethnographic praxis in industry can contribute to the entrepreneurial arena and propose a new role that we experienced ethnographers to take.
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“Hmm, what’s the most meaningful stuff I had in the five months?
I learned a lot of things here,
But, dare to say, Oka was always there for me.He helped me a lot especially when I reflect on myself.
When I was losing the way and when I was dithering…”—Hiro, an alumnus of Innovation Studio Fukuoka, 2015.
WHEN ETHNOGRAPHY ENCOUNTERS STARTUP-ARENA
In the past decade, the corporate arena has come to know that ethnography is an effective tool, bringing customer insights and help create essential values as they were sophisticatedly woven them into the process of product and service creation in a human-centered manner. This recognition, which originally started off from large multinational organizations where understanding another distant culture is naturally crucial, is now known and considered essential even to early and small teams such as startups (Aulet, 2013).
One of the primary attractions among the startups that ethnography or the ethnographic research seem to entail is its power to bring empathy, the ability to “reach outside of ourselves and connect with other people (Patnaik and Mortensen, 2009)”. Today major startup incubators and accelerators emphasize the significance of hiring ethnographic researchers or the team to adapt such set of skills in order to help them access customer insights. This corresponds to the trend of startups where the significance and the viability of human-centric approach is recognized over technology-centric ones (Kolko, 2014).
While corporate ethnographic praxis has been the primary profession for the authors of this paper, the trend today has led us to take an initiative in innovation lab. Since 2013, authors of this paper have established an innovation incubation platform named Innovation Studio Fukuoka based on the request by the city and its directive council of Fukuoka, a capital of southwest Japan with 1.5 million in population. The program is a series of five -months incubation programs, each of which addresses different societal challenges such as health, social boundaries, and ageing. In each program, approximately 60 individuals comprised of primarily citizens and some employees selected from the sponsored companies of the program would participate, forming ten to fifteen teams to become entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs based on the product and service ideas they eventually conceive. The participants so far range widely from technologists, designers, educators, social workers, housewives, and even to high school and college students.
Figure 1. Process of the second project of Innovation Studio Fukuoka “Designing Sports in Everyday Lives.” It was five-months long began in September 2014 and ended February 2015. See details at http://innovation-studio.jp/en/project/index.html © Fukuoka Directive Council, used with permission.
The characteristics of this program is although most participants have never been involved in a human-centered design practice, participants would start from research, spending substantial amount of time. At the very beginning teams are asked to define their field of interest, refine research questions, and conduct interviews and participatory observations. The program also takes into account that as a result of research, participants may rewrite their interest and areas to work on, and allow them to reorganize or even set up new teams. The second half of the program will take these unfolded insights, where teams will ideate new business concepts and prototype them. Towards the end, the participants will pitch their business concepts to venture capitalists, public sponsors, government policy makers and social impact bonds that would support the conceived business concepts to happen. Since the fall of 2013, Innovation Studio has organized four programs, one of which is ongoing as we write this paper. The program has so far had over 30 teams with approximately 100 participants to reach the final gate, among which 14 teams have started or are about to start their own businesses based on the outcomes of the program.
Quite a few lessons learned through the past programs. First, we were once again struck by the power of ethnographic research: Despite being their first to conduct research, participants delivered great stories and insights based on the research they have conducted, and were capable to inspire not only themselves but also the other participants and even mentors of the program. Secondly, we saw the power of empathy, as it enabled teams to gain deep understanding on their potential customers that eventually became the source of ideas.
However, what intrigued us the most took place in the second half of the program, when business ideas were generated and prototypes were made: we saw some teams fall behind despite of attractive business concepts based on their research outcomes. As we carefully observed and listened to each team during and after the program, we have come to notice that tenacious teams had all acquired new lens to see what potential customers to be concerned about, and as a result, were able to conceive ideas that not only addressed the concerns of potential customers, but also, addressed some of their own. In other words, we saw the concern was shared and what we call as co-owned (Uchida, Ichikawa and Tamura, 2014). The result was a better idea with a bigger impact, enabling the team members and even potential customers, who were involved in their repeated interventions to the field mainly as ‘informants’ to the first half and as ‘reviewers’ to the second half, to wish for its fruitful success. This sense of co-ownership was a much more powerful outcome of their research activities than empathy that usually is understood to perceive the other person as if one were him/her but without ever losing the ‘as ifs.’ (Rogers, 1966).
