Facilitating ‘Innovation’ — A memoir of my first ‘make-a-thon’
It was a cold-warm shiny spring afternoon. Just the right weather where with a fleece(thin jacket) I felt comfortable. I was standing in front of a two human tall three bronze statues outside the PPG paints arena, Pittsburgh. At first, I thought if they were the famous trio of this winning ice hockey club, Pittsburgh Penguins. I also got reminded of the trio legends of my favourite soccer club, Manchester United. As I went on to read about the statue, I found out that this statue was erected to commemorate famous goal of the ice hockey legend, Mario Lemieux in 1988. All right, whatever that was. I have watched so many ice hockey games on television during my childhood days back in India. Today, I will be watching the game live for the first time along with a group of 20+ college students(this game was sponsored by the Pittsburgh penguins themselves).
As I walked inside the stadium, I saw hordes of people rushing inside the stadium to grab their seats an hour ahead of the game start time. I could only wonder to myself: ‘Where were you all people hiding in the city?’ For the first time, I felt like my home country, India.
People stopped to buy some beers, burgers, raffle tickets, and were shouting out of nowhere: ‘Let’s go Pens, Let’s go Pens’.
After 45 minutes of theatrics by so many companies bombarding the 18,000 fans with their advertisements, the match finally began. Ice hockey is played as 3 periods (20 minutes each with 60 minute game time). At any time of the game, we have 12 players playing in the court(6 players a side including the goalkeeper). In today’s game, Pittsburgh Penguins are playing against Carolina Hurricanes. As the game proceeded, I was amazed by the speed at which the players skated but still managed to control and dribble the puck(equivalent to hockey ball). Unlike soccer where the endurance of the players is the key(only 3 players can be substituted in a 90 minutes game), in ice hockey, I saw that any player hardly played more than a minute. Ian Suzuki, an ice hockey player himself sitting next to me said: ‘Players do rolling subs every 45 seconds. It’s like giving your all-in, maximum energy and then sub’.
Something unique about ice hockey is the boundaries. Unlike other sports, the play is bounded by boards which also makes the game susceptible to injuries. Imagine getting pushed to the boards. Imagine getting tripped down with a hockey stick. I saw it all, live. There were one boarding and 2 trippings in this game. Although the safety equipment (like helmet, shoulder, elbow pads and shin guard) for the players has improved considerably over the years, injuries still happen. Head injuries make up to 50% of all injuries which gives many players to suffer from concussions. Injuries aside, ice hockey is such a wonderful game to watch for all the skill the players show on the field.
Coming back to the match, we were leading 2–1 at the end of period 1. But the Hurricanes levelled the score 2–2 early in the second period. The aura was very intense with 17,800 fans cheering and shouting their heart out. After 30 minutes, I became one of them, a Pittsburger.
Game results: It was not our lucky day, we lost 2–6 to the Hurricanes. (Side note: Penguins usually win!)
In my last article, I was talking about developing ‘Empathy’ with our team members. This ice hockey game experience was important to me personally before I go on to participate in a week-long ‘make-a-thon’. I know that I am going to innovate a product idea which would improve the safety of the hockey players. Watching the game live aided me to develop empathy for the ice hockey players and sparkled the love for this game.
This article is about my experience at a 5-day ‘make-a-thon’ sponsored by ice hockey champs Pittsburgh Penguins, Covestro(Chemicals company specialising in polymers), Bauer(manufacturer of ice hockey equipment) facilitated by my school’s design experts. That’s a lot of names, I understand it. It’s important to make some effort to remember these names, or at least what they do! (I will tell ‘why’ shortly)
Before you read any further. I am going to request you to read two short articles. These articles set the context for what we are going to talk for the next 10 minutes and make sure that we have a shared understanding of,
1) What is ‘innovation’. How is it different from Innovation?
2) What is the biggest hurdle for any team when they set-up to innovate?
Let’s resume the conversation on the make-a-thon now. Initial prime questions: What is a make-a-thon? What did we try to achieve in 5 days?
A make-a-thon is an event where we generate new ideas to solve a real-world problem, rapidly prototype those ideas, simulate the idea and pitch the idea to the investors. We did in a week which would otherwise take months to do. We worked in constrained time but we had the facilities and experts to guide us as we shape our ideas.
Most importantly, What real-world problem did we try to solve?
