On understanding behavior in new business creation

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“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.”
– Ernest Hemingway

Bayer’s G4A Ventures creates new businesses in Digital Health, unlocking new revenue streams and boosting existing ones by improving the lives of patients and consumers. Our foundation is understanding desires and behaviors in the context of situations. We focus on this through every step, from the challenge question through minimum viable product testing and into commercialization. G4A Ventures normally takes a solution to market.

I’ll highlight the importance of behavioral research across G4A initiatives in a series of posts, starting here with an orientation of G4A Ventures and into the challenge statement that kicks off a G4A venture.

Why obsess on people and underserved desires?

G4A Ventures takes on challenges where understanding people in the context of their situation is paramount. We don’t take on challenges that are technical in nature, such as molecule formulations, and we don’t work on challenges where the solution is already identified in the challenge statement. For example, if we already know we want to implement voice communication to solve a problem, G4A Ventures won’t work on that challenge. We focus instead on unearthing an important problem to be solved, from the point of the view of the person who has the problem.

Our philosophy is centered in social sciences. It’s crucial for us to understand that people see and experience the world in different ways, often not as reflections of our own perspectives and views. We relinquish our assumptions about what motivates people and take the time to learn what’s important to people and what people are trying to achieve in the context of their situation. We do this before we design solutions for people because we are not them. More on this in the next post!

Innovations that hypothesize a problem based on assumptions (rather than engaging people directly to understand their situation) or projecting our own worldviews to solve other people’s problems can lead to a solution that people aren’t willing to invest in to solve a problem, or, worse, a solution without a real problem to solve. Focusing on finding the right problem to solve is paramount to success when innovating around behaviors or habits. It can be nearly impossible to let go of our assumptions and change the lens to someone else’s worldview. For G4A Ventures, this letting go is necessary.

Getting to the challenge statement

The challenge area is often broad, such as nutrition or cardiovascular health. To narrow the scope, G4A Intel team looks at societal and technology trends in those areas – where is the money flowing? How are behaviors changing with advanced technology? Where does the sponsor want to see a solution in 3 years, in terms of revenue or growth? The area and the trends are blended together, along with the constraints given by the sponsor, to create the challenge statement, usually in the form of a question, where we need to start by understanding people and getting to the problem to solve. We start by observing people and environments, fully immersed with all our senses, to understand how people see the world. In the next post, I’ll share details of our field research, observing and interviewing.

Spirit of engagement

For each venture, there is a venture architect, a business designer and a product team of technical, medical, design and behavioral sciences capabilities. That core team is outfitted with specialists in the topic to be addressed in the venture. The team is always in the country where the problem is to be solved. If we’re solving something for a US-based market, the team sits in the US to immerse with local cultural norms and beliefs. Our Spirit of Engagement consists of five maxims:

1. Own the problem – the core venture team is fully responsible and accountable to solve the problem without the need to endless layers of reviews and approvals.
2. Make decisions fast– venture challenges normally run for a few months, and there isn’t time for exhaustive and complete analysis and consensus on all topics. The team decides quickly and tests hypotheses, in the field, in near-real time to pivot quickly.
3. Fall in love with the problem – instead of jumping to ideas and solutions early, we take the time to understand how people interpret the many worlds they inhabit, seeking to understand the spoken and unspoken struggles people face. It’s difficult to push back the urge to jump to solutions! Focus on finding the problem in the beginning. The problem needs to be important enough that people are willing to pay to solve it.
4. Challenge each other – constructively challenging each other is an important element of success. Some tension is helpful to get to interesting and novel ideas to solve problems. This is encouraged to avoid the hive mind.
5. Have fun – the work is long, and hard, and may require travel and late night or weekend activities since the team is immersed in the worlds of others and the challenge is time-constrained. The team can get creative with the fun along the way. During a challenge on supplements, the team visited new-age wellness spas and sampled a wide variety of supplement solutions.

At the start of each challenge, the team goes into the wild to experience people’s worlds, immersing through observation then probing, intimate interviews. I’ll focus on that in the next post.

Dr. Jamie Showrank
Director of Human Centered Design, Digital Health Ventures