It has been an amazing couple of weeks and here is why. I have been a part of the IFA Startup Readiness Training. Innovate For Africa is a program aimed at strengthening the innovative ecosystem in Nigeria by training its fellows on in-demand skills and entrepreneurship. It involved an array of case study learning some of which includes; strategy development, brand building, project management and design thinking
This project is a product of a two days hackathon. In case you are wondering what a hackathon is, it is an event where people sharing similar interests gather under a common roof to build something from scratch or solve a specific business problem. Our hackathon was virtual and it was an opportunity to apply all the knowledge acquired. It started off with a brainstorming session for ideas on problem areas around the COVID 19 pandemic. The design thinking approach was applied which enabled us to walk in the shoes of potential customers and understand the real problems they face.
THE PROCESS
EMPATHIZE
Working in a team of three, we structured our primary market research into conducting interviews and gathering qualitative and quantitative data from our potential customers (mainly people from our close networks). As part of the design thinking process, it was important to ask open ended questions and encourage our interviewee to give as much detail as possible so as to identify and understand their pain points.
With the documented data from the market research it was time for the next phase...
DEFINE
This involved analyzing the raw data obtained and transforming it into useful information. Information that highlighted the customer persona, challenges and pain points helped in clearly defining our problem statement. We established that our target audience would be the the working independent population in Lagos between the age 25 - 60 who have the disposable income to afford basic healthcare.
Presence of a problem brings about the need for a solution...
IDEATE
At this stage there was an intense brainstorming session where all ideas were welcomed in order not to limit the scope of our proposed solution.
We thought about alternative ways to solve normalized problems and eventually developed our value proposition.
Now that we have a solution what is next ?
PROTOTYPE
We built a prototype showing what our product would look like and how it works. The full prototype can be viewed using this link the link below.
THE PRODUCT
Health Hero is a telehealth platform that enables patients to receive consultation services from doctors as well as access to pharmacies and test lab locations from their homes. Health Hero provides convenience to both patients and doctors by linking them up on an online platform. Our solution was different from others because it combined consultation services, medication procurement as well as laboratory testing.
HOW DOES IT WORK ?
Source: Presentation Slides
This illustrates our consultation process which begins with the patient getting registered on our platform.
We pitched our ideas to our facilitators and guest judges Wura Mosuro and Emily Guo from Harvard Business School and MIT SLOAN . This was a success as we received positive feedback and noted areas for further improvement.
In conclusion, my takeaways from this experience were learning the importance of applying design thinking when developing a product, how to give an effective pitch and how to manage project as well as people to achieve stellar results.