Hi Class,
First off, my apologies on managing the clock today. Technically, everyone did have 20 minutes to present which was as expected, but I realize that the time was not consistent across all teams – for this, I apologize.
I understand it’s difficult to take what is a longer final presentation and boil that down to an abridged 10 minute presentation, but from my experience, you’ll get this all the time. For the final presentations, please make sure you’re timing yourselves and spacing the presentations appropriately.
For the blog today:
(A) If you presented, please synthesize what you heard in the feedback from the judges and what specific action items you have to improve it.
(B) If you did not present today, please comment on something you from today’s presentations that you think could improve your own.
Have a great weekend!
Dan
My team and I were offered three key suggestions – include financials, potentially break down the silos between the ETA and R&D team, and address the idea of cultural change. As for the financials we are looking to compare Coke and Pepsi”s income statements and balance sheets. This will show that although Coke is leading the carbonated beverage industry, Pepsi has higher revenue. In order to surpass Pepsi in the revenue department, Coke needs to expedite its processes with open innovation. As for addressing the cultural change, I will be more specific when stating the overall benefits. I forgot to mention that with the new exploratory platform business units will feel a sense of acceptance and satisfaction. This will break down the internal social silos. As for combining the ETA and R&D team, I am a bit unsure of the process because this would be a huge change to Coke’s internal infrastructure.
Our team was very grateful for the judges’ feedback this afternoon. We were encouraged to think about change management from an overall, company-culture perspective. Technology can only change human behavior so much, so our team needs to consider how we will incentivize internal stakeholders to engage with our platform solution. Additionally, one judge recommended that we take our recommendation one step further and consider opportunities to break down the silos between R&D and the ETA – an interesting insight that we will be sure to keep in mind as we make final edits.
Some of the elements that stood out to me regarding presentation was that I liked how all of the teams seemed congruent. I liked how the GE team formatted their business model to have the more animated icons that would transition into pictures as they spoke about them. I also liked how one of the teams blatantly called out how they are incorporating open innovation.
All the teams were solid and it was wonderful hearing how their projects are coming together.
The feedback from the judges for our presentation was that we need to start challenging ourselves and begin to ask tougher questions. This involves recognizing potential flaws or shortcomings in our idea and stepping into the shoes of our potential partners, students and the university. In addition they suggested that we include in our presentation a section about our competitors and what makes Fujitsu stand apart from other companies who might be trying to enter the higher education sector.
In terms of specific action items our group will continue to refine our presentation – making it clear and to the point while making sure to incorporate as much relevant and useful information as possible. We will be revising the script and slides as well as practicing our public speaking skills.
Our team (Fujitsu) presented yesterday. Even though we didn’t have enough time to go over every details of our presentation, but I think we had everybody understood and interested. To improve our presentation, the judges listed these questions:
1) list our core characteristics;
2) also points out the economic/social benefits of our platform, for now and for the future;
3) highlight the benefits to help companies recruit/students look for jobs
4) describe our competitors;
and etc.
In terms of presentation styles, we definitely need more time practicing and memorizing our scripts. And the transition between teammates need to be more smooth too.
I really enjoyed the presentations on Thursday, as they gave me a lot of ideas on how to improve our team’s presentation. In particular, I found the story-telling style of presentation used by some of the groups to be extremely effective and engaging, and I believe it would be really useful technique that can help us streamline our explanation of the business model. Although we are already using an example of a city, Krishnapatnam, in explaining the design process, we can expand it further so that we tell the story of Krishnapatnam from beginning to the end.
I think the biggest takeaway that our group received was that we needed to go back to focusing on all of the judges, instead of just Coke’s. For the other judges, it’s easier to follow our presentation through the use of the canvas, and contrasting old and new canvases. This helps really showcase how much additional value we’re providing to Coca Cola, rather than the presentation which we gave, which made complete sense to Coke, but not so much the other judges.
I am a part of Team Coca-Cola and we presented on Thursday. The judges had generally positive feedback but also encouraged us to think of a more comprehensive solution. Although our challenge only requires us to come up with a solution for their external technology adoption, we should also be considering how to get Coca-Cola employees to engage with our solution. After all, as one judge pointed out, a really great platform is useless if no one is using it. Now, we have to pivot slightly and think about the other end of this problem. How are we going to get people to use this platform?
After the presentation today we have 3 main things to improve: use of time, milestone proposal and try to eliminate as many assumptions as we can on the financial statements. After the feedback we may also consider, as a future proposal, expanding our platform to a larger community by including more participants on our ecosystem.
Our group does not present on Thursday. However, we have learnt so much from the other groups’ presentations. For J&J, we need to make our business model more solid and concrete and specific. Looking at other teams presenting, we realize that our slides could be improved further by having a more focused topics and a mock up of our platform as soon as possible. We also definitely need to work on our financial modeling, analysis and ratios to back up our market research and to strengthen our suggestion of the platform.
Although my team and I struggled with the time constraint, I think we did relatively well because the judges were somehow still able to synthesize our business model and give insightful feedback during Q&A. The judges seemed to be most interested in the implementation of our business model and how we would roll it out. One of the key takeaways was to research more into the cultural barriers we would have to overcome to successfully implement our business model. We were also challenged to research other companies or projects with similar ideas in the past and to learn from their mistakes. Our next action items include researching these potential cultural barriers, figuring out the details of our implementation summary and timeline, and researching similar attempted projects in the past. Presentation wise, my team and I need to practice on being more concise because we have a lot of content to go through. We might possibly also have to rework the structure of our presentation to ensure that our transitions are smoother. Overall, I’m proud of what we have accomplished so far as a team and look forward to giving a stronger presentation next time.
Our feedback was very helpful .The judges showed their concerns about how we are going approach the market .We need to take into account the diversity of our customers .For that reason,we have to be aware of the different cultures and habits in India.Some of our customers in rural areas can be skeptical about our services.That is why we need to cooperate with local healers and people on the ground.They also commented that in the trains in India even if there is a lot of dead time ,passengers have so many concerns about their luggage,ticket… that they would not be willing to have a checkup.
Our aim now is to work on these problems and try to improve our business model for the final presentation.
My team presented on Tuesday, and it was interesting to see a new group of presentations. Although there were time delays due to technical difficulties, I thought it was a good reminder that technical problems should be resolved before the final presentations. The feedback that I found most helpful and applicable to the Wipro team was from Coke’s presentation. One of the judges mentioned that even if it’s a great idea, getting people to use the platform is the most important factor. This really relates to Wipro’s smart city business model because we need to emphasize how feasible it really is to have people move into these greenfield smart cities.