MATUROLIFE Official website
The MATUROLIFE consortium organised two online Roadmapping workshops for smart clothing & footwear and furniture with external participants on 19 and 20 October 2020.
The aim of the workshops was to capture insights from all participants and external stakeholders in order to finalise detailed Roadmaps for the three MATUROLIFE products, the overriding aim being to progress the developed assistive technology solutions in MATUROLIFE towards commercialisation. Specifically, the goals were to
- Prioritize remaining tasks
- Track progress towards goals
- Co-ordinate activity across teams and companies
- Build consensus and understanding within teams
- Create transparency, internally and externally
The workshops were initially planned to be run in-person at a European industrial event. However, due to the pandemic, MATUROLIFEE design lead partner GEDS re-designed the road mapping event experience for the virtual environment by using strategic design tools and methods which has also formed MATUROLIFE’s award-winning design management methodology.
Narinder Bains, Coventry University, MATUROLIFE Project Manager, started each workshop with a short introduction to the MATUROLIFE project, followed by Gulay Ozkan, GEDS, MATUROLIFE Design Lead, who introduced the designed tools which guided the participants to give their opinions in an organized way as well as the virtual environment tools, and overview of the MATUROLIFE design process.
An overview of the MATUROLIFE prototypes was then provided by the responsible partners for footwear (Javier Cortes, CTCR), clothing (Bojan Pavšič, ISN) and furniture (Carlos González Muñoz, ITAINNOVA).
Having also briefly presented the Business Model Canvas for each projects, participants used Miro to capture their responses and feedback for the four phases of the roadmap: Phase 1) Technology Development; Phase 2) Manufacturing; Phase 3) Marketing and Phase 4) Product Distribution.
About 15 persons participated in the workshops and contributed their insightful feedback to the further elaboration of the MATUROLIFE Technology Roadmap. A survey was run by GEDS at the end of each workshop to measure the attendants’ experiences. This data was used to improve the experience of the following workshop.
Overall, the workshops were considered a great success by both MATUROLIFE partners and participants, to quote one of the participants: “ Both of the events were very well-organized and informative. So, it was a great experience for me to attend such a roadmapping workshop for the first time, and what was more, attending an online roadmapping workshop was more interesting!”
