Learning Launch Tool:  Face to Face  Seminar-Workshops  to Online Workshops    Challenge:    In the Philippines, the financial services industry players, like the insurance companies, banks,  brokerages, and investment houses, provide their clients' or potential clients' financial  education.  It is only in recent years that financial literacy became part of the education  curriculum.  For a long time now, most citizens gain financial literacy through financial services  providers who are most vested in their financial products' sales.    I founded a training company focused on improving the Financial Literacy of the working  population in NCR.  One of our objectives is to provide unbiased financial literacy training that  will expose them to the various financial instruments available in the market but will not  compel them to buy.      Will the market pay to gain financial literacy when this is provided by financial services  institutions for free?  How can I best serve the interest of my market?    Selection:    We had experience in training as well as financial services. We wanted to start moving and  develop our ideas at work.  Thus, we decided that whether ready or not, we will conduct the   Learning Launch.  We wanted to deep dive into our users by interviewing them and meeting  them and running to them our program. We wanted to see their responses to our activities,  their engagement on our material, and their overall satisfaction with the seminar-workshop.     admonished the need to identify the WOW ZONE.  The WOW ZONE  is where  customers' wants, the program's viability, and the company's profitability converge.  We  wanted to find that zone through a series of experimentation.    Application:    We did our first Learning Launch to clients from different backgrounds but mostly within the  age range of 20-40.  We offered the program to individuals who wanted to attend a workshop  on personal finance.  We had to experiment on several elements, price point, place of  execution, and promotions.    We succeeded in our first Learning Launch.  The clients had good reviews of the program. We  were able to execute it well. However, our margins were low.  We reviewed how we can  improve on our first launch and did the 2nd, 3rd, and Nth time.  Finally, when we cannot see  how else to improve our profitability, we shifted gears and changed our target market.

Instead of individual clients, we had our first Learning Launch with corporate clients.  After a  successful execution and better margins, we found our WOW ZONE.  We identified that we  have a market, we can execute the program well, and profit from the venture.    Insight and Approach:    It was an excellent decision to put the program in the market, even if it was not perfect.   Learning Launch allowed us to discover that our intended market was not yet ready to pay for  our service at a price to be profitable.  It allowed us to continuously improve the program with  the users rather than at the planning table.  It paved the way for us to look at how we can  streamline our operations to improve our margin with our change in the target market.  It  sharpened our skills, strengthened our conviction, and enriched our experiences     We will continue to utilize the Design Thinking Tool, Learning Launch, moving forward in the  new normal.  Our seminars and workshops were designed to be done face-to-face.  With the  latest protocols in place, we cannot do the same while we are in the pandemic.  Last week, we  completed our First Learning Launch for our Online Personal Finance Workshops.  We now have  the experience of the new process, feedback from users', and a program that was tested and  refined over a series of launches.  We are gearing up for the challenges ahead.

