Читать книгу The Lean Entrepreneur - Vlaskovits Patrick - Страница 13

We are in a value-creation economy. The businesses that continuously create the most value within a market win. This is true for big, established businesses, as well as startups.

There are two sides to the coin when it comes to value-creation. On one side is customer empowerment, and on the other is employee empowerment.

The nature of being hyperconnected means businesses can have access to their customers 24/7, no matter where they live. This has an important implication, which is that it’s easier than ever to be attuned to your customers, and that means businesses are in an excellent position to truly understand their consumers.

In the value-creation economy, customers are empowered by:

● Having a product experience that exceeds their needs.

● Having a relationship with the company in which the company treats them respectfully.

● Having a voice in the product.

With power in the hands of the consumer, the value-creation economy is defined by eliminating barriers between those who build a product and those who experience it. To accomplish this, employees must be empowered to:

● Be close to the customer.

● Discover new value.

● Create value in the moment.

Rather than being sequestered inside office buildings and leaving customer interaction solely to salespeople and customer support, all employees should seek to deeply understand their customers. It should become standard practice for anyone engaging with a customer to be in a learning mode. Software engineers need to go to the source and understand the context of the problem for which they’re engineering a solution. Customer service should be empathetic. Salespeople should be consultative. Even personnel in back-office support functions like human resources, legal and compliance, and information technology should seek to deeply understand the needs of their customers, who happen to be colleagues at their place of work.

This is even true for doctors!

Good physicians know that understanding their patients deeply helps them diagnose illnesses. Family history, nutrition, exercise, stress, and other daily routines and quality-of-life conditions have an important impact on health. That being said, specialists can lose sight of the impact that medical procedures and pharmaceuticals might have on quality of life and other factors that impact long-term health. So relying solely on the science of disease, medicine, and cures, it’s possible to lose focus on the idea that analyzing the quality of life shouldn’t be separate from the discussion about life itself.

Dr. Stephanie Cooper,9 cardiologist and assistant professor at the University of Washington, says:

In the past, a doctor may begin interaction with a patient with an open-ended question, but research has shown that doctors often interrupt the response. The ensuing discussion is directed and manipulated by the physician, who often has preconceived notions about what the patient needs. Patients leave without having all of their questions answered, often feeling disrespected and not fully understanding the treatment plan. This leads to decreased compliance and, in the worse situations, to increased likelihood of litigation if things go wrong. It may also result in worse outcomes.

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on patient involvement in medical decision making in which all the possible treatment options and outcomes are outlined and the patient and doctor together make a decision based on patient preferences. This is in direct contradistinction to physicians’ patriarchal, autonomous decision making (telling the patient what treatment comes next) but also is not an open-ended choice given to the patient, who cannot possibly understand all of the consequences of treatment options without guidance from their medical provider.

This is patient empowerment.

CASE STUDY: Customized Value Creation

Scott Summit, cofounder of Bespoke Innovations, revolutionized the world of prosthetic limbs by combining excellent design with digital fabrication techniques. Here’s his story.

I set out thinking, “Where can you create things that (1) are very complex and (2) will be meaningful in changing the quality of somebody’s life?”

As it happens, I was always interested in prosthetic limbs. I saw an opportunity waiting to happen or a solution that is waiting to happen because existing products represent an unsatisfied need. Regular prosthetics are an engineering solution to a problem and not a design solution.

I thought, “Okay, here is an opportunity to fix that. Maybe I can combine 3D printing, which is the ability to make a unique thing for a unique situation, and prosthetic limbs, which are not very well suited for mass production since that makes generic the complexity and nuance of human individuality.”

So that became the foundation for Bespoke. We started with prosthetic limbs and that’s still what we do as kind of the flagship, but now we have a number of other opportunities that follow a similar mentality.

Ultimately, we want to show as much respect for an individual as we possibly can. We use technology tools and the design tools as our vehicle. I think it shows people tremendous disrespect to lump them all into the same category and say, “Okay, you’re all amputees – you all get this part, this collection of titanium machined parts because you’re all that similar.”

So we rethink that and say, “How do we speak to a person’s individuality and their taste and their uniqueness?”

The process we take is multifaceted. There’s the “get to know us” process, where we explain to [clients] what we do. We attempt to elicit from them their tastes and preferences in design aesthetic, and that’s actually very difficult to do, harder than I had ever imagined.

