Innovation Strategy
[airline]
Like many companies today, our client [top 3 airline] wanted to understand the millennial customer. Specifically, they wanted to uncover why their millennial NPS had plummeted, and how their brand affinity stacked up to their two major competitors.
Over 10 weeks, my team distilled 30+ hours of employee and customer research into key improvement areas. Our final solutions centered on two modes of travel: group and family. Shown here is uFly, our one-click platform to transform the group travel experience for "coordinators" and "joiners" alike. In addition to removing booking pain, uFly empowers our client to build truly magical travel moments, elevating the group travel experience to meet the expectations of the "experience generation."
Group travel represents a $29B market among millennials, and an open opportunity for our client to differentiate from competitors.
Business Innovation Lab
Kellogg School of Management & Segal Design Institute
Fall 2019
Our client wanted to understand the barriers preventing positive brand association among millennials.
Conversations with our client and analysis of the industry helped us isolate two key insights to progress into the prototyping phase.
So lucky to have this team: Kara Smith, Anissa Chen, and Harish Chamarthy
Our client wanted to understand the barriers preventing positive brand association among millennials.
Lowe's
Having steadily lost market share to competitors and digital disruptors, Lowe's was seeking dramatic solutions to help them predict the future of retail.
Realizing Lowe's limited knowledge of their customer base, we built a digital tool to diagnose customer needs at point of entry and assign them a customer persona. This persona framework ("Lowe's Tool B.E.L.T.") updated Lowe's existing customer segments (DIY, Semi-Pro and Pro) with a more nuanced understanding of multi-modal shopping needs, which can easily vary from visit to visit or even within the span of a single shopping trip. These tools empowered Lowe's with critical knowledge to make future innovation decisions rooted in proven customer needs and not hopeful speculation.
Our idea was selected by Lowe's as the winning solution amongst our classmates.
Research-Design-Build Course (Professors Martha Cotton & Greg Holderfield)
Kellogg School of Management & Segal Design Institute
Fall 2018
igby
As part of an 8-week course studying innovation methodology and efficacy, we were asked to conceive and build an online ecosystem to support the sharing economy.
Our research revealed that consumers are fundamentally more interested in the experience of sharing goods and the community it generates than they are in the functional benefits of sharing. So we challenged ourselves to develop a solution that could rethink the magic of shared experiences.
Meet igby, a sustainable, online, experience-rental company, bringing the magic of Pinterest to your doorstep.
igby delivers a curated selection of "parties in a box" to alleviate the burden of planning memorable experiences and events. This was made possible by several key pillars:
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Partnerships: Employing a constellation of delivery, analytics, and inventory management partners, we created a distribution and fulfillment model able to rival Amazon's two-day guarantee without relying on their excessive pricing.
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Sustainability: To achieve our goal of a 100% sustainable, zero-waste inventory, we incorporated handcrafted Etsy goods in each box. This not only elevated the quality and originality of our product, it also provided an opportunity to support small business crafters and creators.
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Pricing: Adamant that price not be a barrier to anyone enjoying an igby experience, we set an early goal that each base package be priced under $100. Our unique pricing model assigned durability and cleaning scores to each item to determine optimal number of uses, ultimately allowing us to charge over three times less than current market options.
Innovation Effectiveness (Professor Larry Keeley)
Kellogg School of Management & Segal Design Institute
Summer 2018
Apple
Exploring how Apple could better leverage their technology in the classroom, my research uncovered a unified pain point among educators: While they know great content exists, they're frustrated by the number of choices and the wide range in quality.
Furthermore, many apps obscure their fee structure with a trial period, making it nearly impossible for schools to compare costs across apps or properly budget tech expenses.
ClassKit Match is a speculative solution I dev incentivizes developers to provide an expanded set of app characteristics, clarifying their unique benefits and allowing greater filtering functionality within the App store for educators to quickly find what they're seeking.
Spec Project
Winter 2019