Thank you once again to everyone who took part in this week’s webinars, we hope you enjoyed the sessions and learnt a lot from them – we certainly did!

To help keep things fresh in our minds, here’s a quick recap of what we’ve done this week…

Monday: Concept Development (Tom, Little Mammoth)

We kicked off the week reminding ourselves what our ideas are and then thinking about how we develop them further. This included exercises such as narrowing down on the problem, identifying your potential users and generating a design brief. It also covered:

• User Journey Mapping –  for understanding your user and their experience 
• Creating a Design Brief & ideation – for generating a great idea and communicating it

Tuesday: Marketing Strategy (Louise, YP Collective)

These sessions demonstrated how to build an presence online and taught us to think how our future customers and partners might see our ideas as businesses. We had some great discussions about other brands and their personas and asked ourselves the all-important question – which brands are your business’ besties? We also learnt:

• The core pillars of marketing 
• Understanding the different approaches and tools to marketing (how to use Canva – a creative tool for figuring out your brand  identity)
• Creating a user-friendly digital presence (how to use  Strikingly –a website hosting platform for taking your ideas online)

Wednesday: Business Planning (Erica & Jo)

Erica and Jo took us through a great workshop where we learnt how to frame your business model around your key stakeholders. It also covered:

• How to communicate what makes your idea unique with a value proposition statement 
• Developing a  business model canvas 
• The importance of receiving and acting on feedback
• How to use a collaboration tool called Mural (which has a three month free trial at the moment!)

Thursday: Product Development (Tom, Little Mammoth)

Tom closed off the week by taking us through the product development process including some methods for creating a prototype and then testing it. He went through:

• Planning your prototype and drawing it out 
• Planning your user research and the questions you need answered

Don’t forget all the resources including the worksheets, the powerpoint slides, the recordings of the workshops are all on the Longitude Explorer website so you can revisit them whenever you need to: https://longitudeexplorer2019.challenges.org/im-a-longitude-explorer-finalist/…plus lots more resources to explore!