In this paper, we expound how this generative phenomenon happen and discuss how it works when one would become an innovative entrepreneur through research.
SENSE OF CO-OWNERSHIP: HOW SOME TEAMS CREATED BREAKTHROUGH STARTUPS AND DID NOT
Fukuoka, located in the Southwest of Japan, is the administrative, economic, and transportation center of Kyushu. It is the largest city in the region and belongs to the fourth largest metropolitan area in Japan. Being distant from the Japan’s national government while being closer to other Asian cities across the sea, the city has a culture of autonomy and grassroots efforts, which makes its citizens highly in sync with the notion of citizen-led innovation of the Innovation Studio program. Fukuoka almost always shows the highest rate of inauguration among the large cities in Japan.
In recent years, entrepreneurship has been the central interest of the local government that is strongly driven by the mayor Soichiro Takashima known as a leader of the oncoming generation in Japan’s political arena. Innovation Studio Fukuoka, the innovation incubation platform, lies at the heart of its policy. Since the authors of this paper were named as directors of the studio in 2013, a constant effort, and in some cases, an appeal has been made in order to keep the effort suited for Fukuoka, where it is primarily ‘citizen-led’ that distinguishes itself from the rest of the nation’s ‘large capital-based’ or ‘top-down.’ Organizers have also been careful that the studio avoids participants to be technology-centric: upon the announcement of each program when we receive applications from potential participants to make sure there are themes are announced to appeal the program’s emphasis on the human side of the innovation. So far four programs addressed following themes: “Reconstructing the social boundaries between kids with special needs and without”, “Designing sports in everyday lives”, “Innovating the life course: future of human network, career and growing up”, and “Discovering hidden resource: people and materials.”
Although the studio currently runs its fourth program, its learning and reflection are still in progress as we speak. However, here we take one of the previous programs called “Designing sports in everyday lives” as an example and describe how three teams has succeeded and failed in shaping their businesses.
Team A: Led By Hiro
Hiro was in early thirties, a father of two daughters who were age two and zero respectively when he was at the project. He earned his PhD in material science and worked as a freelance consultant for local businesses and schools. In the first half of the session, he was not really a lead of the team. The team encountered a variety of informants under the hypothesis that parents often desire their kids to work out what they could not. However, the very change took place for Hiro and his team members when the team visited a family, or, to be more specific, a father and a son. When the father was a child, he dreamt to become a baseball player but he could not for family reasons; As he had a son, he again dreamt that his son would become the one, in particular, eventually to play at Koshien Stadium, where the final national high school baseball tournament is held. He has started to train his son when his son was a baby, prepared the best environments for his son to practice including choosing a team led by a quite a coach and devising a way to review every play in a game using camcorders and other instruments to measure his son’s performance. Other than baseball itself, he studied nutrition and physical therapy for his son to build up his strength. As the result, his son successfully joined a leading senior high school team, gained a regular position and won out local preliminary games, and finally got hold of the right to come in the tournament at Koshien! This is truly a successful case of nurturing and seemed perfectly holding true to the hypothesis that the team conceived, but Hiro had another perspective: “Has he really intended to ‘nurture’ his son?” Because he frequently used the term ‘we’ when he explained how his son having achieved the goal, Hiro realized that over the years, it was not his son who was nurtured, but the father himself: His son becoming a successful baseball player was a goal shared between the two and was realized together as a team! This notion alone gave Hiro a strong inspiration and was enough for him to stop his engagement to the team he joined earlier. He spun out and formed a new team to realize the idea of his own. The idea he conceived is based on a new educational toolkit developed by the perspective: Parent and kid grow together as a team.
In a fast changing era, knowledge is something that quickly becomes obsolete; This especially holds true to digital technologies, therefore Hiro thought it would be essential that the product should be an easily-modified, educational toolkit, which provokes collaborative effort among them. Towards the latter phase of the project, Hiro and his team has developed a prototype and quickly decided to start up a company despite that not a single investor showed an interest in his idea at that moment.
Why is this a case of shaping co-ownership? Because although the opportunity he identified was through the process of studying others, in the end the idea addressed the concern of his own, for being an educator and being a relatively new father of two daughters himself. In other words, his research was no longer a mere inspiration to a new business idea, but was co-owned.