We have two groups of clients for tools and methods we hope to build: patients (aging, elderly, dementia, or MCI) and the care-givers. Our care-givers have two clients they hope to serve: the patients and the care-givers themselves.
Pitch and Pivot
The typical approach to building new products can be called a Pitch and Pivot method. This approach makes two implicit assumptions: (i) All users of same class (patients or care-givers) will interact with our products the same way, (ii) It is possible to define common set of requirements and high value use cases to encompass majority of users. Thus the role of the innovator/entrepreneur is to discover the high value use cases and related. The innovator/entrepreneur puts forward a hypothesis about what the user community would find useful, develops some prototypes, test with users, learn and pivot.
An upfront challenge is to identify the initial product hypothesis: what tools the users would find useful. For the Care-giving problem domain, much expertise is available from neurology, psychology, nursing, social sciences to get us started with an initial set of product hypotheses. Assuming that there is a wining product hypothesis the developer hopes to find it through numerous pivots hopefully before the funding dries up.
Then there is another challenge: in the domain of Care-giving one size does not fit all; the assumption of a homogeneous user community and a winning product hypothesis does not hold. At an advanced age people are remarkably different. Even the same patient behaves quite differently under different circumstances. The product or solution space consists of a large number of variations; none may have enough critical mass to support a traditional business case. Pitch and Pivot will not scale since it is quite impossible for some group of researchers and entrepreneurs to really create infinite custom variations.
We need an alternative to Pitch and Pivot.
User as Developer – Organic Evolution
There are three factors that limit the scale-up of Pitch and Pivot: (i) Finite number of experts attempting to guess the next best winning product for patients and care-givers, (ii) A separate development process and team, and (iii) Need to recruit (and convince) user community for testing and spreading the word.
We propose to make users into innovators. Rather than a few trained professionals making tools for everyone, let users make their own tools! Their creations will not be slick, shiny, super hifi .. but they will serve the purpose. Users will solve their own problem in a manner that meets their needs. They will, based on their daily needs and experiences, propose products they could use every day. Furthermore, let users (with some help if needed) develop their prototypes. Moreover, let the same users test their prototypes with their patients. Based on what they see work and not work, they can update their products. No big/famous experts or grand theories here, just common sense trial and error, and build “appropriate” solutions, and scale the ones that succeed.
The primary intended user community is that of Care-givers. However, this approach can also be used by researchers, neuroscientists, nursing practitioners, social workers, etc. to quickly formulate their hypothesis and develop prototypes for testing.
An example of this approach is the way we use Excel. It stills need some basic learning, but now all of us (pretty much from all types of professional backgrounds) use Excel to solve our own problems. The way we encode formulas/rows/columns may not produce a nice looking report, but it does solve the problem we have in a rather quick manner. And we can change it as much as we need.