Design and Innovation – Summary of the Workshop
Introduced by:
Mauricio Adade, Chief Marketing Officer, DSM Nutritional Products, Belgium
Led by:
Jocelyn Wyatt, Head of Social Innovation, IDEO, USA
Dan Newman, The Value Web
Participants in the Innovation and Design Stream modeled a process for designing nutritious foods for the ‘base of the pyramid’. Jocelyn Wyatt of IDEO facilitated the group through three 100-minute workshops. The process employed ‘Human-Centered Design’ which is based on the needs and preferences of actual customers. Rather than basing product and distribution ideas on technical understanding or on some aggregate view of market needs, participants learned about individual consumers in their own environment and kept these individuals in mind throughout the design and innovation process.
In this case, participants were unable to travel to our target communities and observe local behaviors. Instead, GAIN asked social entrepreneurs based in India and Bangladesh to identify four target customers. These customers were provided with cameras and asked to document a day in their lives, focusing on the things they hold dear, on the foods they eat, their attitudes towards health, etc.
Using these profiles as a starting point, participants went beyond the photos and quotes to find the deeper meaning and the implications for possible nutritious product ideas. For example, when a girl tells us her favorite drink is milk, does this mean that she drinks it daily, despite her limited means, or that this reflects an aspiration or a dream? Human-Centered Design supplements empirical observation with personal judgment and experience.
Based on these profiles, participants brainstormed dozens of nutritious product ideas that would be of interest to these consumers, as well as concepts for getting the target customers to try these new products. They distilled these ideas into six specific product concepts plus one generic marketing concept applicable to various products. These concepts included ideas on production, marketing, branding, etc.
On the second day of the Forum, participants selected two of these concepts from the previous day – Fortified Spices and Fortified Fruit Concentrate – and built prototypes, including product attributes, packaging, marketing campaigns, an overview of the supply chain required to produce and distribute these products, and storyboards of how the products would be marketed and used by the target customers.
Participants reported several key insights from this design process. The most important may be the most subtle: that building product ideas around real customers is more than just rhetoric. Real customers are not statistical aggregates but rather have real lives, preferences, needs, and behaviors. Building from the needs and preferences of real people completely re-defines the design and innovation process.