In Professional Ice hockey(National Hockey League a.k.a NHL), shoulder and elbow injuries make up to 15% of all injuries that occur in a year after head injuries. In Youth Ice Hockey, shoulder injuries go up to 24%. We were tasked to redesign the shoulder, elbow pads for the ice hockey players which would increase their safety, without compromising their mobility(ease of movement) while playing.
Now we know what the problem is, we know who we are solving for, the next step is to understand who cares about this project. Or, to put this way, who all will be affected by the novel solutions we come up with?
Answer: Ice hockey players, Bauer(who sells the ice hockey safety equipment for those players), Covestro(who supplies the materials to Bauer), and us(the Innovators) alongside the design experts of my school. All of the above-mentioned people are called stakeholders(because they have a stake in this innovation project outcome).
Let’s pause and think about something for a moment here,
Who are we innovating for?
Think about it!
The answers to the above question will help us determine the ‘key stakeholder’ (Among all the stakeholders, key stakeholder are the people we should empathise the most with). This is an important concept to understand because as we start making design and material decisions down the line, the ‘metric’ we fall back to make the right decision will depend on the team’s understanding on ‘Who is the user of our product and what are their needs’. Understanding the key stakeholder will help us navigate the classic dilemma of ‘I do this because my boss liking it this way vs. I do this because this is how much the user needs’ which all of us experience in our job. The more you understand about your key stakeholder, the better trade-offs you could make on balancing value generation between customers and users. To quote an example in this context, we are innovating to improve the safety of the hockey players and not just because Bauer could sell a new line of product and Covestro could supply more of their material to Bauer(this is an outcome of good innovation and it will eventually happen).
This is also a good time to understand the difference between ‘customer’ and ‘user’. Understanding from a point of view of an innovator, customers are the one who will pay for the value you create(in the context of this make-a-thon, it’s the new elbow and shoulder pads designs we are going to prototype as a team). Users are the people who will ultimately end up using or experiencing the value(product/service) you create.
To sum up things. At this point, we should know that our
Users (and Key stakeholders) are Pittsburgh Penguin’s Ice hockey players.
Customers are Covestro and Bauer.
All right, perfect!
Now, I will go on to share my highlight on each day of the make-a-thon which you could understand, digest and apply at your current projects. It’s a mix of my experience and good tips!
Day 1: (March 9, 2020)
On Monday, we kickstarted the day with signing the Non-Disclosure Agreement form followed by short talks and showcasing videos from the previous two editions of Rethink the Rink Make-a-thon. When the leaders from Covestro talked about how they are implementing the ideas and designs that came out of the last two editions by deploying new rink and helmet in production, I got pumped up!!
The leaders from Bauer, & Pittsburgh Penguins also talked about how we are helping the players by increasing their playtime(or sweetly called, ice time!).
The moment all of us(students) waiting for came finally arrived — Unveiling the problem prompt for this edition. As I mentioned before it’s redesigning the shoulder and elbow pads. The professional NHL players (two Stanley cup champions) shared their experience on shoulder and elbow injuries. Specifically, they also explained in detail what actions/ motions(by other players) during the play cause injury.
We also had an opportunity to connect with the all these industry leaders and NHL players after formal sessions. Seeing 15+ top-level executives, and leaders who are choosing to spend half a day with us gave me this impression: ‘Man, this is some serious stuff! How did I not know when I applied for this?’
As the day came to an end, we were given names tag, t-shirts, took some group pictures. Professor Haider who organised this whole event from my school then gave us directions to form self-guided teams. Personally, this was the moment I was waiting for. One key reason I choose to spend my spring break over a make-a-thon is to work with people who have a educational background different than me. I know that this is not going to be very comfortable and easy. Yet, it was the very thing I was looking forward to.
Day 2 & 3: (March 10–11, 2020)
I woke up early on Day 2 to do sketch some initial ideas before heading to the workshop to brainstorm new ideas. But, wait! I need a pivot to think around. This pivot is what we could call as the ‘problem statement’. When I first heard the problem prompt, this is what popped into my mind: ‘What is something which protects us but does not hurt others?’ You could ask me, ‘How is this problem statement anywhere closer to ice hockey or shoulder pads?’. That’s a good question and you are right here!
To tell the truth, this is too broad to be called a problem statement since this lacks context, but it is a good start. But, having a very broad problem statement encourages us to stretch our brains to us to think out of the box.
