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CO/LAB

Innovative Tech-to-Market Onboarding Experience.

Client: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Employer: ICE- Innovation Centre for Entrepreneurship

Challenge

The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) is a prominent European research center whose mission is to develop breakthrough technologies in the field of computer science, robotics, nanomaterial, and life science. However, the industrial implementation of technological innovations presents us with a paradox: IIT must collaborate with companies to develop the prototype further. However, most companies are uncomfortable investing due to the technology's low development level.

We supported IIT in rethinking the corporate partners' onboarding process to build trust and show to companies the benefit of contributing to the technology development.

The Team

IIT-team: 1x Senior Business Developer, 1X Junior Business developer, 1 X Nanomaterial researcher, 1X Electronic Engineer.

ICE- student Team: 2 x Service designers, 1 x Electronic Engineer, 1 x Finance.

My role: Senior Service Designer and Innovation Consultant. I managed the relationship with the client and supervised the activity of a team of students. I also provided, both to the company and the students, training in design thinking and Innovation Management.

The picture above shows the user journeys we realized to investigate the current process of IIT while onboarding companies to identify the critical phases.

The solution

The new onboarding process was developed starting from a real technology called "artificial leaf" capable of turning carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals. This allowed us to understand some of the challenges related to the development and implementation of new sustainable technologies.

The solution name is CO/LAB and it is meant to enable companies to better understand the value of a new technology through an interactive simulation of the implementation of the technology. Furthermore, this software takes the various questions that often get lost during meetings and creates an organized, concise platform where all data can be viewed coherently. After finishing the simulation, companies will receive a detailed report of the results to bring back to their financial team for assessment.

Wireframing

After we defined the flow and thus what screens we needed, we proceeded with creating the wireframes to explore the experience in more detail on a screen-by-screen level.