This week, Team Switching Gears solidified our How Can We statement so we could have a solid focus for the ideation process. We decided on: How can we encourage bikers at Rice to regularly perform maintenance on their bikes?

With our How Can We statement in mind, we then wrote down on Post-It Notes as many solutions as we could think of individually. Sharing out our ideas led to even more solutions built on one another’s initial thoughts.

The next step was to group our solutions into clusters of similar ideas. We ended up with five clusters: Digital Information/Education, College-Specific Solutions, Campaign, Posters, and Rice Bikes Products/Services. In order to determine which category of solutions to pursue, we made a graph with two axes: Feasibility and Impact. We then placed each cluster title on the graph so we could have a clear visual of which options were the most feasible and had the potential to have the highest impact.

We concluded that our two best options were College-Specific Solutions and Rice Bikes Products/Services. We then made another feasibility-impact graph for the individual ideas within each of those two clusters.

 

The Urban Harvest team helped us reason through the merits of each option. We finally settled on Rice Bikes Products/Services as the category of solutions that best combined feasibility and impact.

All that remained was to choose a specific solution from that category to pursue. We decided to combine the highest-rated ideas from our graph. We are going to develop an information campaign to be carried out by Rice Bikes, including periodic email reminders to customers to bring their bikes in for maintenance.

The next step will be to meet with representatives of Rice Bikes to gauge their enthusiasm and buy-in. With their approval, Team Switching Gears will proceed with our information campaign solution.

If you are intrigued by this project or our process and want to learn more, please come to Mid-Semester Review this Saturday (March 2) at 1pm at the OEDK to hear more details about all the current DFA Rice projects!