Reflection assignment for Design Thinking  “Leaning launch”

Tatsuya Watanabe

Challenge

I work for pharmaceutical company and in a marketing department focusing on medication for patients

with schizophrenia. As you know, schizophrenia is kind of brain related illness which sometimes causes

disability socially and individually that they need a medical support and social support. One of issue is

declining of cognition level that doctors need to have an endurance and technique to communicate with

them by using simple and clear words. On top of that, they don’t think they are disease, they think

themselves as a normal human being that their situation make compliance for medication difficult and

tend to relapse because of stopping medication. Physicians usually use mini-booklet or illustrated

explanatory guide to explain all about what a disease of schizophrenia is and what is importance to

prevent recurrence of disease and etc. It is ordinally way to let patients understand an importance of

keeping taking medicine regularly based on obeying doctor’s order however, their disease related

problem make it difficult to motivate them to continue having drug.

Selection

I used learning launch for my project in advance to actually launch our new service to the market.

Investment for this project was really huge that I needed a pilot study for making it success.

Application

In order to solve this issue as mentioned above, I came up with new idea to utilize movie leaflet which

equipped with 7 inch of digital screen in a booklet and which automatically explain all about an

importance of taking medicine regularly by running enjoyable music while the explanation is held.

However, it was totally new approach that I needed to prove if this way would work well or not. I choose

around five sites which were willing to do pilot experiment using prototype of “Movie leaf” to see if

patients with schizophrenia would react positively as well as doctor would feel it easy to use for

explaining to their patients.

Insight

Through above experiments, I could find out some needed modifications to effectively adopt “Movie leaf”

to real medical field. These modifications could not be found on the table in my office and from original

hypothesis however, I could receive meaningful great feedback from doctors and patients who joined the

experiments. I recalled this experience when I learned “What wow and What works” phase in the course.

Eventually, I succeeded in launching new approach of “Movie leaf” by modifying several points such as

volume of instruction and length of the video and could contribute to schizophrenia treatment. I received

a lot of pleasant message from medical representatives and doctors that it is really helpful to get patients

to understand entire treatment for schizophrenia and motivate them to continue the medication. If I

didn’t apply learning launch, I would be failing and causing of huge loss to the company. I understood

the importance of pre-launch action.  I hope my developed device support them for long.

approach

At the same time, I’m a Part-time MBA student that I want to horn my capabilities utilizing design

thinking approach not only through learning from my business school as well as my workplace of

pharmaceutical marketing department.  In particular, I want to use mind mapping, and visualization

for the next assignment or real tasks.

