Ideate

Having converged on a primary focus, the initial stages of the ideate phase allowed the team to diverge again around ideas and possibilities which could become our solution focus. The team worked individually and collaboratively to arrive at a number of available options to pursue.

Our ‘How might we…’ question…

The team then proceeded to create ‘how to…’ questions to generate ideas in response to the ‘how might we…’ question.

We recognised within the team’s 22 individual ‘how to..’ questions, some recurring themes emerged. Our original 22 questions were condensed into 12 themes and then 4 idea ‘packs’.

These ideas were voted on using a Red Dot voting system (Gibbons, 2019) and put through a metaphorical ‘funnel’ to assess whether we believed our Persona would love the idea and how implementable the solution was per the Hasso Plattner ‘Idea Funnel’ exercise. (Plattner, n.d.)

We decided to create an online platform for our persona Sonia that would support her financial security while at UCC and therefore protecting her food security.

‘The Money Tree at UCC’ was born…

The team proceeded to ideate around the content of our online solution/platform, the content, the service and the Unique Selling Point (USP). We engaged in some early concept testing with our secondary persona Cian, who validated our idea and confirmed that our proposal would fill a gap in the supports currently available for students to protect their financial security.