NESTA workshop: Book03

Book 03 of the Nesta programme focuses on 'Choosing your path'.  The book looks at 3 main areas:

• Customers: To determine who is buying your product, and why.
• Your business process: The different elements that make up your business.
• Relationships: The different associations you have to recognise and develop to ensure your product or service reaches your customers.

I found the following quote from book03 quite appropriate..

“ALL YOU NEED TO HAVE A BUSINESS IS A CUSTOMER AND IF YOU DON’T HAVE A CUSTOMER THEN YOU DON’T HAVE A BUSINESS –YOU HAVE A HOBBY.”

-Dean Brown, Product Designer

As part of book03 I participated in 4 tasks:

1. Your customers

2. Operational Stages

3. Blueprint modelling

4. Relationship modelling 

Worksheet 03a: Your Customers

This exercise asked me to build a picture of my potential customers and customer groups.

I was able to explore the needs of my 'customer' so that I could figure out what I wanted to offer them within the service.  The exercise also enabled me to think about how many people I would target, how many of those people I would reach, how frequently they would use the service, how much they would pay and what would be the potential income from the service.

Worksheet 03b: Blueprint Modelling

This exercise helped me visualise how my business would function.  The worksheet took the form of 2 parts- Part A: Operational Stages and Part B: Blueprint Modelling.  The operational stages looked at the engagement stage, the development stage and the delivery stage of a business.

Part A: Operational Stages:

The areas shaded in grey represent activities that are costs that cannot be charged to a customer.  These parts are within 2 of the 'backstage' stages and 1 of the 'onstage' stages.

Part B: Blueprint Modelling

The following image illustrates all the steps that I would need to deliver my service in a linear flow diagram:

Constructing the blueprint model helped me to really think about what my service would offer to the user.

Worksheet 03c: Relationship Modelling

Every business needs a set of relationships to ensure all the steps happen.  To help with this we were told to map out the steps into 4 different categories: Generator, Realiser, Distributor and Customer.  This exercise helped me think about the activities I would need to keep inside my business and what could be carried out by others outside my business.