Accelerating commercial validation with HP Labs

The Assignment

Citi Ventures is the ventures and innovation arm of the bank. The team's remit is to help catalyze innovation and look for opportunities to accelerate growth. Spotting new and emergent trends and understanding the behavioral, structural and technological changes that will impact the business is part of the mandate.

The product development team wanted help to build a business case and launch a digital first product that addressed a financial pain point for families.

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The Solution

Starting with ‘Modern Family’ as the foundation, Co-Created kicked-off the ideation process with a week-long intensive workshop with specialists from the consumer bank product and tech teams, external subject matter experts, and seasoned tech founders. Co-Created then did a customer discovery deep dive – bringing in real people (consumers) to hear directly what challenges they were facing and what services they wanted from their bank.  These sessions, complemented by prior research, helped our team create a half dozen family 'archetypes' to broaden our exploration of problem categories, market segments, and consumer needs, in order to ideate across a range of potential solutions. In short order, our process facilitated and forced prioritization to land on the top three concepts. At the end of the week, we delivered three high-fidelity pitch decks (“Lean Product Plans”), each one for a discrete, disruptive concept, one of which was a way for co-parents to seamlessly manage and track shared financial expenses related to their children.

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Co-Created then worked with the Citi team to drive the in-market validation process. This first phase we call “signal mining” – a sprint (in this case 10 weeks) designed to help us get closer to customers and validate the critical assumptions underpinning the concept, primarily which problems and value propositions resonated most with different target customer segments (co-parents in this case). Following this phase, with strong signals (validation) around concept resonance and cost per lead, Co-Created moved to the MVP phase in which they designed, built and launched an iOS app in the app store under independent (non-Citi) branding within roughly two months. Over the following four months, Co-Created iteratively launched marketing tests and product designs to progressively improve key metrics. The product launched first as a simple free collaboration tool for co-parents. Despite intentionally not building a fully featured app with money movement, Citi saw unprecedented monthly engagement per user compared to its own mobile app.

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Outcomes

• 4,000+ downloads in the first two months after launching with limited marketing. 
• Executive support for a spin out in 2021 – Onward. 
• Onward then went on to raise over $13 million across its Seed and Series A fundraises, including investment from the Citi Ventures fintech team
• A new playbook for the Personal Banking business

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The Assignment

HP Labs excels at R&D and the broader organizational machinery is incredibly efficient at scaling operations around existing products. However, the executive team wanted help accelerating pipeline activity and bridging the gap in their commercialization process between R&D and compelling commercial opportunity. Several projects had been in various stages of development for years, without a clear path to market. Co-Created stepped in to help identify and prioritize the strongest use cases for driving organic growth and new revenue streams and developed a repeatable process to commercialize new IP as it emerges/matures.

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The Solution

Our team bridged the gap between R&D and market success by helping the executive team align on new opportunities, increase agility, and go to market with anchor customers. The engagement kicked off with technical presentations by the R&D leads, and continued through a structured, phased approach to surface a wide variety of potential use cases and hone in, with increasing levels of validation, on compelling commercial opportunities. Co-Created facilitated working sessions with the R&D teams and executives, conducted extensive market research and discovery, and engaged with dozens of industry experts and prospective customers through its own outreach across the use cases identified. 

To help prioritize use cases and force decisions throughout the engagement, we leveraged a scorecard, consensus voting, and templated use case summaries and business cases. The scorecard, for example, was customized to HP Labs commercial and strategic criteria, and enabled the collective team to evaluate dozens of potential use cases in a structured way – looking at evolving market dynamics, shifts in consumer behaviors, the size of the opportunity, technical feasibility, and the competitive landscape. The ultimate goal was to narrow in on the few most compelling opportunities that had strongest alignment to HP Labs’ strategic priorities, biggest market opportunity, and clearest signal of demand from large, qualified customers.

The three most impactful capabilities Co-Created brought into the process were (1) digesting and translating technical descriptions into market-ready propositions, (2) bringing structure and granularity to evaluating use cases and the criteria that matter most, and (3) spearheading market outreach and direct customer engagement. 

Co-Created engaged directly with the research teams, over several working sessions, translating their ‘technical’ info into market-facing value propositions and critical assumptions to be tested further when surfacing business use cases and validating customer interest. Prioritization, through scorecard evaluation and use case ranking, was based on factors such as market size, potential for differentiation, alignment with the company's strategic goals, and the feasibility of development and commercialization. To engage prospective customers and validate use cases, we leveraged our global network of corporate clients and subject matter experts, as well as third party platforms and direct cold outreach, to find the right people in market. We iteratively built up our understanding of and point of view on the use cases, digging deeper in each phase of the engagement as we progressively narrowed our list to the prioritized few.

By building out the detailed business cases with direct input from prospective customers, Co-Created helped cultivate relationships and build credibility with those customers – making way for an organic transition to negotiate and sign Letters of Intent (LOIs) with those customers for large scale pilots. This step was about moving from theory to action, translating strategic planning into tangible partnerships and projects. Finally, we handed off the projects in flight to HP Labs’ corporate development and supporting teams. 

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Outcomes

Within four months, the HP Labs team was able to advance from the exploratory stage to customer validation, working with several qualified partners on projects in flight. The HP Labs team built conviction around the prioritized use cases, as well as those opportunities not worth pursuing. This rapid progression from early thinking to actionable plans for commercialization underscored the fast paced, structured process that Co-Created applied to R&D commercialization.

