While we were expected to get deeply immersed in the bath-tub of - innovation, collaboration, grit, growth mindset, and inclusivity and diversity - fellows excitation greeted the corridor of the IFA orientation's day that aims to strengthen the whole innovation ecosystem by inspiring and training young noble minds with the aspiration of becoming African Entrepreneurs and Innovators and also supporting existing innovators and entrepreneurs simultaneously.
In a blink, we were introduced to design thinking as a social technology, which in turn is an iterative process that tests one's ability to solve problems through creativity and critical thinking. This iterative process can be seen in five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Don't get mystified, as this can be done in the form of a hackathon.
A hackathon is a design spring-like event, often, in which domain experts and others collaborate intensively on a project to solve particular problems. It is a condensed way to see the long process of designing, creating & building within an existing organisation, or as an entrepreneur. Ours began with a short pitch on an idea of providing a connection between climate change and agricultural innovation practices of the country.
During the brainstorming phase, a stream of ideas flowed and mixed between my team (Abdulhaffiz Umar, Ochanya Adah, Archibong Akpan, Uchenna Nwafor) and myself, where we finally reach a juncture on "how climate change is affecting crop production and crop yield, and how this is driving the price of foodstuff high, thereby worsening poverty and food security in Nigeria". This in turn drew us to our initial Problem Statement of "how do we leverage on technology and data analysis to improve crop production and ultimately reduce poverty in Nigeria?" The goal of a hackathon was to create a prototype or minimum viable project (MVP) by the end of an event, and this can only be feasible through conducting a Primary Market Research to better understand the root causes of the problem.
A Primary Market Research is one you conduct yourself by going directly to a source - usually customers or prospective customers in your target market - to ask questions and/or gather information. Ours began with interviews (face-to-face or telephone) and shadowing with some of our target audience who are mostly farmers. Our goal for this was to understand our prospects and customers rationally, emotionally, economically, socially, culturally and more.
Truth be told, the PMR was eye-opening and knowledge-expanding as the understanding towards our target market begins to changed drastically without batting an eyelid through the below listed 10 PMR interview questions:
1. Are you presently facing difficulties in crop production?
2. Since you said Yes, what sort of difficulties are you presently facing?
3. How does the payment of fertilizers affects crop production?
4. Aside these, what other challenges are you facing in this regard?
5. Cattle invasion!!! What does that mean?
6. If you were to tackle this challenge, what will you do?
7. What about the use of farm machinery to boost crop production?
8. What has your farming experience been like?
9. What are the difficulties you face?
10. What challenges are affecting you as a farmer?
After critically and painstakingly scrutinizing our target market responses drawn from both the angle of their verbal and nonverbal body languages during our primary market research interviews, we understood that there is a need in redefining our initial problem statement, which turned out to flow in this style; How best can we upscale crop production and farmers adoption through agricultural innovation?
After running the Primary Market Research Program, and digesting the insights and results therein, it is the time my team and I move to the next step, which is? Find out in my next blog post.