Author: Khang Trần Hoàng

Lead trainer: Phan Hoang Lan

Program Manager: Nguyen Vi Hoa

Blog Advisor: Phuong-Linh Le-Nguyen 

Summary

• Problem Statement Focus: Innovators learned to clearly define their customer’s biggest pain using a structured problem statement format that identifies the target audience, their job-to-be-done, the specific problem, and the impact on their desired outcomes.

• "How Might We" Question: The problem statement is reframed into an open-ended "How Might We" question to encourage creative problem-solving and broaden potential solutions.

• Brainstorming Frameworks: Three key frameworks—Crazy 8, SCAMPER, and EAST—were introduced to generate diverse, innovative, and behaviorally effective solutions rapidly and systematically.

• Solution Prioritization: The Impact & Feasibility 2x2 matrix was used to evaluate and prioritize ideas based on their potential value and practical implementation challenges.

• Unique Selling Point (USP): Emphasis was placed on identifying a clear USP by analyzing customer needs, company strengths, and competitors’ offerings to find a unique market position.

• Practical Tips: Key advice included avoiding biased interview questions, keeping problem statements concise, focusing on feasible solutions, and continuously refining the USP through customer feedback and competitive analysis.

Day 2 of the Fulbright Innovation Bootcamp 2025 is here! Let’s look back at what our students learned today. 

Key Learnings: Identify Solution 

On the second day, after receiving a very detailed feedback session from the trainer about their customer persona board, our students moved on the create a concrete problem statement for their product to solve:

• [Concept] Problem Statement: You need to choose the biggest pain of the customer and try to solve it. The statement should summarize this pain clearly:

[Target audience] wants to [jobs-to-be-done], but struggles with [specific problem], which prevents her/him from achieving [expected outcomes/emotions].

Here is an example of a problem statement: MoMo (Vietnam’s leading e-wallet and payment app)

[Vietnamese smartphone users] want to [pay bills, transfer money, and make daily purchases quickly and securely], but struggle with [long waiting lists, cash dependency, and complex banking processes], which prevents them from achieving [a seamless, struggle-free payment experience anytime, anywhere].

Next, the flip of the problem statement is the "How Might We" (HMW) question, which is a problem-framing technique designed to help open up possibilities by starting with the right question. The structure is:

How might we + [do what?] + [for whom?] + [to achieve what result?]

Here is a Problem statement - HMW example from our beloved team 3:

• Problem Statement: 

“[University students] wants to [have sustainable productivity and long-term well-being] but struggle with [overload of many tasks in the same time] which prevent him/her from achieving [balance between emotion and growth without burning out]

• HMW Question: 

“How might we help [university students] to [balance between emotion and growth without burning out] to gain [sustainable productivity and long-term well-being]”

Now for the part all innovators look forward to: coming up with solutions! Here at CEI, we recommend starting your brainstorming with three (03) key frameworks:

• Crazy 8 Framework: a rapid ideation and sketching technique designed to quickly generate a wide variety of ideas by challenging participants to sketch 8 distinct concepts in 8 minutes. Each participant folds a sheet of paper into eight sections and sketches one idea per minute, focusing on quantity and creativity rather than quality. This method encourages creative thinking, helps break mental blocks, and levels the playing field between experts and beginners, since making mistakes is expected. The goal is to refine and improve after selecting the most promising idea.

• SCAMPER Framework: Each letter stands for a method to generate innovative ideas to solve big problems. This tool encourages you to re-examine existing products, services, or processes through seven distinct lenses to spark innovation and lateral thinking. For example, for the letter M (Modify): if you interview customers, and they say your bag (product) is too big, you listen and adjust it to a smaller, more practical size to better match their preferences.

• EAST Framework: a behavior-focused approach rooted in behavioral economics, designed to influence people’s behavior by tapping into their unconscious mind. It stands for Easy, Attractive, Social, and Timely. 

1. “Easy” emphasizes making actions effortless to encourage adoption. 

2. “Attractive” refers to making the concept, design, or presentation appealing to capture attention. 

3. “Social” addresses the human need to belong and fit into a community, often leveraging social influences like trends or the “fear of missing out” (FOMO), which many students recognize from social media dynamics. 

4. Lastly, “Timely” means delivering the right solution at the exact moment when the customer experiences a need or pain point, ensuring relevance and impact.

When a product or solution embodies all 4 qualities, it significantly increases the likelihood that people will engage with and use it. For example, let’s apply these 3 frameworks above to a hypothetical solution: a mental health app for university students

• Crazy 8: quickly generate eight random ideas in eight minutes, such as mood tracking with gamification, peer support chats, campus counseling integration, self-care clock reminders, or a crisis hotline call button, etc.

• SCAMPER: substitute generic advice with student-specific content; combine mood tracking with social sharing; adapt mindfulness exercises for campus life; modify the interface to have light and dark mode; put bell notifications to use for academic reminders; eliminate complex sign-up process; and reverse the approach by proactively suggesting resources based on mood patterns.

• EAST: make it easy to use with an intuitive interface; make it attractive through personalized content; tap into the social by enabling anonymous peer connections to satisfy students’ desire for belonging; and make it timely by sending helpful messages during high-stress periods like exams.

