For this startup we were able to leverage the full potential of the diverse pool of breeders from Unicorn Labs to re-imagine urban parking. Being in the idea phase, we did not only have to solve a technical challenge but also take a closer look at the business case.
Design Thinking Workshop
After a short presentation of the problem, we poured all our questions onto the entrepreneur to find out the strengths and weaknesses of the case at matter. It was essential for everyone’s understanding of the challenge to cover most aspects of this vision. Whether on the business challenges ahead or on its technological aspect, our team of breeders was able to learn a lot. Making a reasonable decision on how to proceed became much simpler. The 10 years experience in Design Thinking and Innovation Workshops of one of the breeders helped to keep our focus on the right questions and define the right goals for the breeding.
As we expected from our interdisciplinary group of breeders we found a large amount of different solutions. The breadth of solutions to the given challenge went in all sorts of direction. From a more dystopian future of turning parking fines into a crowd-sourced system, to a utopian vision of universal free parking. Why not zero cars on the streets while we were at it. But the next step helped bring us all back down to earth: the clustering. Ideas of possible solutions would be grouped according to certain criteria such as feasibility, viability or even desirability, to help narrow our focus.
Approach - Design and implement the MVP
Thanks to the experience that we collected during the past 12 breedings by the time we started this one, breaking down the complex task of digitizing a process into smaller components was done in a matter of seconds.
The diverse background of our breeding team made it possible to solve problems in many different domains. Be it mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, design thinking and innovation expert or computer vision, we were covered.
One team designed the user journey and implemented the workflow using React Native in platform independent App. We would be able to showcase the clear experience and added the value the customer would gain from this revolution.
Others worked on the car detection system, the backend side of our infrastructure, both for the business and process logic. It was also important to provide form to our hardware and thus a housing would be designed and later 3D Printed.
The outcome of the breeding was a functional MVP for Frictionless Parking. We were able to show the full user journey in our live demo. Our entrepreneur told us that, we did not only help by building a working prototype, but we also had a profound impact on the business case.
We would like to thank Peter for the trust he put into our experience, process and wild crazy ideas and wish him all the best in pursuit of his vision.
We would also like to thank our dear partners and friends from ETH Entrepreneur Club and GetYourGuide for helping us make this a reality and hope to do even more in the future.