Week 10 Reflection

I want to mostly talk about the class on Friday and how interesting it was to embed our in class knowledge into a business model. First of all, my group consisted of me and Max so I had a great chance to impact the idea. We were given the task of coming up with a business plan that would aid free education for in the future. Since Peter told us that “Nothing is for free, someone, somewhere is paying for it.” We knew that we had to have a strong and consistent resource that could provide us with the capital we need.

So we came up with the plan of making a free mobile service that could gain revenue from targeted ads and information collection. However, in this cyber age, not everybody likes their information to be given away. But there are people (generally lower income) that do not have anything important to lose(as information) so offering them free mobile services and mining information from the transactions would seem a good deal for them. With this abundance of information, we would attract partners that could use this information and provide a payment to the company. Since the company will be mostly spending the money on infrastructure rental from larger mobile services, there will be a certain amount of money dedicated to target people that are in need of education. Since the users are low-income people, the only weakness would be in the long run, when we educate our young users for free and they become more aware of what is going on.

Except that drawback, providing free data and phone calls for people is a good deal and all of this is done for the sake of educating them. I think while thinking this business model, the canvas helped us structure the system in a much more solid way and we also had a chance to talk to Peter about what we did.

I think that thinking about the future scenarios for this business model showed me that no matter how brilliant of an idea it is, there are futures that this model can weaken and lose its value. Thinking about the spectrum of possibilities show us that designing products that think about the spectrum, are more viable to be successful in the long run.