After listing and picking your favorite solutions, it’s time to make the decision to choose the final solution. The matrix below will help you focus efforts on the best available solution:

• Impact & Feasibility (2x2 Framework): Impact refers to how significantly an idea can contribute to solving a problem, while Feasibility measures how practical the idea is, considering available resources, time, and constraints. By plotting ideas on this matrix, teams can visually assess and compare options to choose the one positioned furthest toward the upper right corner.

Finally, one more point that every salesperson or marketer will remind you of: make sure your product has a clear Unique Selling Point to attract potential customers.

• [Concept] Unique Selling Point (3 Circle Framework): a strategic tool that helps companies identify their competitive advantage by analyzing three overlapping areas. The sweet spot, or USP, is found where the “Customers’ Needs & Desires” circle and “Your Offerings” circle overlap, outside of the “Competitors’ Offerings” circle.

1. Customers’ Needs & Desires: What the market desires and values.

2. Your Offerings: What the business does well and can offer.

3. Competitors’ Offerings: What competitors do well and how they meet customer needs. Remember, your product isn’t the only one serving these customer jobs. Competitors may come from entirely different industries, as long as their product or service satisfies the same jobs-to-be-done as yours.

Student Progress Highlights: Planting Your Ideas 

In the morning, the teams had the opportunity to present their first assignment (see [FIB Learning Blog #1] for more details). For the temporary problems on Day 2, the teams focused on:

• Team 1 (Chill Guys): Plastic waste and sustainability in food delivery

• Team 2 (Bún Đậu Mắm Tôm): Mental health and support for the disabled community

• Team 3 (Crumb & Calm): Work-life balance and mental health self-care for university students

• Team 4 (EduNauts): Job pathways and educational success for university students

• Team 5: Time management and stress relief for students

Most were able to describe their customers, identify five key points to define them, and outline pain points, though many still struggled with the temporary solution section and Jobs-to-be-done. Even so, they did their best to present their results and refine their analyses based on feedback from Ms. Phan Hoang Lan. 

Some initially assumed problems turned out not to be accurate and needed to be reconsidered from a new perspective. It’s encouraging for CEI to see that some teams began to revise and deepen their main problem after the morning session, showing their quick learning and flexibility in problem-solving and reflecting our bootcamp’s innovation spirit.

After a nice lunch break, our students returned more excited than ever. Our trainer and teams began testing all three frameworks to brainstorm feasible solutions for each team’s customer problems. The sessions brimmed with energy as students enthusiastically pitched their innovative ideas to each other. Ms. Lan also helped elevate these solutions by making them more multifaceted, using the Impact x Feasibility metric to visually rank them on the Y and X axes. By the end of the day, some teams had chosen their main solution, while others had developed a solid understanding of the foundational pieces they needed to validate their ideas. This will get the students ready for Day 3, when they will meet our special guests from many industries. 

Reflection: Actionable Tips For You To Do 

Again, great job reviewing all of Day 2’s materials above. Here are a few key tips to help you improve your skills as an innovator when working with a brand-new customer profile and solution:

• Interview Framing: Interviewing, like any other speaking-related skill, has the power to influence others. Bias in an interview happens when you ask questions that lead in a certain direction, causing the interviewee to answer in line with your expectations. This is usually unhelpful when you’re trying to understand someone fully, as people have many sides—even contradictory ones. To avoid bias in your answers, remove strongly opinionated nouns or adjectives from your questions, avoid yes/no questions, listen empathically, and keep an open mind toward unexpectedness. Be patient if the interviewee doesn’t immediately talk about what you want to know, and ask follow-up questions like “Why did you say that?” to help fill in your customer persona board.

• Problem Statement: Be thoughtful and selective when choosing the nouns and adjectives to fill in the blanks. Some people believe adding more words will describe the problem better, but in reality, it often makes the statement confusing and targets too broad a customer market. Less is more.

• Solution Brainstorming: Any idea can be a good idea  - if it’s applied at the right time, in the right place, and with the right support, resources, and capital. For every idea you consider, ask yourself, “Can this solution realistically work in my context?” When choosing a problem-based solution, Feasibility is more important than the theoretical Impact it might generate. Many startups see their dreams falter when they launch a product or service that struggles to take shape before even reaching the intended customers.

Unique Selling Point: Make a list of competitors and analyze them to identify gaps or unmet needs in your market. Focus on highlighting your strengths to address these value gaps in ways competitors miss or cannot easily replicate. Be prepared to adapt your USP as customer needs and the competitive landscape evolve through ongoing interviews and research. 

What’s Next? Teaser For Tomorrow! 

Get ready for Day 3, where the ideas come to life! Tomorrow, we will transform our students’ chosen solutions into real prototypes and run lean experiments to test them quickly for learning validation. It will be a wonderful opportunity for our teams to see what really works, get early feedback, and take their innovative product to the next level.

👉 Stay tuned as we’ll share more reflections from FIB 2025 soon.

🔗 Curious? Drop us a message if you’d like to learn how to run your own innovation bootcamp or partner with us.

Reference

Bitesize Learning. (n.d.). The SCAMPER creativity model, explained. https://www.bitesizelearning.co.uk/resources/scamper-model-creativity