Design Thinking for Base of the Pyramid

I'm surrounded by post-it notes and dozens of photos from yesterday's field work.

It's 9am on a Sunday, and I'm a student again -- sitting in a beautifully modern classroom at the Indian School of Business (ISB).  I'm participating in a workshop on "Consumer-Centered Innovation for Emerging Markets."  We were warned beforehand that it would be intensive, and they weren't kidding: 9am - 11:30pm yesterday, and all-day again today.

The design task: Identify a business, product, or service innovation opportunity in housing for base of the pyramid.

To do this, we split into teams of two and spent eight hours in urban slums in Hyderabad.  Rather than traditional market research techniques of surveys, interviews, and focus groups, we took an ethnographic and anthropological approach... Basically a fancy way of saying: we became flies on the wall inside a family's house throughout the entire course of their day.  We got into their lives, studied their ecosystem, and at least tried to put aside our assumptions of how to improve low-income housing.  The basic assumption is that surveys and focus groups tend to result in incremental improvements, while a more immersive approach can lead to transformational and non-linear innovations.

I am paired with Priya, a current ISB student who was previously a reporter in Bombay.  We drive to Shivaji Nagar and spend eight hours with Iqbar Khan, his wife Sajeeta, and their family.  While Priya speaks to them in their living room to learn more about their lives, I spend time with their daughter-in-law, Altheea, who is eight months pregnant.

While I am first extremely frustrated by my inability to communicate, I quickly find that this actually enables me to observe more.

Altheea looks about 18.  Eight months pregnant, she's doing all the cleaning and cooking for her family-in-law.  In fact, she spends three hours doing laundry.  What's particularly interesting about this is that they own a washing machine (which was part of her dowry).  After taking the clothes out of the machine, she hand washes the clothes again!!

Indeed, one key insight is that although some base of the pyramid consumers own the same technology as higher income consumers, they often use this technology in different ways.  For instance, for the three mobile phones I observed, the family still uses the community pay phone outside.  Another team's family owns two fridges, yet do not use them in order to save energy.

The list of observations that struck me goes on and on, so just a few highlights:

• Creative use of space; one room served multiple functions (e.g. kitchen tripled as kitchen, bedroom, and dining area)
• Little to no space for children to play within the household, which often results in children playing on the roof with few safety precautions (I even see this outside my Banjara Hills balcony -- this morning I saw a little boy riding this bike (!!!) on the building's roof!!
• Extreme distrust of doctors (the mother is not feeling well, but does not want to go to the doctor, instead making home remedies)... yet at the same time, ensuring daughters give birth in private hospitals because government hospitals are "poor quality"
• Water storage extremely important, with huge water drums outside each household and multiple buckets in the kitchen
• Perhaps unsurprisingly in India, education is a key priority.  When forced to prioritize, education was placed on a much higher level than even food.  One team talked about spending time with an auto rickshaw driver who was putting his son through engineering college.

Some photos (notice the satellite dish!):

My brain has been on fire over these last couple of days -- I can't stop thinking about ways to apply this design thinking process to LifeSpring.   In fact, John sent me this design toolkit for base of the pyramid, designed by IDEO.  Really excited to apply this to my day-to-day work!