The Key to Designing a Successful Solution: Listen to Your Stakeholders!

Written by Nicole Ciavola

“... it will save the patient money…” said the nurse at Ha Nam, a provincial hospital in Vietnam. My ears perked up immediately because I had been waiting for an insight into what our stakeholders, NICU staff at low-resource hospitals, cared about most. I was there to learn what they needed, what they wanted to accomplish, and how they measured that progress.

The question of how to identify and solve customer needs is the single most important question in entrepreneurship. The product or service a business is offering must solve a real, present problem for stakeholders if a company wants to create value. Unfortunately, many companies allow their focus to drift and instead prioritize making a snazzy product, courting donations, or any myriad of distractions. If you want to create a solution that will make a real difference in the lives of your stakeholders, you must listen to and understand their needs.

Understanding customer needs can be made more applicable when you look not only at what problem your customers are trying to solve, but how they measure the progress. Professor Ben Linder, one of the professors for Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship, a joint course between Olin College, Babson College, and Wellesley College, brought this concept to my attention. The course enables students to work on a social entrepreneurship venture in industries from Community Development to Global Health. Each project is developed in conjunction with global partners, which helps students engage in the cultural context of the places they are trying to solve problems within. Understanding the on-the-ground situation is absolutely critical when working to solve any problem, especially those that surround development. Many excellent initiatives to solve global issues have failed due to a lack of understanding of both what matters to stakeholders and the reality of the countries they are trying to serve.

During a team presentation, Professor Linder asked my team and I what “currency” our stakeholders cared about. By this he meant: what progress did they put value on, and what metrics did they use to measure it? If we understood what they cared most about, we could design our solutions to fit into their goals. Everything we do should be serving the customers’ end needs, and our communications should highlight the value we were bringing to them.

ADE Student Kai Levy leads an interview with the doctors and nurses of Ha Nam Provincial Hospital

In the case of the nurse at Ha Nam, she cared about giving effective treatment as efficiently as possible, to both cure her infant patients, and save the families money. Therefore, for me to engage what she cared about, our team would need to offer a product that would treat more babies, much faster, than they currently were able to. Thankfully, we were able to deliver that. Our team is working on eliminating hypothermia during jaundice treatment in low-resource settings, with a combination product called Otter and Firefly. Due to Firefly being a double-sided phototherapy device (the treatment for jaundice), it cuts treatment time in half. This means that, at minimum, every family will save 180,000 VND. Otter/Firefly meets the nurse’s need perfectly: treating the infants effectively and safely, and saving families significant money.

Stakeholder centricity is key to any successful product or service. It doesn’t matter how fancy the gadget, beautiful the design, or brilliant the business model, if at the end of the day it’s not what your stakeholders need nor want. Therefore, next time you are trying to solve a problem, ask yourself: What is the currency of your stakeholders? What do they care about? And how can you, when trying to solve problems in their context, communicate that in a way that they find important?