Check out the article published by the USP News Agency below:
USP students are competing with pairs from five other countries. Online voting took place from March 14 to 21
The time has passed when solutions to business problems were left solely for executives to resolve. The global trend is design thinking: a company presents a problem it is facing, and people outside the organization propose real solutions. Two USP students accepted one of these challenges and now represent Brazil in an international competition with other pairs from five countries: India, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Internet users from around the world will be able to vote, from March 14 to 21, on the projects through this link. The two pairs with the most votes will advance to the final phase of the competition.
The contest, called Innovators Race, is organized by Capgemini, a consulting and Information Technology company based in France. Aimed at university students, the competition seeks to find a technological solution for a local company in each country.
In Brazil, the 21 pairs participating in the first phase developed a project for the cosmetics industry Natura. From these, 8 were selected to be evaluated by a panel of experts from Capgemini. Later, a new panel chose 4 projects, and among them, the Brazilian representative emerged.
The chosen project was by students Rodrigo Spillere and Augusto de Paula Junior, from the MBA in Governance in Technological Innovation with Sustainability, offered by the Sustainability Laboratory (LASSU) at the Polytechnic School (Poli) of USP. The students created a smartphone platform to optimize the work of Natura sales consultants and also for consumers, in addition to offering an e-learning center resource for training professionals, and a financial manager to help them manage their own money.
Watch the video about the project (in English)
“I even changed the course calendar so that our students could participate in the competition,” reports LASSU coordinator, Professor Tereza Cristina Carvalho. For her, it is a very interesting real and practical experience for the students, as it puts them in direct contact with design thinking, a resource increasingly used by the market. “The idea is to increasingly bring to our students what is happening out there,” she emphasizes.
Tereza Carvalho points out that the fact that students need to gather votes to qualify for the competition may be challenging at first. However, the need to take the initiative to reach out to people and ask for votes is very positive. “It is a characteristic that is part of a successful entrepreneur, because they need to believe in their own idea to be able to sell it,” she comments.
Real Challenge
The real problem presented by Natura to be solved was to boost sales while maintaining the current format, with customer mediation carried out by consultants. “We found that, in the current model, the flow from purchase to product delivery is very long,” says Rodrigo Spillere. “The consumer needs to know a consultant, then meet with them and look at a printed catalog to choose the product; then, the consultant places the order, waits for it to arrive, and only after that will the consumer have the product in hand,” he explains.
In the project developed by the students, the proposal is for consultants to have a small stock of products on hand and act as a small e-commerce, simplifying and facilitating the buying and selling process. Using geolocation techniques, the consumer can find the nearest consultant and place an order via the app.
An intelligence mechanism will show consultants the best-selling products by region and also in each season of the year. In summer, for example, sales of sunscreen increase.
Another interesting point of the platform is the offering of e-learning, where the consultant can watch videos with sales lessons and follow guidelines on how to enhance the business, as well as how to better manage product inventory.
Sustainable Solution
Augusto de Paula Junior emphasizes that the project was entirely thought out with sustainability in mind and takes into account all its aspects. “In the environmental aspect, geolocation prevents the consumer and the consultant from traveling long distances to make sales, which helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And with the online catalog, there will be a decrease in the printed version. In the social aspect, the platform will help consultants by offering e-learning and a financial manager. And in the economic aspect, it helps the entire chain: the consumer, the company, and the consultant,” he clarifies.
In this next stage, people will be able to vote for all six pairs, but only once for each. To vote, it will be necessary to provide Facebook or LinkedIn credentials so that the system recognizes the user and does not allow people to vote more than once for the same video.
The two pairs that receive the most votes between March 14 and 21 will go to Paris, to the Capgemini headquarters, where they will undergo a technical evaluation of the developed technological solution. The winning pair will receive a prize of $25,000 and an internship at Capgemini in San Francisco, United States.
Published in Technology, USP Online Highlight by USP News Agency on March 10, 2016
