Crown Research Institute - Landcare Research

Environment, biodiversity and sustainability research

Challenge:
Landcare Research had 3 multi-function teams who were in the establishment stage of offering commercial services or products to a range of New Zealand and international clients. Landcare Research recognised that a clear understanding of client and stakeholder needs was essential for success. They wanted help with sharing existing knowledge of client needs as well as completing the market picture.

"Our teams got a lot out of the Personas process both in terms of understanding their customer and team building and we are thrilled to see them continuing to use the skills they developed with designindustry."

Robin MacIntosh, Commercialisation & Business Development Manager

Approach:
designindustry delivered the Persona Development Programme (which looks at developing personas which influence sales chains and enables businesses to reasonably predict future customer needs) as a first step in embedding a useable and successful product design process. This was delivered as a full day workshop followed by a two hour video conference.

Teams then went away and completed their ‘personas’ over a six week period. At the review session held by video-conference, each team presented their Personas and had them critiqued by designindustry and by those Landcare Research colleagues who attended the original workshop. Feedback was provided for fine tuning the Personas.

Result:

• Clear definition of who the stakeholders are both now and who they are likely to be in the future
• Clear understanding of what science can deliver and how this can meet stakeholders’ needs
• Making sure that the product or service design process is focused on the needs of the people who are the decision makers and purchasers of the future
• Dynamic way of collecting valuable information about clients and sharing it across functional groups. By putting a group together that was working on diverse projects participants were able to bring significantly more variety of approaches to the table to argue them openly. This made the depth of thinking of all participants far deeper than if they had worked only within functional teams – finding sometimes unexpected synergies.
• Team building
• Prioritisation of client and stakeholder groups to ensure the best delivery for the stakeholders who will provide the best return.