the internet of bees
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overview
Type:
Elective: Design for Innovation Strategies
challenge:
Create a valuable business model for one of your past projects.
Role:
I contacted talked with beekeepers on forums about our concept, looked for publicity, created a community plan around the product, looked at the income projections over 5 years and did a competitor analysis.
competencies:
Explanation
BBeacon is a project that targets on helping with re-increasing the amount of bees in the urban city area, which is based on the background of the drastic drop of bee population occurring in recent years. This report outlines the process of how did we come up with
the business plan in order to make this project work in the real world. We are going to talk about how do we identify and position ourselves in the market through competitor and SWOT analysis and how did we refine and develop our proposals through talks and interviews with relevant stakeholders (beekeepers and entrepreneurs). We followed
the methodology of Hypothesis-Driven Entrepreneurship, in which two MVPs (minimum viable products) were made and tested out with our target users. In the end, future plans for marketing had been envisioned based on the insights we gained through the process.
BBeacon brings together three groups of stakeholders – beekeepers, government officials and common citizens to maintain a better environment for honey bees to live by creating an internet of bees within the urban city area, which finally will benefit ourselves.
Note: to concept was developed by Bas Bakx, Toussaint Jongen & Wenhao Wu. My role was in the business development and community of the project.
Reflection
Key learning points: business models, value validation, community design
With the course, I tested the first time what my expertise about communities could add to a start-up. The beekeepers were quite critical about the concept and saw us as infiltrators who wanted to lift on the hype about bees. Therefore my role was to communicate with the community of beekeepers on forums and try to explain to them what our goals were. In the end, I got the beekeepers on our site with three beekeepers wanting to support us with their expertise. The input helped a lot to understand the value we added and testing our MVP’s. Therefore I learned about how I could use my expertise to benefit any project that is trying to launch. Because of the group dynamics, I discovered I was quite open with communicating my ideas quickly and getting attention for it. Basically what also the Transformative Process describes which I learned the semester after this course. The other team members didn’t think that a newspaper would already find their story interesting, but the article helped us to find initiatives in Eindhoven and collaborate with them.