Earning Criteria

• The 5 day workshop was broken down over 4 separate stages of work, reflecting the innovation roadmap expressed in the Design Council’s, Double Diamond Framework. There was no formal assessment. Students undertook a self-reflection exercise at the end of each day. A judging panel of WLIOT tutors evaluated proposals and provided feedback on day 5.
• Day 1 DISCOVER - Students had to use research methods to discover more about the challenge brief and associated factors that would drive any new solutions. This involved desk research and limited primary research to understand user needs, issues related to the technology, commercial opportunities and, deployment environment. This stage of work helped students gain a better understanding of the opportunities for new product and service innovation.
• Day 2 DEFINE - The goal here was to define a product or service concept, based on the learnings acquired from the research undertaken on Day 1. Activities centred on the rapid generation of ideas for new product and service concepts using the insights gained on Day 1. Each team generated a range of ideas that responded to the innovation opportunities identified in Day 1. From this each team selected their most promising ‘single best idea' to develop further into a practical ‘concept proposal'.
• Day 3 DEVELOP - Students had to develop a simple prototype of the ‘single best idea’ selected in the previous session, testing key aspects of the concept represented in the simple prototype with others outside of their own team and then learning from this process to enable any ‘must have’ revisions to be implemented. At the end of the session, each team had further developed their ‘idea’ into a more refined and evaluated, single concept proposal.
• Day 4 DELIVER - This stage focused on students developing their ‘pitch presentation based on outputs from the previous 3 days of activity. Pitch presentations were based on a basic template provided during the workshop to ensure focus and consistency. A number of criteria had to be addressed in final concept submissions, including: Desirability - Meeting User-needs, Level of innovation achieved, Viability - Commercial potential of proposal, Sustainability and Practicality.
• Day 5 PITCH - The 5 days culminated with the Pitch day, where teams presented their proposed solution in a 5 minutes long presentation to a panel of invited judges who also asked the teams questions. Team submissions were then assessed by panel of judges and final verbal feedback provided. WLIOT provided awards to all participating students and for exceptional submissions including the digital badge as evidence of participation.