Aspirations Engineering: Using design thinking to innovate for emerging markets
Today, the countries with the highest GDP growth rates are in emerging markets, not the developed or mature markets. In addition to current high GDP growth rates, Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa especially, is expected to lead the rest of the world in population growth well into the future.
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Despite the potential challenges of high population growth, analysts are pointing to the economic opportunities of such rapid growth. An article in Forbes Magazine published in Sept 2014 noted that Africa was poised to power the next phase of global economic growth. TechCrunch, one of the highest read news sources (35m readers a month), published an article in Sept 2015, titled “The Future is African”. In this article, they discussed the opportunities presented by Africa as the fastest-growing economic and population region of the world.
With their markets maturing, business players from the developed world are chasing new market opportunities in these fast emerging markets. They are mounting fierce competition for the existing market share and introducing new products and services for the additional market that population growth makes available. These developments should delight and also concern local entrepreneurs and innovators. The growth in the local economies present local players with tremendous opportunities for new market acquisition and existing market expansion. They also face strong competition from more developed global companies capable of wrestling market share from them. In essence, local entrepreneurs and innovators need to propose new solutions or new meaning to existing solutions in order to take advantage of their opportunities and also to survive the upcoming competition.
One of the main challenges with innovation in a fast changing socio-economic environment is the lack of reliable data on market segmentation and customer preferences. However multinationals have succeeded in building research systems that traverse the traditional methods of research, such as survey questionnaires which often rely on hard data for decision making. They have adapted design-thinking methods that provide strong point of views without the need for hard data (except for validating preferences later in the process).
Aspirations-fueled designs
Armed with this approach, multinationals have sought to use design thinking to create new ideas in emerging markets. However, with rapidly changing socioeconomics in these emerging markets, these corporations have to do more than determining people’s needs. They need to tap into people’s aspirations. Aspirations can drive preferences for goods and services. Hence, innovating to meet aspirations is innovating to meet the deepest desires and needs of users.
Abraham Maslow gave us a model for aspirations in his Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He gave us a ladder of aspirations that shows that people generally aspire upwards at whatever stage they are at. While critics maintain that life is not as hierarchical, Maslow’s ladder is still a strong model to guide the work of innovators. Innovators routinely develop products and services to support people’s aspirational journeys up this ladder. Through the lens of Maslow, one can see that in the Western context, innovators have enough information and understanding to create products for each of these classes of aspirations.
What about the emerging markets? Do people aspire upwards in the same way? Given that there is often limited information on the consumer and the socioeconomic situation is rapidly evolving, I believe the design-thinking approach of using non-traditional research methods has the best chance of understanding emerging market customers. I take this notion one step further to suggest that the design-thinking process could be structured and delivered in a way to capture aspirations in such a rapidly changing economy. I call it aspirations engineering. Aspirations engineering will therefore be the discovery of target user aspirations through the use of ethnography research tools in a systems design engineering paradigm. The focus is on aspirations as the source of customer needs. Further, the focus on aspirations first before needs is relevant to emerging markets because these markets are characterized by rising disposable incomes and increasing interest in convenience and self-improvement of the middle class. Innovators have to respond to the aspirations that come with such economic changes.
Lessons from aspirations engineering in the Chinese diaper market
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There are a few examples of multinationals using the design-thinking approach in emerging markets in a way that fits well with the aspirations engineering concept. For illustration, let’s take the process Continuum Innovation, where I cut my teeth in design thinking, used to help P&G enter the Chinese diaper market. P&G had earlier faced stiff resistance to the adoption of its Pampers diapers due to a rich culture of early potty training. Chinese children would wear open-crotch pants (called kaidangku) that had the bottom cut out so they could freely relieve themselves as part of potty training. A parent using kaidangku for her child had no use for a diaper in the day. According to the story, diapers were not needed at night either because there were three sets of parents in a typical Chinese home due to the one child policy. P&G was stuck. The research team discovered that the Chinese mother’s aspirations of having a high cognitively developed child could be tied to the diaper – their unique Point of View. Continuum collaborated with a local hospital to study the connection between a good night sleep and cognitive development. The results got them to pitch the diaper as a means of comfort to prevent the child from soiling him/herself and thereby from waking up at night. Consequently, the Pampers diaper for China had the picture of a sleeping child while the one for the US had the picture of a playing child.
