Challenge+problem+4

Challenge Problem 4
Due date: Due at the beginning of class on Wednesday, February 29 Due at 5:00pm on Thursday, March 1st. Please submit as MS-Word or PDF document by e-mail.

Overview:
In this challenge problem you will synthesize your group's observations and ideas collected during challenge problem 3 and in-class exercises to prepare for a gate-2 review. Specifically, you need to use your results from challenge problem 3 to write a revised and refined:
 * Product Opportunity Statement
 * List of value opportunities that you have identified as most important for your target customers
 * Prioritized list of product attributes
 * Detailed customer scenario

You will hand in a single, written report that includes these items. One submission per group.

Your report should be compelling and professionally prepared. It does not need to be long. The best submissions for this assignment are likely to be short (no more than a few pages), concise, describe a clearly articulated and compelling idea, and provide a story in the form of the the scenario to illustrate that idea. You want to convince the gate 2 reviewers that your group really understands your customers and has uncovered a real gap between what they would like to have and what is available for them on the market.

Points:
This challenge problem is worth 75 points.

A note on collaboration and citation:
For this assignment you should actively collaborate with the members of your group to put together your presentation and set of pictures/artifacts/quotes. It is ok to discuss the assignment and what you've discovered with students from other groups (or people outside of the class -- more feedback is better). Your group, however, is responsible for your written report and all of the content that you collect and display. I would encourage you to minimize the interaction with members of the other group on this project. It will not be considered cheating if you do so but it will be a more interesting exercise for everybody if each group follows their own path to reach their conclusions. I anticipate that doing so will lead to a broader exploration of your customers and the possibilities, and avoid having both groups come up with similar observations and recommendations.

You should cite the sources for information that you use in this project much more carefully than you did in challenge problem 3. The assumption in this report is that the information presented represents your observations and synthesis of what you have discovered in your desk-based and field-based research. If you are directly pulling information, ideas, quotes, images, etc. from another source you should cite them properly in the brief write-up that you provide.