Microsoft: “Look 5-10 years into the future and identify productivity blockers that might be addressed using technology.”
Although everything we produced and presented is under NDA I wanted to show the logo/mascot for our project. It is a service, tool, maybe a plug-in or something else (consciously ambiguous). Let me introduce you to “GloBot“.
About the Practicum…
The past two and a half quarters I have been working with Microsoft product planners Leland Hale, Scott Gordon and five other graduate students on a project to come up with the next big thing that we believe that Microsoft should invest in. It was called a Practicum and was part of a pilot program that Microsoft started at the University of Washington and Duke University.
We were chosen from a pool of many teams that applied to the position. For the application I created a team graphic and we got chosen. My team consisted of three MBA students from the Foster School of Business and three MS Information Management students (me included) from the iSchool.
Our process
We went through several stages of ideation, research, more research!, refining the concept and materializing it using slides, a written report and a final presentation at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. My part in this was doing a lot of research, writing internal reports on my findings, creating interesting visual representations of those finding, creating presentation slides and of course presenting. The work was shared by all except the visual design which was my responsibility.
Result
We ended with a very successful presentation in front of the Microsoft product planners. Discussions spun off during the Q&A around the “GloBot” and how it could be used, we ultimately cut due to time running out.
Thanks to all of my great team members who worked very hard getting this done:
Thomas Potier, Steve Brockett, Ashish Malviya, Ajay Pillay and Prashanth Ganapathyraj.
And of course Microsoft (Leland & Scott) for the opportunity to present, participate and learn how things work at Microsoft.