(Extra tip: Ideally, or lest in most cases, it would take months of research to come up with a better problem statement and through learned insights which turn to opportunities. Later, we use these opportunities as a pivot to think about solutions. It’s okay if you don’t understand this! Keep reading!)
To get inspiration for more design ideas and new form(shape) for shoulder and elbow pads, I did a quick mood board with keeping the problem statement in the mind. Mood board is a tool industrial designers use for getting inspiration when they sketch new product concepts. (Mood board is nothing closer to intensive and good quality user research. But, it works just fine for quick product concept generations and inspirations!). Doing this mood board inspired me with the elbow design which we evolved and improved as a team on Day 3.
I joined my team at 9.30 am at the workshop. Aditya, Chris, Daniel, Rachel and myself are the yellow team. Out of 5, we have three mechanical engineers and two chemical engineers. Aditya and I are the master’s students. Chris, Daniel and Rachel were are doing their undergrad.
Prof. Haider kickstarted the morning with a brainstorming session. We as a team gotta come up with 50 ideas in 1 hour. To make things simpler, she had already categorised the ideas into particular categories to make it easy to ideate(means idea generation). A pro tip: The power of sketching while ideating. To save a lot of explanation, you gotta trust me with this: Try sketching your ideas instead of just writing down in words. Why is it so effective? When you sketch, your mind thinks very differently from the way it thinks when you scribble! Another good thing is that sketching is a global form of communication. What is means is that everybody draws the circle the same way around anywhere you in the world. Having sketched your idea(the lines doesn’t have to be a perfect stroke), you could save a lot of energy in communicating and explaining your ideas. [As a fun activity, try sketching your bucket list or to-do list].
Bottom line: Always sketch your ideas.
In the next few hours, we were instructed to downsize and choose top 3 concepts out of the 50 ideas!
After lunch, we had an expert coaching session where we presented our 3 concepts to the design experts of my school, scientists and of Covestro. It was a very informal discussion where all of these experts would come over and look at our design concept sketches to help us improve the concepts.
I found this session very critical and important for 2 reasons,
1) Improving our concepts by asking the very basic of questions like: ‘What is fundamentally unique about this particular concept? Is this concept integrative to the current shoulder pad design or is this a radical design?’
2) Most importantly, validating assumptions. When we sketched our concept as a team, we had an idea of how the materials should behave in real-world impact situations. But, these were all ‘This material might be the best for this design. This design might be manufactured by thermoforming’. In a regular project, validating these assumptions would have taken weeks. Having the engineers from Covestro, we were able to clarify our ‘this might’ early on.
After the expert coaching session, out of the 3 concepts our team took forward one design concept(which we were confident that it would work out) for the shoulder pad design. We prototyped our concept to present within the 4 other teams at the end of the day. If I told you before that sketching is the global form of communication, prototyping is the best form of communication when you innovate a physical product. This advice might save you a lot of time: If you are innovating a physical product, discuss with prototypes. To quote a business example, at Apple, you could only call for a meeting and discussion with the leaders during demos. A demo is the working prototype of the software project you are working on.
Funnily, most of the times from what I have seen, the prototype would look very different from the concept initial sketches. You might react like: ‘Oh, wait! This is what you told us?’ or like this: ‘Now, how is this closer to what you have sketched here?’. This incident happened again on Day 3 in our team. Two of my team members were discussing for hours on a slight modification on the shoulder pad that would redistribute the stress far effectively. Running out of time, we asked them to start prototyping the concepts. After 3 hours, both of them ended up prototyping the same concept. Communication was the issue. One way we could have avoided is by quick sketching, another way is by quick prototyping(what we sometimes call as pre-totyping). All you need is cardboard, scissor and a maybe a glue.
Bottom line: Talk with prototypes.
In my previous article, I was talking about the importance of developing ‘empathy’ with your teammates. The bittersweet truth is that in reality we sometimes don’t get time to understand the strengths and weakness of every team member when we are doing business, on a mission. However, you get to know about your teammates as you work together.
Day 3 was again prototyping day. The staff from the workspace helped us with prototyping. Either its laser cutting, thermoforming or 3D printing, they made sure that our skill to operate any of those machines does not impede us from getting the best conceptual prototype. We also had an expert coaching session in the afternoon. This time, two more NHL players joined us to validate the final assumptions we had about how our design could improve the safety of the players.