The overall process was incredibly iterative, data-driven, and collaborative. It involved constant feedback loops with the market and the HP Labs teams, ensuring that every decision was backed by solid market-based feedback and validation and had internal buy-in. The ability to sift through dozens of potential use cases and pinpoint the most and least viable ones demonstrated a strategic clarity and focus that can be lacking in traditional R&D processes.

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The Assignment

Blood donations in the US have historically been low, but the situation is getting worse. According to the Red Cross, throughout the last 20 years the number of people donating blood has dropped by 40%. A number of factors are contributing to this: the active blood donor pool shrinks as donors “age out” of the donation process, given that the average donor age is high. The pandemic put an added strain on the blood supply, with blood drives still not reaching their pre-pandemic levels. “Traditional” marketing and tactics that proved effective in the past are getting to be cost prohibitive, resource intensive and have diminishing returns.

The donor experience - from recruitment and engagement, to the technology used, resources shared, or the type and frequency of communications - needed to be entirely rethought. Yet, doing so would prove to be incredibly difficult as blood centers are short-staffed, their technology is constrained and access to data is limited, and these tasks, let alone revamping them, are very time consuming and resource exhaustive.

Delcon has enjoyed a proud legacy as a manufacturer of regulated medical devices for the blood industry since their founding in Italy in 1981 and remained focused on bringing the best hardware to the market, both through direct manufacturing and distribution partnerships. Yet for their next phase of growth - and with growing market challenges to confront - they recognized two major opportunities: expanding their business beyond hardware to building new capabilities in software, data, and automation, and growing their presence in the US market. With a bold, ambitious CEO at the helm, they are actively investing in and pursuing both.

Centered on increasing their focus on innovation - including by co-developing new hardware with customers - they had a variety of compelling ideas for the future (and even early concept designs for some), yet outside of hardware didn’t know where to start and what to prioritize.

They partnered with Co-Created to advance their innovation agenda by bringing discipline and a structured process to their work, leveraging seasoned entrepreneurial talent, and gaining an external partner committed to long-term outcomes.

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The Solution

Initially, Delcon’s strategy and hypothesis was centered on the recognizable gaps in their existing market - like helping to attract younger donors - as well as new ideas around engagement  - like a gamified digital platform to give donors badges and rewards for their donations.

While finding some evidence to support those pain points in the existing landscape, Co-Created quickly identified a larger and more pressing problem for the industry by engaging directly with market experts and prospective customers: Converting one-or-two time donors into habitual and recurring donors. Activating blood centers' existing donor base, and using their own data to do so more effectively to increase donor retention and engagement, presented the biggest opportunity to increase overall donations.

The result of a phased discovery, validation, and ultimately prototyping process was the launch of two new digital products (as well as a backlog of other concepts and opportunities and a lot of actionable learnings about customer needs). Co-Created drove the process end-to-end - from conducting initial discovery research and ideation, to bringing onboard designers and developers, to engaging in customer development with blood centers, to deploying and running pilots in the market.

The first product is a mobile-first web application that helps reshape the donor experience and combines a modern booking engine, marketing automation, and analytics dashboards. The new platform makes it easy and  intuitive to book donation appointments on the donor’s own terms. The platform gives donors more control around the communications and reminders they receive before and after donating, a step-change from the status quo today in which donors often feel “spammed” by the blood center and reach the point of communication fatigue. The result is closer, more trusted and personalized relationships between donors and donation centers. Furthermore, this product sets a foundation for future expansion to an end-to-end DRM (donor relationship management) and booking tool for blood centers who don’t have any systems in place today.

The second, OpenChair, is an AI-powered donor recruiting platform that delivers hyper-personalized communication strategies at scale to drive successful donor outcomes. The product was developed within just six months and is now the cornerstone of the business’s 5-year growth strategy. OpenChair combines machine learning, data science, and generative AI to enable blood centers to understand and segment their donors, personalize communications at scale, and get a lot more output (workload and results) with the same size team.

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Outcomes

Tests with several of Delcon’s US partners have yielded remarkable results. Communications sent by one of the largest community blood centers in the US using OpenChair saw a 24% increase in appointments among inactive donors and a 35% increase in donations from frequent donors compared to traditional methods used during the same period. This could potentially result in tens of thousands of additional donations annually for each center.

In addition, OpenChair’s showing at the ADRP industry-leading annual conference generated strong interest from a number of blood centers, with several requesting immediate access to the platform and service to run their own trials.

Importantly, the adoption of OpenChair led to a true inflection point for Delcon. Equipped with a new and tangible capability to offer blood centers, OpenChair empowered them to adopt a truly proactive sales and partnership strategy, knowing and confident that they had a truly additive and compelling proposition to offer centers. This continues to expand their pipeline and relationships across a vast and key market for the company. OpenChair also helped cement Delcon's presence in industry as a true innovation partner to blood centers, laying groundwork to do more co-development on other opportunities in the future.

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You can read more about our efforts in this Byline from Delcon's CEO, Barbara Sala: Boosting Blood Donation Efficiency: Tackling The Blood Shortage With AI - Healthcare Business Today

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How can we help you?

Contact our team to learn more