Because of my track 'Design Leadership and Entrepreneurship' I wanted to become more competent in the area of design innovation strategies, to find out what strategies are there and how to benefit from a certain approach. 

To get insight in those strategies, existing design cases have been studied to learn about the approach of others, their successes, failures and challenges. Next to that a business proposition should be developed. As such, we opted for 'Simfit', which was a final bachelor project of one of the team members. Simfit is a vibrating module to provide tactile feedback to runners being attached to the shoe.

Some iterations are still done to improve the prototype, given the vibration was insufficiently felt and we wanted to find out whether users would be able to follow the programmed vibrations like running on a rhythm. 

Achievements

In order to relate to the industry, I found Ato-Gear, a young company with a product related to Simfit. While interviewing the CEO (picture above) we saw that networking is very important to find investors. At the same time, it can be quite a big hassle with investors as they also can be very directive. Combined with the fact that just a 5% of the startups succeed,  the independent entrepreneurship seems to be a lot less independent and a more tough business than I had expected before.
Looking to others' strategies, a clever idea which sticks to me is the approach of Philips. They combine related products and put them in a certain roadmap, which makes it attractive for the user to also buy the next (related) product in another phase. 

Wrapping up: due to the course, I understand the different modes of innovation: technology-driven, user/consumer-driven, and design/meaning-driven innovation and how to build on that. I got a deeper understanding of the value of the combination of products and services and how data gathering could be a smart element in developing a business proposition. By practicing evaluating other design cases as well as our own, I’m able to analyze a design proposal by considering key factors in a specific context.