Methodology and Limitations of the project “Incrediblue”
In the world of collaborative consumption, what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine — for a fee. Pioneering services like Incrediblue have proliferated into shared yachts. The idea behind building incrediblue was not to follow a trend or use a buzzword, but to update boating holidays and make sea related activities affordable and accessible to more people. Incrediblue’s goal is to simplify the process of booking boat rentals for boat owners and tourists in an effective way.
In order to learn more about the concept of Incrediblue and the activities of the people that fuel the company we chose participant observation as the primary method. Basically, through the participant observation we had the opportunity to be involved in the day-to-day or routine activities of the company’s crew. We collected data by checking for nonverbal expression of feelings, determining who interacts with whom, observing how participants communicate with each other, and finally checking for how much time is spent on various activities.
Our first encounter was on an event in Innovathens (08/12/2015) where we had the chance to discuss up close the concept of Incrediblue and meet Antonios Fiorakis who is the CEO & cofounder.After understanding how Incrediblue works, our next meeting (13/12/2015) was with a Skipper-owner so as to observe and identify the relationships between the company and the owners and also to get the feel of how things are organized and prioritized and how people interrelate.
Then we analyzed these facts (21–27/12/2015) and we set up the meetings in the offices of Incrediblue. On our overall 3 meetings in the offices we unfortunately had only one observation day (07/01/2016) in which we observed the culture of the company, the relationship between the employees and the founders and the collaboration of the different departments.
The other two days (11/01/2016) we interviewed the founder and the co-founders of Incrediblue and we discussed in depth other matters of interest for the company such as the technical issues they had, the new additions in their services and the philosophy behind their new model of the platform. Although in the lasts meetings the method was the interview, simultaneously we had the opportunity to observe the characteristics that a founder needs to have a successful startup company.
Thus, the only limitation we had was the lack of time and also the fact that the founders though that it wasn’t so easy to observe the offices of the company for more than 3 times. They did not want to disturb the working environment and the employee’s concentration.
