How to Fit Business Ideas into Actual Market Needs?
“What are the unmet needs” seems to be the most-frequently-asked questions among medical practices and startups, said Dr. Jimmy Huang. As an specialist doctor at the BioMedical Development Center of MacKay Memorial Hospital, Dr. Huang has accumulated fruitful experiences on professions like Digital Health, Healthcare Big Data and so on. H. Spectrum was delighted to have Dr. Huang share his insights on the industry with the trainees at H. Spectrum, in hopes of giving them better understandings about the market and effectively defining their unmet needs and potential businesses.
Test your ideas in the real market first
It is estimated that there are hundreds of similar innovation ideas emerging at the same time, and everyone of those who brought forth these ideas believes that he or she solely holds the key to creating more value. However, very rare does he or she actually realize the ideas.
“Rather than keep thinking over about whether your ideas are good enough, why not test them in the market first? In this way, we can really have a grasp about whether they are feasible and valuable.” said Dr. Huang.
“It is a common blind spot that people today believe once their prototype can connect to the internet or is labelled with a name starting with “smart”, they will eventually become the best product.”
“Undoubtedly, these idea might be helpful to a certain extent, but they might not be categorized as the “jaw-dropping” innovations that will wow us. However, it seems unfair to judge an idea right away, we should take a standpoint from the product itself, evaluate its function, and really dig into to see if there’s a “need” existing that requires a powerful solution.”
Take the onlinehospitals in China recently emerging for instance, it is said that there are millions to billions of users on these platforms. Yet ironically, the American Medical Association (AMA) meanwhile warned that though these online hospitals might be beneficial to the GDP, it does no good to the patients at all, and may in turn encourage behaviors of “going to the hospitals just to “see” a doctor”. Nature Digital Medicine has also thrown a wet blanket in an article of their first episode, citing studies and arguing that remote patient monitoring would not bring any improvements to the patients.
“We have the chance to observe reactions from markets so comprehensively and efficiently, and based on the studies we have so far, digital health has never been able to prove itself feasible. When we proposed a big market size, but failed to have that much of an impact, we couldn’t help but wonder what exactly went wrong?”
The Real World Problem: Actual Needs always exist in the Real World
This is a common conception of starting up a new business:
First, we come up with the topic and the basic framework, and then we start building bricks on the framework; finally, we take our product to the market and seek lucky appreciation and funds. In the end, we figure out nothing but the cold truth: No one wants our product. This is the real problem in the “real world”.
“ A startup should interview the users with its product, and optimize their product based on the user experience. Namely, we should test in the real world with the minimum viable product (MVP). Only when it turns out to be a promising idea that amazes people should we start thinking how to market and optimize the product.
BlueStar, a diabetes management software developed by WellDoc, ask users to record and upload information such as real-time drug treatment and diet, telling them that it would reduce the number of unnecessary hospitals revisiting. However, the market did not respond as expected due to the “money incentive” provided at that time — giving the user a certain amount of rewards as long as it was used, continually recording the condition or actually returning to the hospitals. Later on, they added a management personnel between software and users, and users turned out to record it more positively, and the effect was even better than before.
Dr Huang concluded from this example that, in the past, one caregiver had to treat a dozen of patients. But thanks to the software, they can handle tens of hundreds of patients quite well now, and a higher patient usage rate of the healthcare services can also been seen.
“Sometimes it might not be a problem of the product itself that leads to poorer outcomes from the market. It might be a flaw of the process. Once they are corrected or revised, their true value will be shown.”
Dr. Huang urged the trainees to start small at the first stage of the business, and numerous of challenges are expected. However, the sooner we enter the market, the better we position our product.
“Start small, start fast!”
About the Lecturer
Jimmy Huang graduated from the Medical School of Kaohsiung Medical University and later studied systematic biology and medical engineering at the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine in Scotland. He is currently a senior attending physician in the emergency department of MacKay Memorial Hospital and an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine, and concurrently serves as the lecturer at Memorial Hospital Medical Development Center. He has done intensive research on medical big data, digital health and related topics.
Author: Sarah Wang
Reviser: Jeffery Wu, Ariel Cho
