Team Koivu

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  Team Koivu making mockups

Inspiration

Kaleva Media’s current issue is that they do not reach millennials with their products and services. The inspiration of our solution came from us. Everyone in the team can be defined as a millennial because our ages range from 20 to 34. We have the needs and wants that millennials have so the basis of our inspiration came from our own needs.

What it does

Our solution gathers around influential people and university students who wish to show their ability to produce quality content. Universities could become Kaleva Media partners. There is clear incentive for students to provide content for millennials. Students want to prove their skills and get work experience. Also, who else would know what millennials would want except for millennials themselves? In the meantime Kaleva Media will get quality content from university students for low investment costs. Low investment costs for Kaleva Media and clear incentive for students to provide content for Kaleva Media about their field of expertise. Millennials are curious cats who have a thirst for learning. Also this kind of business model is very scalable because the concept can be moved to different universities abroad and then there could be content in different languages. The functionalities in the app would also consist of the ability to choose the duration of the podcast. The time you have available to listen to news/series/anything desired. For example, when choosing 15 minutes and a genre, the app would employ an AI to find content from different podcasts on that topics that can be combined to create a personalized 15 minutes podcast. For that we developed a tool. Time stamps have been used before. In YouTube videos you can click the time from the description in order to move to that time in the video you are watching. Why is that not a quality in the interface itself? Our interface has the possibility to hop from topic to topic on podcasts and news. When publishing your work, you can add the time stamps on your work.

How We built it

On the first day did a ton of research and benchmarking via internet and different social media platforms. We wanted to define the design problem and therefore from the three topics that Kaleva Media gave us we chose to focus on millennials. We identified the needs of the millennial by using different designing tools. For starters we asked 5 times ourselves why we use media. After we had identified the true needs why we use media we asked 5 times how we use media. The last thing we asked ourselves was why we do not use media. These tools enabled us to understand what are the fundamental reasons why and why not we as millennials use media. We started next day by identifying the generic millennials, end users. This enabled us to understand how the millennials behave. Next we started the ideating process. All of us contributed by placing as many ideas as they had in 5 minutes. After that we narrowed those ideas down and chose the ones that seemed to answer the most to the needs of the millennial. The process continued next by narrowing even more down and choosing that we want to choose podcasts because they satisfy many of the needs. You can listen them anywhere and anytime you want. Millennials often do not have a strict routine, so they can listen those at different times. One of the needs noticed was the option to choose how long to use the service. For this reason we added a functionality that allows the user to define how long they want to listen to a podcast and which topics so that the app will use an AI to search content from different podcasts and combine them in a single complete experience for that duration. One of the trends was that millennials are consumers and producers of content. We decided that we could do this by making Kaleva Media to partner with different universities. Students in these universities would provide quality content for low investment costs because they are willing to get work experience and show it as a proof of their skills. The content would be universal information. Millennials are curious and just want to learn and know things so this would be the content creation. We also collected some data about the behaviour of the millennials from other Dash participants through a google forms sheet and asking people to answer to questions like: How do you consume media? What do you look for media? Would you use a platform that has many content creators? We got green light for the last question and we liked it and that was also one of the reasons we choose this.

Challenges we ran into

The ideating process took a pretty long time. We used a lot of time ideating, but the facilitators encouraged us just to proceed which enabled us to make the decision. The decision making part was perhaps the hardest thing because there was so many possibilities to choose from.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of our team. Everyone has had a part and we enjoyed the whole time working as a team. Of course, we are proud of the solution what we came to.

What we learned

We learned team working skills and how to work with different team members. Our team also had three different nationalities, so it gave us an opportunity to learn from each other’s cultures. One of our team members, Eero, was very delighted that he learned to use different kinds of design/problem solving tools.

What's next for Koivu

Team Koivu members would be more than happy to provide further advice for Kaleva Media even after Dash Lapland is over. The concrete next step would be to contact the universities and their student organizations that are running the student radios and attract influencers, and start producing and publishing podcasts, building a catalogue. In the background you should hire a company to work on the interface that has never been seen before.