Business Summit / Market-driven Robotics opportunities

Design as Facilitation

This project was a joint venture between master students from both the School of Business and the School of Design. Our team was tasked with developing a "market-first" approach to determine disruptive opportunities for robotic solutions.

With our final design, our team laid the groundwork for an innovations workshop that brings together robotics experts and market leaders, along with design facilitators, to share knowledge and collaboratively co-design opportunities for robotic technologies.

Our summit recommendations were accepted and developed into the Designing a Business Summit, held on August 21, 2009. This summit was sponsored by The Technology Collaborative and hosted by CMU's Tepper School of Business. Design facilitators were led by Maya Design and Gravity Tank.

Design Process

We decided early on that the fundamental question for a market-driven approach is not what is a robot—but rather what should a robot be. We proceeded to an analysis of existing robotics markets, hold interviews with entrepreneurs and market-gurus, and finally tested our facilitation approach with a summit prototype.

Survey of successful robotics ventures

Our goal was to determine a commonality that existed between all successful robotic ventures. By looking at various industries ranging from military to consumer ventures, we concluded that the traditional notions of Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous was a gross simplification. Instead, successful companies focused not on designing robots, but designing robotic services.

Entrepreneur Interviews

How have people succeeded in discovering market opportunities and actually building a successful company? More importantly, what was their journey? We decided to go out and interview entrepreneurs and experts that have experience commercializing robotic technologies. These CEOs and market-gurus not only gave us insight into the commercialization process, but many participated in the final summit.

Summit Prototype

We developed a facilitation guide for the proposed summit. Before our final recommendations were delivered, our team ran a prototype summit involving participants from the MBA program and facilitators from the School of Design. The prototype summit focused on robotic solutions for educating future MBA students. Finally, our final recommendations included top potential markets, our methodology for analyzing said markets, a proposal for an innovations summit, and a facilitation guide.

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