This minimal viable product was made during IBM's Be(e) Innovative Challenge, a competition amoung interns to think of the best solution to a problem using IBM technologies. Complete with application prototype and software architecture, our task was to reduce consumers waste footprint.
During the summer months of my 12-month coop term with IBM, there was a challenge released to all currently employed interns called the Be(e) Innovative Challenge. Its main goal each year is to give all currently employed interns a prompt with a problem that tackles some sort of real-world issue to come up with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). An MVP is a product design blueprint or concept that allows anyone to get a general idea of the product without creating a working demo. The only requirement is that we must use IBM technology to solve this issue and we only had three days. The prompt that year was “reducing carbon footprint” and our goal was to come up with a way to reduce peoples’ carbon footprint.
Our solution was Green Receipt, a receipt tracking application that allowed users to take photos of their grocery receipts and be given a “Green Score” based on what products they bought and how environmentally friendly they were.
Since we needed an MVP, we needed to get across our idea in the most concise way possible and needed to include three things in our submission:
The application design needed to have a basic concept of the application and be able to showcase what your design would look like if it were to actually exist. This includes a user interface, functionality, general colour patterns, and design.
The application architecture depicts what IBM softwares are used and how they interact with each other and the user. It shows a very basic decoupled software system and which IBM technology is used at each step when a user interacts with the application.
The 3-minute video presentation depicted our problem, our solution, a demonstration of our application concept, and an explanation of the software architecture. It gave an all around explanation of how our product works and why it is designed in the first place.
In the beginning, we spent a day and a half brainstorming, thinking of what type of application we could create to provide a solution to the given prompt. This took a lot of time and discussion as we weren’t sure what exactly a finished product was supposed to resemble. We originally thought that we had to come up with a very basic working model of the product to demonstrate so when an AI model was proposed, we were very wary of using the idea as we didn’t have enough time to train the model. Because of this, a lot of other ideas were thrown around instead. Once we realized that we only needed a concept, we took the AI model idea and ran with it, having it be the base of our application algorithm.
The IBM technology we chose to use was the DB2 Database. We used it to store all recorded product information regarding its “Green Score”. Since we didn’t actually do this, we can speculate what type of information it would actually hold. This could be anything from the product itself, to its packaging, and even its transportation costs.
We used Figma to create the user interface as we were able to create application panes and design how everything would look directly on that page. Additionally, we could even set up a slide show or create animations within our Figma design so that it interacted as if it were a real application. We designed all the different pages that were necessary for the application use such as the home screen, receipt scorer page, and profile page that included a weekly footprint score.
The application architecture was designed using Draw.io, an online UML designing tool. It used a variation of the Model View Controller (MVC), with the user interacting with the user interface which then talked to the business rules. It then pulled from other places in the application such as the DB2 Database, to display data regarding a receipt based on the products it contained.
Overall, this project was really cool, and I never knew a project or competition like this existed. It certainly was a great experience, especially since it was an intern only competition, seeming like it was made to specifically draw upon new interns’ creativity and love for new technology and innovation.
It was also a really eye-opening experience, showing how easy it is to get a basic application idea out so that you have a concrete idea and seemingly roadmap to go off of. I also got to meet my team of four other interns from around North America including but not limited to Toronto, Texas, and New York.
I really enjoyed this project and have used the skills that I have gained in other projects since. Anybody who is doing an internship at IBM during the summer months, I would keep your eye open for announcements about this challenge.
