As we come to the end of semester 1 for the first cohort of 12 Cyber Innovate students it’s a great time to reflect on what they have learned, applied and achieved to date.
The first 2 months of the term was mainly focused on learning and applying the first three phases of the Design Thinking process, namely Empathy, Define and Ideate. The students attended a number of lectures and workshops with Dr Sarah Hayes to learn how to work their way through these three phases. Working in teams of 3, under the expert guidance of Kevin O’Mahony, Design Thinking and UX expert from the MTU Nimbus Centre, they then took this new knowledge and spent the next 8 weeks visiting and engaging with partner company cybersecurity personnel (Immersive Environment) to apply the tools and techniques that they had learned in order to identify problems or challenges that these people face in carrying out their day to day roles and tasks.
The Immersive Environment engagements consisted of Observations, Interviews, Fieldwork and Tabletop exercises. The Immersive Environment visits varied in duration from 1 – 3 days. We are incredibly grateful to all of our industry partners who gave us access to their very busy staff throughout these visits. These companies included: Dell Technologies, Eir Evo, eSentire, Fexco, ICBF, JRI America (SMBC), Mastercard and McKesson. In all cases, the companies were incredibly forthcoming and open in engaging with the students and they gained real insights into some of the problems faced by Cybersecurity staff in carrying out their duties.
The final component of the Immersive Environment included a Capture the Flag challenge focused on the Smart Maritime sector combined with the Smart Maritime and Offshore Wind Event which was attended by key opinion leaders and stakeholders in this space. The challenge was developed by Airbus for Cyber Innovate and was expertly led by Dr George O’Mahony with our partners from the Irish Naval Service and the NMCI (National Maritime College of Ireland).
At the end of this module the students had identified 435 Needs or Problems to be solved. They then ideated on potential solutions and prioritised 38 Needs. Each team then selected one Need to move onto the next phase of the programme and presented their findings to date to their lecturer and programme stakeholders.
A key part of building the students’ knowledge of the cybersecurity space was our 22 guest speakers who were incredibly generous in giving up their time to deliver hugely engaging talks on all things cybersecurity related. A huge thank you to all of these speakers. The student also attended a number of events including The National Women’s Enterprise Day Event, Cyber Ireland Conference, ISA Ireland Section OT Cybersecurity Conference and the Cyber Ireland Founders Meet Up in Dogpatch labs.
The November – December period was spent learning and applying the Customer Development methodology originally conceived by Steve Blank (Stanford University). We were delighted to welcome Melissa Heffner and Sara Martin Henderson from VentureLab in Georgia Institute of Technology to MTU to spend a week instructing the students on the process and then meet with the teams weekly to monitor their progress in applying the process and to offer them advice on how to apply it. Melissa and Sara are experts in the Customer Development process, who have previously trained numerous Irish researchers and Technology Transfer Officers (TTOs) on the process.
This process, often referred to as Evidence based Entrepreneurship, involves each them interviewing 50 potential customers for their proposed product in order to validate their Business Thesis. A Business Thesis is defined as “A Customer Segment will buy our product/service because of a value proposition”, e.g. An Asset Manager will but our device monitoring tool to reduce the time spent onboarding new OT devices. By carrying out 50+ interviews the Teams quickly had an opportunity to validate or invalidate their business thesis. In a number of cases the teams pivoted their Customer Segment, product/service or value proposition as they developed a deeper undertaking of the problems faced by a particular customer segment. For some teams this meant adjusting part of their business thesis, for others in meant dropping their idea completely and going back to select one of the other Needs that they identified in the Immersive Environment phase and re-starting the Customer Development process.
At the end of this module the students will select the proposed solution that they want to take forward into Semester 2, where they will learn how to prototype and test the proposed solution, carry out a detailed market research and regulatory assessment, develop a business model and business plan and receive investor pitching training.
