Chapel Hill, North Carolina
As a Second Year student planning on starting a business, I’ve started to shift my academic focus at Kenan-Flagler toward those classes that will directly provide me with the tools necessary to successfully do so. One such class I’m taking now is an Entrepreneurship course offering, Innovation & Product Development, taught by Prof. Barry Bayus.
Throughout the quarter, Barry has walked us through the new product development process, providing best practices on conducting market research, identifying voice of the consumer, translating needs into specifications, brainstorming ideas and designing new products.
Concurrently, we have been working in small teams on an innovation project for mobile phone giant Nokia. The project has allowed students to directly apply all that we are learning in the classroom to a real business case.
My team has developed a product called the Family Tree. It’s a mobile phone docking unit, targeted at seniors, that integrates and simplifies communication and printing capabilities. Here’s the pitch that we developed and just sent to Finland for review by company executives.
With luck, look for the Family Tree on store shelves by next spring!
Or at least we hope so.
UPDATE: Here are the other team entries to see how we stacked up.
Marc Zawel 
why not take a netbook, configure it to do what you want to achieve and hook it upto a printer
I understand the needs of the consumer segment you are trying to reach…but why do i need multiple devices when a configured netbook can do all that….and i understand that this does not serve Nokia well…you should start selling these configured netbooks…something similar to what bloomberg did for the financial markets