Design thinking for innovation

University of Virginia

Reflection – Assignment – Learning Launch

The Paraguay Dilemma

Challenge: the submission provides a detailed description of the authors challenge including all

relevant information    The challenge I selected is offering the low income population of Paraguay some insurance

products for them to buy using digital means so they can obtain a safety net to protect

themselves and avoid falling into extreme poverty in case they suffer a calamity that can

affect their already struggling finances.

The hypothesis we developed is that the low income population of Paraguay most of whom do

not have any type of insurance would buy it if it was easy for them to understand and to buy,

if presented to them thru the use of technology.

Paraguay has a total population of about 7 million inhabitants, out of which 3,5 million are in

the 18 – 65 age range and are subject of coverage to insurance companies; the financial

market has issued about 1.8 million credit cards, there are about 7 million mobile phones,

and 2.5 million electronic wallets supported by mobile technology.

The health care system consists of prepaid medicine (insurance), a social security system that

provides health care if you are registered and eligible, and a free public system that has poor

service and low quality.

The insurance market offers only traditional health insurance, most of its customers receive

insurance as a benefit from their employers (public and private sector), and the general

public perception is that insurance is good only for rich people and it is something very

expensive.

In other words this is an insuretech startup that wants to learn with its customers what is it

that they are interested in, how they would buy and how and how much would they pay.

Selection: the submission provides a detailed description of the selected tool including relevant

information, what it is and why the author selected it for this challenge including any video

lecture references)

The learning launch is the tool that enabled us to learn while engaging with our potential

customers in real interactions; we were able to perform several experiments where we

presented the products in different ways in order to learn about the interest of the Paraguayan

population to buy insurance products online.  Even though we were able to land sales, of

upmost importance was the findings and lessons learned with the information gathered from

the customer interaction with the product online; the importance of the learning lessons

coming out of these experiments are relevant to proving our hypothesis as told by Jeanne

Liedtka in Designing for Growth.    Application The submission provides a detailed description of applying the selected tool

including all relevant information, what the author did and how the tool was applied    The first experiment we performed was focused in the introduction of two new insurance

products into the market.   In particular the products offered were a cancer indemnity product

and a hospital cash indemnity product; the customers were prompted to visit the domain that

hosted the products to navigate in it, and if interested to buy the product.  A TV advertising

campaign was launched and the public immediately started to visit the website; traffic was

correlated to the adds coming up in their TV’s, people were using their mobile phones – not

computers and very few used tablets - to visit the website and learn about the products and its

benefits.   In this version of the website the customer had to make the selection of sum insured

to buy or the product mix.    A second learning launch presented a new website version where the product was already

selected for the customer and they only had to make the decision of how much they were

willing to pay for it.   In this new version of the website the bounce rate was much lower and

many more potential customers navigated thru the complete acquisition process.      Insight the submission provides a detailed description of the insight gained by including some

information how an insight affected the authors thinking about his challenge and design

thinking more broadly     First of all the implementation of the learning launch tool validated our hypothesis, the low

income population of Paraguay is interested in buying insurance products and is willing to use

technology to buy it; it also helped the team behind the project better understand the

technology which is in the hands of our potential customers, the way they behave and what

they are most interested in.   It also made us understand that they look after their disposable

income and prefer short term coverage to annual policies so they don’t have to make large cash

disbursements due to the fact that they live they by day and their income is very limited.    Approach    Our business model, an insuretech , which is bringing insurance products to the low income

population is now frequently using Design Thinking tools as part of its regular business

process; insuretech is new in Latin America and insurance penetration is low so there is not

enough data for the model to rely on and as a consequence we need to take a different

approach to gain insights and learn from our customers in the fastest possible way at the

lowest possible cost.   This approach should enable us to successfully roll out more products in

the near future.

