Who Wants Marshmallows?
In our many years of running commercialization courses and acceleration cohorts across the nation, we’ve seen hundreds of awesome technologies, tried dozens of team-building exercises and exposed people to the excitement of “breathtaking” intellectual property lectures.
But, one tradition has stuck: Marshmallows! (pun intended)
The Marshmallow Challenge is a fun exercise for anyone — especially for our cohorts who not only need to get to know each other, but also need to learn to flex their creative, innovative and collaborative brains.
Here’s how it goes. According to www.marshmallowchallenge.com, which I’m assuming is the “final word” on all things marshmallow challenges:
In 18 minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top.
We have our students break into teams and go through this exercise, as it’s not only fun and competitive, but also is full of business and product development lessons, which are critical for commercialization.
Here are the usual results: out of the 5 teams, only 2–3 teams make structures that stand at all (some are off balance — even falling during the measuring process) and usually one team completely dominates with a really, really tall, balanced structure.
The biggest lesson from the challenge is that product design (just like business model design) is an iterative process and prototyping/feedback is really important.
As you can see in this TED Talk on said Marshmallow Challenge from 2010, most business students spend a great deal of time planning their strategy to build their marshmallow and spaghetti tower, only to see the tower collapse upon their build. After wasting 10–12 minutes, now they’re scrambling to come up with a new plan, which leads to anger, yelling and kicking — well, not always kicking— resulting in no structure when the 18 minutes are up.
The lesson is explained on the Challenge site:
Business students are trained to create a single right plan, then execute on it. When they put a marshmallow on top and the structure topples over, there’s no time to fix it and that creates a crisis!
Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process — which is central to design thinking. With each version, [people] get instant feedback of what works and what doesn’t. Through play and prototyping, they instantly adapt to what’s in front of them.
You can read about this and other lessons on the Challenge site.
Where am I going with this? Well, when we go into our classes where students are tasked with creating business opportunities for federal lab technologies, we first try to understand objectively how the technology works, then we identify the potential applications, layout the potential stakeholders and research the competitive landscape. Then the students hypothesize on the relative value of the technology to those stakeholders.
And this is where the Marshmallow Challenge comes in!
Before students build a prototype or business plan, they test their relative value hypothesis to validate/invalidate their conclusions by talking to customers and immersing themselves in the industry— then they use that feedback to formulate a more accurate relative value model for their end users. At this point, they’re ready to discover a viable business model and develop a MVP.
Students will continue to use the lessons of Marshmallows (iterative development) as they prototype solutions and test those solutions in the marketplace.
Sounds fun and rewarding, doesn’t it?
You can follow students TODAY as they build commercialization plans for Air Force technologies in the classroom at Wright State University and the University of Dayton. Sign up at www.ArchiTechPlatform.com and join in on the conversation.
Now, who’s hungry for marshmallows?
