Hey guys!
This past week we’ve been working on HMW statements in order to spark innovative ideas that serve to solve the issues of our company. To start off, this was actually a really fun process which I plan on using in the future for all group work. We first brainstormed HMW statements which referred to the areas of improvement we identified in Chipotle, then we picked a single statement and spend about 15 minutes vigorously and quietly writing down ideas that we had on post its and putting them up on our white board. We saved time for both generating genuine ideas and then really wild ideas. I think the wild ideas was my favorite part of the process because it seemed at first like all of the ideas were way to out there, but when we reviewed them we actually found some really great ones that we could work off of to build it into a more doable ideal. For example, one of the wild ideas our group members came up with was a gym inside of Chipotle. Something like this would be sustainable in that we could use the energy to power the lights in the store, etc. We really liked the idea of this and from there we morphed the idea into more of a hidden spectacle, with pedals under the seats so that you could quietly exercise if you chose and we, as a store, would track all of the energy burned and then translate those numbers as a total count into more relevant scores, such as calories burned, power generated, etc, to empower customers. This idea ended up being in our top two options overall!
We didn’t go with the gym idea though, and decided instead that a fro-yo style weighting station and payment method would flow better with Chipotle’s prior innovation processes as well as solve some of the larger problems that we identified within the restaurant. These problems included food waste, no size options and limited portion control. If customers have the option to choose how much food they want, we will be promoting more sustainable as well as healthier living. The difficult part now will be ideating how to prototype this system. We’ve already discussed many of the difficulties we foresee with this method of consumption, but we’re confident that we’ll be able to innovate around in in order to streamline the process. My biggest issues with this system would be food safety regulations as well as quality maintenance and ensuring that customers aren’t waiting in line too long to get their food. Another issue that I have more confidence in solving would be the price to weight matrix in how certain ingredients are more expensive than others – maybe instead of weight it could be more of a scoop system? Do you want one scoop, half a scoop or two scoops? This may pose problems in the issue of time, or I know one of our group members suggested a scale that zero’s out for each new ingredient which I think is a great idea, we’ll just have to innovate the system for the scale and really hash out the logistics.
Lets get to ideating!
xoxo Lana