Research project analyzation market needs

Research project analyzation market needs – 3rd year Bachelor 2018

Aim: Find a new market (and discover their needs) for the existing product Smart Goals
Theme: Starting a business
Expertise area: Business and Entrepreneurship
Client: Smart Goals

During this course we were asked to find a new market and application for SmartGoals. SmartGoals is a company which sells interactive training equipment.

The Design process started by searching for a potential user for SmartGoals. We did this by evaluating different markets on several criteria like budget, workout frequency and willingness to use new technology. We ended up with a couple of markets but since the army has a big budget, a lot of soldiers that need to train frequently and are very eager to innovate we decided that the best market would be the army.

To see how applicable the SmartGoals already are for the army we did research on their trainings went to visit several army (related) locations to shadow a training and talk to experts.  From these observations we created a customer journey map.

After doing market research we concluded that our initial plan to target the military should be adjusted. But since the ground forces we visited in Oirschot were already using  sport system that keeps tack of their performances we decided to shift our focus the VEVA as our research shows them to be a more suitable client.  

Using different end of the year nota we averaged the data and came up with the following estimation of the market size

• expected amount of students per year lays around the 1550
• student count of approximately 1600 can be extrapolated over the other 26 school this would mean SmartGoals has 41600 potential users for its product

This allows for a potential revenue of 41600 x € 2,00 = € 83.200 per month.

VEVA trainers still educate their students to fully understand their body and training. But most of the training that the VEVA students do, are by themselves. Without the supervision during those training sessions sometimes quality is compromised.
To assure quality training is met, which in most cases is injury prevention, Periodization is important. Periodization is a long-term cyclic structuring of training and practice to maximize performance to coincide with important competitions or tests. The tool to do this is by heart rate.

To come up with a solution we designed 40 possible solutions using the C- sketching method. Eventually we came up with two good solutions that we combined into our final concept.

Firstly we will expand the app with the ability to track the individual scores of athletes. By tracking the individual performances of athletes in an in-class setting a ranking will be made, showing the achievement of the athletes in different exercises and showing an all-round score. This will create a bit of motivational gamification for SmartGoals users. Students can be competing with their classmates and training hard to set new highscores. Also they will get a better view on what areas they excel in.

Secondly the app will also get the new function to connect other sensors to it (e.g. heart rate sensor). This way athletes can have the data they collect during a training all together in one app. Adding different sensors to the SmartGoals set can make the data collected by the goals even more insightful and valuable (e.g. your heart rate becomes unsteady after 4 sprints between the goals, spread your energy more to reach 10 sprints).
We will work with 2 types of packages. (read the details in the report).