How Lilli Used Prototyping with Numbers to Explore the Viability of a New Business Idea
Lilli is a service designer with expertise in building services and ventures, behavioral and organizational change, and employee experience. Sustainability is her passion and she is currently exploring how to craft engaging service experiences that are better for people and the planet.
By Elisabeth Graf, d.MBA alum, with contributions by Clare Goldblatt
I have a client who is a service provider, seeking to break into the facility management industry. This industry essentially serves to ensure the comfort, functionality, utility, safety, and efficiency of a space. This client hosted an “Innovation Day,” where employees are encouraged to brainstorm and come up with new ways of expanding and enriching their offering. One of the employees suggested that perhaps rope access cleaning, a type of outdoor window cleaning, could be added to enrich their overall offering.
As a service designer, I knew very little about facility management and what rope access cleaning entail.
However, I tackled this project with this client using the same approach I use with any of my clients who want to test out a new idea: that is, to first and foremost, determine the desirability and viability of any new idea.
Although I was excited by the idea of innovation in an industry I knew very little about, I wanted to ensure that this business could benefit from a possible innovation. Therefore, I decided to test out new business models with this client in the form of a collaborative workshop. I used the Business Model Framework from St. Gallen paired with the Ecosystem Map to visualise the different options. I also gave them 'cards' with other relevant business model patterns as a prompt to come up with new business models. Each group created at least a couple, we then discussed their proposed model ideas, and I synthesised and visualised what they proposed. We experimented with different options, first seeing if this rope access cleaning could be implemented internally, or if it would be more advantageous to partner with a company that already offers this service.
We played around with these two options to see what this structure could look like, especially from the business model perspective. First, we did a deep dive into the competitive landscape by doing a competitive analysis. Next, we wanted to understand this potential concept’s viability in terms of revenue and used prototyping with numbers to better understand just how achievable this concept could be.
We had to take a lot of unique aspects into account when conducting the prototyping with numbers for this service provider. A building’s height, or the type of buildings within a specific area, had to be considered for the calculations. Another component was the potential capacity of a building because, in order to do the cleaning, two people are always needed. Additionally, the weather is always an important aspect when doing rope access cleaning, since it is much more easily done on a clear, dry day. From this data, we extrapolated what the potential amount of buildings are suitable for rope access cleaning, what is possible to do in a certain amount of time, and finally, what would be the costs behind offering this service.
Prototyping with Numbers helps identify the most important factors that determine viability. The table contains hypothetical data.
The process of prototyping with numbers so early on in a project was unfamiliar to my client, as it can come across as you’re largely operating off of assumptions instead of working with concrete data. However, I was able to show them that prototyping with numbers is valuable despite not having all the data and variables available.
By actually showing more of the logic, this helps you at least get a first stab at it, and also helps you to identify what information you’re actually looking for.
The team found this workshop valuable and came to the conclusion that more thorough research was necessary to determine the potential viability of offering rope access cleaning. My client and I are planning on conducting thorough customer research, so we can build upon the data we already have and supplement it with more concrete information. Prototyping with numbers has allowed us to clearly see what data is still missing, which is a huge first step in determining the viability of rope access cleaning for my client.
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uncover hidden assumptions in your work,
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