On all these days, there was one person who used to come and check with us every 1 hour at least. That’s Prof.Haider. Always, with a smiling face, she would approach us and make sure that we are doing fine. She had so many things on top of her mind to keep track and facilitate. Despite all that she kept her cool and worked with a smile. She inspired me a lot. Now I fondly remember of her as my ‘academic crush’ for those 5 days!
Day 4: (March 12, 2020)
Preparing for Storytelling!
From the start, our team was cognizant that how we thought and arrived at our elbow and shoulder designs should tell a cohesive story.
As we started to practice our 10-minute presentation, two of us started getting into an argument on what should we give more focus during our presentation. Person 1 was arguing that we should spend a little more time on the problem. Person 2’s argument was that the solution is more important than the problem. This is that high pitch argument,
Person 1: ‘Problem is more important than the solution. We should explain why we did this before we tell them what we did’
Person 2: ‘’They already know what the problem is. Why do you want to tell them again and waste a few minutes of our 10-minute slot?’
Person 1: ‘I agree that they already know what the problem is. But, we should tell them again that we understand what the problem is. Also, what if those leaders don’t know what the problem is? What if their assumptions could be challenged?’
Person 2: (After 10 seconds of silence) All right! We will talk about the problem too!
We settled to split our time equally between problem, solution and validation(simulation results).
Something to note here is that some fights are good for the team. It’s bad if a team just keeps doing whatever their leader tells them to do. Sometimes, these little restraints are the team members way of giving feedback: ‘I too care about the project’. This is no Army, Navy, Airforce where you can’t question your leader’s orders. This is innovation. Team members should have small fights on whatever could bring meaningful outcome in the project. When do you know if the output is meaningful? ‘It’s when even if you fight hard and win an argument, you will not feel like: Ohh, I won the argument at the last. I am right!. Instead, you will get a feeling that whatever you argued for is will add value to the customers and users’.
Also on Day 4, I did what I love doing the most: solving engineering problems. Yeah, I put my hands on FEA Simulations after a long time. (Tip[Disclaimer: This might sound too technical!!!]: You could save millions of money in new product development of any physical product if you could master FEA simulations. Mastering FEA means mastering the key engineering assumptions(point of contact, point of forces, point of stress during impact) you should make when you simulate the behaviour of the product as it would behave in the actual world. Huh!! This is easier in structural problems. FEA analysis becomes complex once the object of study starts moving i.e dynamic motion).
Now, why the why am I talking about this?
To convince ourselves about our design hypothesis and other judges, we have to do an FEA simulation of our proposed design solution.
One thumb rule while doing FEA analysis that any expert would agree with me is this: Simplify the design problem to test the base hypothesis(before going on to do real word simulation). So, we simulated an FEA analysis considering the player is getting an impact on his elbow and shoulder while being still.
So, I modelled our concept, assigned material properties, made an educated assumption on the forces and impact, and did an Impact testing and modal analysis for the elbow design. Daniel did a similar FEA analysis for our shoulder pad design. The stress distribution was as expected in both these cases.
Day 5:(March 13, 2020)
It’s the presentation day. Our trip to the Penguins practice arena at Cranberry got cancelled due to coronavirus outbreak. Hence, we had to present at our school where our presentations will be recorded and shared with the judges from Covestro, Pittsburgh Penguins, Bauer for scoring.
Design experts from CMU were present on the day of presentation to score us. We did a good job as a team rehearsing and pitching our biomimicry inspired design concepts for Shoulder and Elbow pad designs.
As the event came to a closing, I was left with this one feeling: I couldn’t wait to test my prototype in the actual game. All I wanted was to start prototyping our design concept and do a real usability testing of the prototype with ice hockey players.
Closing thoughts: This 5 days make-a-thon was made possible by the collaborative effort of so many people(tools expert at the workshop who helped us with prototyping, engineers and NHL players who gave valuable feedback, professors and design experts at my school who organised this workshop, & all the leaders of the partnered companies who sponsored). It’s the collaborative effort of all of these people that facilitated the success of the event. I am thankful for this wonderful opportunity and happy to have spent my Spring break doing this.
I am hoping that one of the designs from this make-a-thon makes its way through production to guard the shoulders and elbows of ice hockey players!
~Rahul vignesh Sekar
P.S: Dedicating this article with much respect,
To my high school physics teacher Professor Lucas who gave a killer answer (to the first question that I remember asking):’Why do visible light does not have any colour?’. An inquisitive nature of a boy was saved, kindled and sprouted that day.