Outside of people who are designers at heart, it’s very hard to thrust somebody into the role of designing something for themselves, something very personal like a prosthetic limb. It’s like the extreme version of telling somebody to design their own tattoo. We all generally don’t do that, because we’re not used to doing that in our daily lives.

So we typically show people the art we have, the patterns, the designs we’ve done in the past, and we use that as a kickoff point. We say, “By the way, we can change this material. We can add details if you like. If there are patterns that you like..” We try to tease that out of them because ultimately we don’t want them to simply select from our preexisting work. That doesn’t take what we offer to its fullest potential. So we encourage people to cut loose a bit and look inside themselves and see what would make it the most personal and give them the most connection to it.

Then there’s the technology part of the process. We do a 3D scan of their body and turn the images into usable data by running them through software that uses different cleaning algorithms and meshing algorithms. From that data, we actually mirror the person’s sound-side leg and superimpose it over their lost leg. We align it by eye; there is a lot of craft involved. We line it up until it looks like it is in a natural location on the body based on the scan. That will be the reference for the rest of the process because now the body will be symmetric no matter what we do and it will be unique no matter what we do. The process philosophically goes to the heart of what we do because it generates what we think are the most important elements we offer: symmetry and uniqueness.

We have a number of templates that we’ve developed, which are partially mechanical and allow us to attach elements to the substructure of the prosthesis. The templates might create the design pattern, for example, herringbone tweed or a lace or a lattice, and we start mixing these templates into the computer files, playing with them to create the aesthetic we’re striving for.

The final step is that once we have the data, we do a lot of communication with the client. We send them images of the prosthetic, which are photographically accurate even though they’re virtual. When they’re ready to pull the trigger, we send the files out to a third party who three-dimensionally prints the parts. We have a few post-processing steps we can apply depending on what the person is looking for, and then we’re ready to send them to the person.

How they use them and how their life changes is up to them. We encourage them to communicate back to us when they’re ready, because it’s exciting for us and rewarding. We hear of stories where women all of a sudden are buying clothes to match their fairing. We recently had a case where this woman wore a beautiful dress and shoes that really brought out the best in the fairing we had created for her.

The woman said she had been creatively hiding her prosthetic for eight years under stockings with foam pads and suddenly she’s wearing skirts that show it as it is and it just looks great and she doesn’t care about people seeing it and knowing that she’s an amputee.

We’ve had soldiers, guys who don’t express emotion readily, say they feel naked without it or they wouldn’t walk out the front door without it. We’ve had people come to us and they have a gym sock pulled up over their prosthetic limb and they have three or four other socks stuffed into it to approximate a calf shape. People are mostly not comfortable with the fact that a part of their body is a bunch of skinny little titanium pipes; it’s disheartening. So this process gives the prosthetic a dynamism, a suggestion of life. Even though intuitively we know better, it suddenly imbues the prosthetic with a sense of life that it wouldn’t otherwise have.

We look at our business as a fundamental departure from the traditional thinking, which is to do a ton of research up front, market-research the hell out of it, focus-group it, and throw in a ton of investment hoping that you’re going to capitalize on the backside with a huge return on investment.

We’re saying let’s turn the whole thing on its head. Have a very nimble process where we can print one thing and if we think it’s valuable and compelling, it can become an entire product line, because we don’t have inventory; we print to order. If the next person walks in the door and says, “Hey, I’ve got this thing – my neck muscles gave out,” we’re ready to go and can do a quick scan and before they leave we can have a custom product created or at least in the process of being created. You can’t do that with traditional manufacturing.

When a disruptive technology comes along, it doesn’t just change the way you do things; it changes the entire culture of the way you look at doing that thing. Online travel sites, for example, like Travelocity and Expedia, didn’t just change the way we book a flight; they changed the way we approach traveling as a culture.

For the past 20 years, I was able to look at people with amputations and think, “I would love to do something about creating a better prosthetic leg.” I could think about it and think about it and I wouldn’t get anywhere. It wasn’t until the technologies matured to the point where they became viable that I could start putting different elements together in the right way. Then I could start thinking differently and say, “Okay, now we look at prosthetics and don’t think of them just as technology solutions, but think of the problem of a missing limb and whether there is a way to incorporate design and the arts and human emotion into the solution.” It invites us or it challenges us to see problems and solutions in an entirely different light.