Then, the designers had to re-engineer the material composition of the diaper because the Chinese mother favored cloth-like feel to the diaper and not a plastic feel. This led to the development of a high efficiency thinner diaper with a cloth-like feel at about $0.10 per unit cost. According to Continuum, as of 2011, P&G Pampers were the number one diaper brand in China. The 2011 P&G annual report credited this project for the increase in the size of the China diaper market from $200m in 2000 to $2.8bn in 2011 (P&G, 2011). The key point, not to be missed, here is that the research process revolved around a key insight from primary ethnographic research not so much from secondary research using survey questionnaires.
Lessons from aspirations engineering in the Indian diagnostic process
Another example is GE’s Vscan, the portable ultrasound machine which is the size of a cellphone. GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt suggests that the Vscan will replace the physician’s stethoscope. The Vscan was born out of the realization that even though Indian doctors could not afford the more expensive GE ultrasound machines, they were very adept with cellphones. So the team saw the aspiration of the Indian doctor to have an ultrasound machine that was the size of his or her cellphone but with the same level of functionality. The Vscan has become the poster child of the phenomenon of ‘reverse’ innovation where innovations that are developed in emerging markets are brought to the mature markets of the Western world.
Lessons for Africa
What lessons should emerging market entrepreneurs and innovators in Africa take from these two projects? First, empathize with users to understand their aspirations. If the emerging markets are growing and therefore hard data is less useful, then empathizing with the user is the logical thing to do as that provides real time insights that could reveal the changes in the target demographic. Second, look for inspiration in your research to lead you to the solution. The inspiration may come from constraints peculiar to emerging market. The Chinese culture against diapers was the constraint that inspired the solution in the P&G project and economic scarcity was the constraint that inspired the solution in the GE project. Third, probe insights vigorously to realize an acceptable point of view. Insights are great but you need to rigorously assess and evaluate them in order to finalize your point of view. Since you don’t have strong statistical data, your point of view statement needs to be irrefutable and that only happens if you probe insights down to the core. Continuum probed the sleep-cognitive-development insight deeply to arrive at a solution for P&G.
So, how do African innovators and entrepreneurs react when they hear that the continent is poised to power the next phase of global economic growth? Do they resign to helplessness or do they rise up and take the challenge to develop new products and services as middle-class preferences and demand grows and disposable income increases. Many people in this part of the world have strong opinions about why certain things will never change. What is they could redirect their opinions to think about what can change? Many people will not see the opportunities that the multinationals will see because they are blind to the problems around them. I advise my students to undo such ‘blindness’ by imagining new or alternative situations to the issues they face. Imagination happens if you ‘step outside’ your current thinking. But you need a trigger to start imagining. How do you do that? Ask ‘what if’ questions. What if a car didn’t have 4 wheels? What if what if what if. You mind will go wild on an imagination surf. If you are ‘what ifing’ for your company as an employee, you may have a challenge. No organization can succeed if employees don’t trust their managers to support them if they fail. So, managers need to create a ‘safe’ environment for employees to ‘what if’, fail and succeed.
It is fair to conclude that what ifs for sparking imagination in the process of engineering aspirations is the surest way to develop new solutions or new meanings to existing solutions. Africans should be able to do that for Africans better than anyone else. If Africa is poised to lead the world, then Africans need to be poised to take advantage of that opportunity or to at least survive the coming onslaught from Western and Eastern competition.
The writer is a Senior Assistant Professor, Ashesi University, Visiting Professor, CEIBS Africa.