30 min |
Team |
Technique Mind mapping
Imagining to be a social enterprise which wants to enter the market, the students have to create two Personas by using an online tool to mind mapping (e.g. Mind Mup).
By using a mind map, students can focus on their ideas and working in a shared environment while mindmapping. It can therefore facilitate cooperation within a team and brainstorming.
In particular, in the case of Personas’ definitions, this can help students in concretely figure out the “features” of their potential customers and adapt their product/service to their audience.
Step 1: Have your students represent a fictional social enterprise interested in entering the market. For instance they represent a didactical farm.
Step 2: Based on the appointed mission, the students have 15 minutes to brainstorm and identify two customer archetypes who represent a broader group of potential customers.
Step 3: Tell the students to write down these initial ideas on a Mind Map using one colour.
Step 4: Based on the inputs they collected, the students have to write down the specific features of two Personas.
A Persona is the fictional character created to represent the needs, wants, and behaviours of a company’s target customer(s). In particular, the Persona has to list as many details as possible.
Students can expand the original inputs collected during the initial brainstorming: this time they have to use a different colour.
Step 5: Taking a look at the two Personas, the students have now 10 minutes to design one or more product(s) / service(s) they are going to offer as social enterprise in order to target their customers’ needs (e.g. one pizza made with vegan and organic products).
Step 6: Ask the students to share their experience, the process they followed to define the Personas’ profiles, the aspects they took into account for the product / service definition. Look at the two Mind Maps and how they evolved and became richer and more detailed.
Before a social entrepreneur can begin to start-up, (s)he needs to narrow the field a little. It is important to warn the students that starting with the solution and looking for the home of best fit is a tricky undertaking! Not impossible…. just tricky. Therefore one possible approach is to start by identifying the customers to serve and the problem to solve. Mind mapping to identify both the problem and the target group can be very effective.
– Once a Persona is developed, it can be useful to better fit the social enterprise’s approaches, actions, features and functions, and decide what should be prioritised, based on the value it offers to the different personas created.
– In order to guide the students to define their Personas they can try to reply these questions:
Age
Sex
Location
Occupation
Goals
Frustrations
Motivations
Fears.
In order to proceed with the Persona definition, students can start with simple key words and then expand them.
– You can perform this activity in class also creating more groups of students who represent different social enterprises.
