Brainstorming... 44 Ideas...

Presentation was made after these brain exercises...

I had an opportunity to participate in a brainstorming session along with a few colleagues of mine at UOB. We joined a group of people from a couple of world renowned enterprises. (I am sorry that I cannot name them due to a non-disclosure agreement that I signed.)

One enterprise has been retained by the other enterprise to conduct an in-depth survey on the felt needs of Rwandans for the use of mobile and agent banking. A group of six people (from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Johannesburg, San Francisco and Rwanda) lived together, talking to people at all levels in geographical areas for almost four weeks. They worked 1,068 hours, collected 3,750 data points, visited 24 towns and conducted 110 hours of interviews, including 37 in-depth interviews and 12 expert interviews.

Then, the group interpreted the collected data and drew essential principles. They called it a synthesizing process. They gave us the presentation about five personas that are prototypes of clients and analyzed their behaviors in depth, including their felt and real needs.

The brainstorming session was the process of collecting further feedback from participants and of producing conceptual business ideas to meet the identified needs and coming up with graphic drawings for effective use of mobile and agent banking technology.

The list of 44 conceptual business ideas...

It was a rigorous but productive session because at the end of the day we came up with 44 conceptual ideas. Also, we voted for the ideas that were most creative and most pragmatically implementable. We came up with four that collected most number of votes from 14 participants. It is now the next step to take to bring these ideas into reality, which is another daunting task. It is a blessing to have these resources come to UOB and to Rwanda to help conceptualize the needs into product ideas. - Jeffrey