The details about our process:

1. A quantitative survey  for chemists and private clinics

Much of this was developed with support on format from Jessica (a pro from her IPA and research days) and Amy Lockwood (a huge supporter and advisor for us). The questions cover demographic basics, information of interest to me with inventory / financial, clinical for Jess, and chronic diseases for Margaret. The survey is entered in afterwards by using ODK Collect on a tablet for clean, electronic results. While we are not asking a large enough sample to be running large analyses, this could eventually form the basis for a wider-scale market sizing survey. For now, it helps to ensure that we collect some key basic details for all stakeholders.

2. Interview summary sheets

Long open-ended questions, often driven by asking about this form or that object that we see in a chemist shop, can lead to long and unwieldy notes that we would not have time to properly analyze. As a result, I developed a shorter summary template that we could use to quickly share highlights from each interview – from key interesting facts (e.g. the Kilgoros chemist who spent 30,000/- on a POS system) to key challenges that we could try to address. This idea of “pains” and “gains” was drawn from a class on the value proposition canvas this past semester, which I’ll elaborate on in another post someday.

Finally, these interviews are always done with an eye to product / service, and what we can offer. As a result, observations on what features we are prototyping would or would not be useful, and ideas for new features that we think of during a conversation are jotted down at the very bottom.  As one advising expert rightfully pointed out, this […]

Tammy’s Highlights from Week #4 –

Taking a moment to stop, think, and rest.

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This week was remarkably meeting and site visit free – an important time to reflect on what we are seeing and learning, and let things settle in our minds. Last weekend we went to Ethiopia to visit an old friend, who is in Addis for the summer working with a chicken farm and a PE firm based in Nairobi, looking into investments in East Africa. It was an interesting crowd we don’t encounter in Nairobi – from chicken farmers (okay, business guys focused on a traditional, but high-potential agro-business) to McKinsey PE folks to investment folks. This also exists in Nairobi, but because there is such a strong social enterprise community, it often feels like there is little need to look beyond it. The scale (both in dollar size and in actual business sizes) and different types of backgrounds were an interesting and inspiring jolt, something which we were talking about well into this week.

Some customer research context

Spring semester, I took an “Innovation in Services and Business Models” course (Professor Henry Chesbrough’s book, Open Services Innovation, covers many if not all of his course’s points). One concept of particular interest to me was the Value Proposition Canvas, introduced to the class over Skype by Alexander Osterwalder, the inventor of the business model canvas (explanation of the canvas is here). A key takeaway for me from Osterwalder’s presentation was how the success of a business model often hinged on finding a truly relevant value proposition, and often organizations and business models will fail because they don’t understand their customer, and come up with a not-so-valuable-value-proposition. The rest of the business model stuff is important too, of course. In our situation though (as is true […]