Design Thinking for Innovation

Final assignment prepared by Borz Melnik

Challenge: Significantly increase sales of Healthcare IT product line in Russia at  minimum cost and fast.

 My goal is to increase sales of Healthcare IT product line sales in Russia.   I need fast result and do not have budgets for marketing...

Selection: of the tool to test idea

To overcome challenge I have idea I wanted to test.

 I have information that up to 30% of demo shows of Healthcare IT are finalized with

sales.

 My idea is if we want to have quickly more sales at limited marketing budget – we

need significantly increase amount of demos and minimize cost of per 1 demo.

Selected tool

 I used learning launch tool (presented by Michael Ott at lesson 4).   I selected this tool as I need fast, cheap experiment to test my Idea.

1. Application of the tool:

First of all we created small diverse team to do experiments and discuss main ideas. Everyone  have permission to speak freely. We want minimize cost of failure. Also we agreed to mitigate  confirmation biases.

Here is what comes out of the discussion.

 To minimize cost of demo we make application/show to the customer through

internet by Application specialist who are based in the office (NO T&L cost)

 To minimize hardware cost we make Healthcare IT application demo available from

cloud (No need to install, just open from customer PC at nay location in Russia)

 To increase amount of demos (grow demo funnel) we make incentive to sales force

where we will pay them % new sales (no upfront cost and payment from future  margins)

 Work with IT companies across Russia who has big sales force to motivate them do

demos (grow demo funnel)

Then we do cost effective and fast test .The logic was to use at maximum resources and  assets already available in the company.

 We used one workstation available in HCIT Department.   We connect workstation to service server hosted in the office.   We talked to application specialist from other departments and they agree to

support customer applications demo at no additional cost.

 We collect leads from sales and partners and installed make calls to customers with

proposal to run demo.

 We scheduled 10 demos during 2 weeks of time.    We have 2 sales out of 12 demos.

Insight

Applying the tool allowed to make real experiment and test idea vs real customer needs. It  helped to save huge amount of time compare to B-pan model. We have feedback from  customers and real understanding what works in this model and what could be optimized.  Cost to do this test was 20 K USD – outcome after was 63 K USD in contribution margin.

Approach: Describe what you might do differently next time

For the next time I think we will be using similar approach as cost of failure is sometimes less  then cost of time spend on creating theoretical models. In the team we have some challenges  to have all people excited to execute test – so for next time we will focus more on engagement  part – so that we have better team dynamics.

