Business Innovation

Reflections

Over the past days, our cohort worked through an intensive Business Innovation workshop that pushed us to explore the entrepreneurial and strategic dimensions of our projects. Even though my thesis project is not primarily driven by profit or by a traditional startup mentality, this workshop gave me a new lens to assess opportunities, understand markets, and articulate value in a way that complements the more systemic and critical approach of the MDEF program.

Identifying and Ranking Opportunities

We began by using an opportunity ranking framework, a structured way to compare different problems we observe around us. Instead of choosing a challenge based on intuition or personal preference, we evaluated impact, feasibility, urgency, and market potential. This process helped me clarify which problem is at the core of my thesis: the disconnection between local creative capacity and the systems of production that remain global, distant, and inefficient. Ranking opportunities forced me to focus and to justify why this is the problem worth solving.

Defining Users, Customers, and Current Solutions

Once the problem was defined, we mapped potential target customers and users, and analysed existing solutions. For my project, building a distributed, local manufacturing platform in Barcelona, this meant identifying designers, makers, workshops, and consumers who struggle with access to production tools. Exploring current alternatives (from industrial platforms to local FabLabs) helped me better understand where the gaps are and what differentiates the approach I am proposing.

Validating the Opportunity

One of the most useful parts of the workshop was learning how to validate an opportunity. Instead of assuming that “people will want this,” we discussed concrete methods: – lightweight prototypes – landing pages – data-driven interest tests – direct conversations with early adopters – measurable indicators of traction For the first time, I had to articulate what success would look like. What numbers, signals, or behaviors would show that the opportunity is real?

Creating a landing page for my project was an especially interesting exercise. It forced me to communicate clearly, simply, and convincingly—something that often gets lost when working on complex, systemic problems.

Market Size, Costs, and First Customers

Estimating the market size was completely new to me, and surprisingly eye-opening. Even though my thesis project is not designed to become a hyper-scalable startup, understanding the potential scale of the opportunity helped me refine the scope and relevance of what I am building. We also discussed how to reach the first 100 customers and how much it would cost. This reframing—from “just build the idea” to “how do people actually find it, adopt it, and pay for it?”—was extremely valuable. It made me think about real-world implementation, not only conceptual frameworks.

What the Workshop Brought to My Project

Overall, this workshop helped me: – clarify the core problem my thesis is addressing – understand the ecosystem of existing solutions – think more strategically about users and value – articulate my project in a simpler, more accessible way – envision real steps toward implementation – evaluate feasibility from a business perspective, not just a design perspective

It also reinforced the importance of creating something desirable and usable—not just theoretically interesting.

A Reflection on the Business Mindset vs. MDEF

Even though I appreciated the workshop, I also felt a tension between the very business-oriented, sometimes explicitly capitalist framing and the approach we cultivate in MDEF. Our program tends to focus on systemic change, local empowerment, situated knowledge, and social impact, rather than profit, growth curves, and markets.

My thesis is not about “making a fortune”; it’s about enabling local production, decentralizing capacity, and strengthening communities of makers and designers. Still, learning to speak the language of business innovation has value. It allows me to translate my project into a format that is legible to stakeholders, funders, partners, or even institutions, without compromising the deeper intention or ethics of the work.

Conclusion

This workshop challenged me, expanded my perspective, and ultimately helped me refine my thesis project. Even if I do not fully align with the classic startup logic, the tools, methods, and exercises we explored gave me a clearer understanding of how opportunities can be validated, communicated, and implemented in the real world. It was a valuable complement to the MDEF methodology, and a reminder that even transformative, community-driven projects can benefit from a sharp and strategic foundation.