Crossing the chasm between idea and delivering value
Successful business discovery has three parts: observation, creative synthesis and modelling:
- Human observation, data analytics and business and market understanding ground design in real world conditions and inspire ideas.
- Synthesis of research is a creative process that involves generating hypotheses and sketching out new ways of delivering customer value — often by combining existing business assets and technologies in new ways.
- Modelling ideas and rapid prototyping demonstrate how product ideas can come to life and generates evidence for business decision making.
In our experience, where discovery involves all three components there is a much greater chance of moving quickly from discovery to product development. You have insights, ideas and evidence for what to build, how to build it — and why.
Here’s an example:
We had a brief from a Japanese convenience store brand to address problems of high staff turnover and poor customer service, both created by a tight employment market. We began by addressing a symptom: long lunchtime queues in downtown stores. Store congestion was preventing franchisees from optimising sales at the busiest time of the day.
Observation
In Tokyo and Yokohama we watched what happened in stores between 11.30 and 2.00pm, observing peaks and troughs and the behaviour of lunch-seeking shoppers. We interviewed office and factory workers about their lunchtime habits, preferences and frustrations. We interviewed store employees and franchise managers about the operational demands they worked under and how they addressed the problem, and we learnt from hot and cold food sales data.
Synthesis
The team brought all of this material together and produced a number of hypotheses and 9 sketch concepts. These ranged from high tech Amazon-Go type solutions to kiosks in stations or street vending machines. We reduced these down to two related ideas that could be tested and implemented quickly with minimal investment, and which had the potential to meet both customer and franchisee needs and generate valuable data for the store brand. Both involved in-app ordering, in one case for in-store collection, in the other for delivery direct to offices.
Modelling
We carried out further interviews with customers using sketch concepts to test reaction, then built a prototype app enabling office workers to order from the actual inventory. We faked payment, but set up real delivery to office buildings in downtown Tokyo and collection of pre-ordered lunches from a store in Yokohama. We ran three trials, each time discovering and solving problems around selection and fulfilment and connecting up orders with customers, until we were confident that the service worked for both stores and customers. Then we built a business case that demonstrated franchisee value and corporate gains from higher sales and direct marketing to customers and better demand modelling achieved from data generated by the app — as well as better service, rewards and nutritional benefits for customers.
Conclusion
This is more than — better than — ‘design thinking’; it’s an interdisciplinary process that integrates design, product technology and business strategy skills, grounded not only in customer needs but also the realities of business operations, technical feasibility and commercial necessity; and it’s a process that crosses the chasm from ‘innovative idea’ to business delivery and rapid return on investment, because an intrinsic part of the process is to inform the business of the resources required, roadmap to follow and gains to be made.
