Description

In this course, seniors in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Certificate work with a client to help launch and market a product. This semester, our group of students worked with Michael Klein, a Duke art professor to launch his meditation device, the Hydrean. The Hydrean is a small metal ring with certain notches or “elevations” that are meant to direct the user through a guided meditation. Each notch along the Hydrean corresponds to a certain meditative thought that the user can do. The idea of the Hydrean is is small enough to be used in any situation. The goal of the class was to work with Michael Klein to help determine the ideal marketing and launch plan for the Hydrean.

Reflection

• Why did you take this course as part of your certificate pathway?

Taking this class exposed me to a different experience and industry within Innovation & Entrepreneurship. While I did not know exactly what would be the “client” product when I enrolled in the course, I was hoping that it would be something to do with the hospital as I have experienced launching and working on medical devices given my background in BME. To my surprise, the client product was totally different. A consumer meditation device. That said, the fact that the device was something I was so unfamiliar with provided me a better opportunity to learn as I had almost no experience in the area, given that I do not practice mindfulness or was interested in learning.

• What are the most important things you learned in this class and why?

In this class, I learned the importance of ensuring that your product was solving an important problem for your target market. When we were originally shown the Hydrean, the target market was relatively unclear. Dr. Klein argued that it could be marketed to large group of people and they would be interested due to its slender design and flashy appearance. As we discussed more, we realized that we didn’t think that there were clear reasons for such a large group to have problems that would actually be solved by the Hydrean. For example, initially it was thought that Hydrean would appeal greatly to Yoga enthusiasts but after doing some market research, we realized that people who already have established meditative routines, like Yoga enthusiasts, may not need a guiding tool, like the Hydrean. Because of this experience, the importance of ensuring that your product was truly solving a problem is something that was clearly shown in this class.

In addition to defining the problem that your solution solves, defining the specific market with that problem is also a crucial lesson of this course. In much of this course, we spent time going back and fourth and analyzing 3 different target markets. While the market is often thought of as the all of the patients or physicians with a certain disease or that perform a certain surgery in medicine, it was interesting approach a more consumer-based device and analyzing the different subsets of users that would be interested in this device.

The final lesson that I got from this class was the importance of going out and testing your idea by asking people for feedback. In this class, to help find our target market, we created a survey to ask individuals in Gen Z about their interest in their device. Partially based on the fact that I do not meditate or practice mindfulness, I expected to struggle to find people who were interested but surprisingly we had 168 respondents with roughly 50% of people who said that they were interested in trying the Hydrean. Overall, by using a target market and device that I knew nothing about, the I&E capstone course taught me how to identify a problem and market for that product that I hope to use on devices and products that I do know something about.