EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Festo Didactic wants to implement a strategy for its learning platform Festo LX to outperform a potential nightmare competitor. However, the pathway to creating such strategic recommendations for Festo LX was yet to be explored. Following, the project team’s aim was to create nightmare competitors that could be benchmarked against the learning platform.

Goal

The goal of this project is to introduce Festo Didactic to a potential “nightmare competitor” for its online learning portal Festo LX and to present measures to stand up to this competitor by using Festo Didactic’s own strengths to overcome the competitive advantages of this fictitious competitor. The aim is to create an image as threatening as possible, which Festo Didactic can timely react to, since the nightmare competitor does not yet exist but could become reality.

Methodology

Throughout the whole project, several methodologies were used to ensure a diverse variety of approaches to arrive at the nightmare competitors. The project team started with a trend analysis through desk research and several qualitative expert interviews to gather a collection of over 100 trends relevant to the EduTech/E-Learning market. The trends were classified according to PESTEL and in a second step the most relevant trends were identified through clustering. Through creativity techniques, possible scenarios were created and described, and future personas identified to be able to better understand their needs. Based on the personas and the trend analysis, and with the help of ten design themes, the nightmare competitors were described, and gap analyses were conducted. In the end, strategic recommendations were derived, taking into account the nightmare competitors, the status quo of Festo LX and future trends.

Results

112 identified future trends and several expert interviews led to the creation of four distinct scenarios and personas. Understanding customer needs and recognizing opportunities and threats led to designing a nightmare competitor for each scenario. Festo LX got compared to each nightmare competitor along the mentioned ten design themes and gaps between Festo LX and the nightmare competitors were identified, which revealed weaknesses and blind spots. Finally, 18 strategic recommendations based on the detected gaps were derived. With these, Festo Didactic will be able to close the gaps between its learning platform Festo LX and the nightmare competitor’s offering and prepare itself for the future as well as secure and keep its strong market position.

Cooperation Partner

• Festo Didactic SE
  Rechbergstraße 3
  73770 Denkendorf
  Germany
  www.festo-didactic.com
  lx.festo.com

Contact Person

• Dr. Ute Gebhard - ute.gebhard@festo.com

• Dr. Philipp Melzer - philipp.melzer@festo.com

Student Team

• Emma Litschka

• Dominik Sylejmani

• Hanna Tritthart

Project Manager

• Caroline Fabian, M.Sc.

• Shtefi Mladenovska, M.Sc.