Design Roadmapping for ‘farming-as-a-service’

New service lines for GrowY

News - 15 December 2021 - Communication

To wrap up the first quarter of the 2021/2022 academic year, students from IDE's Strategic Product Design MSc programme presented design roadmaps to the venture team from GrowY.

From A to Z, providing a real-life case study was a big learning [moment] for us. It gave us some bright and daring outlooks for the next ten years. It showed us a bunch of opportunities to create awareness around our company. But most of all, it gave us the opportunity to take a step back and look at our company from the outside in.

Sebastiaan Boink, Head of Technology at GrowY

As a new venture in vertical farming, GrowY is a young and passionate organisation looking to solve the problem of sustainable food.  Rather than focusing on creating the most high-tech farm in the world, they aim to create a farm that grows tasty, healthy, and affordable vegetables that will feed the next generation.

In order to scale up their organisation, GrowY wanted to create a strategy for ‘farming-as-a-service’. And what better way to get there than by asking our students! Thus, five roadmapping teams presented their vision for GrowY, in tandem with a clear strategy of the future and what value propositions come next.

It was a joy and an inspiration for us to work with TU Delft IDE’s Strategic Product Design master students on creating a roadmap for our company, seeing their presentations, having them at GrowY Amsterdam, and discussing the roadmaps they designed for us. However, what we were most surprised by was the level of detail, depth, and visuals each of the finalists were able to produce with just a handful of information and nine weeks.

Laura van de Kreeke, Head of Operations at GrowY

The GrowY team was inspired by the wide array of ideas and the impressive presentations and videos from our students. This made it all the more challenging for them to pick only one roadmapping story as the “best”. In the end, they chose the roadmapping story from Wiktoria Łucarz, Runlang Wang, Luc Verduijn and Lonneke Orij.

With the student’s impressive storytelling, the final video’s covered different angles and convincing argumentation for strategic directions for GrowY.

Assistant Professor Lianne Simonse, course coordinator at IDE

As for this year’s Design Roadmapping Award for the most daring innovation strategy... That was presented to Tjerk Jaarsma, Ragini Karki, Pepijn Huis in 't Veld, Nian Liu, and Max Labee.

Last but not least, a special thanks goes out to the course’s lecturers Bart Bluemink, Deborah Nas, Zuzanna Skalska, Celine Tesselaar, and Lianne Simonse and its student assistant, Gaby Ghusen.