Challenge Closed
Strategies that motivate risk averse business operators to adopt new technologies, systems or processes.
December 31st 2024 @ 23:59 PM EST
Challenge
FAQ
Here was the background of the challenge.
A manufacturer produces a diagnostic test that can identify and help potential users. However, in order for users to take the test, it requires individual business operators to administer the test. Many of these business operators are not currently set-up to administer the test. And while there is the potential for those business operators to financially benefit in the long-run, administering the test can be complicated and time consuming in the short-run.
Many of the business operators are worried that it will end up being an operational burden, time consuming and hamper their ability to operate efficiently (as well as could cause a short-term financial burden). In short, these business operators are "risk averse" and resistant to changing their current business practices despite a potential user benefit AND long term financial benefit.
We’re curious to uncover examples from across different industries and domains in which business operators may have initially resisted adopting a new process, system or technology but ultimately, they were persuaded or enabled to overcome their initial reluctance.
- Where have you seen a ”risk averse” business operators adopt a new process, system or technology despite it increasing the operational burden/complexity for those business operators in the short-run?
- What strategies were used to make it easy for those risk averse business operators to adopt that new way of doing things?
FAQ
What is this all about?
What is in it for you?
How do I know if I have the expertise to participate?
What happens after I submit to the challenge?
How do I get involved with future challenges?
What is this all about?
We’re inviting our friends to spend a few minutes to think, problem solve and brainstorm. We are trying to “solve an unsolvable problem.” And the best way to solve intractable problems is to seek out insights and inspiration from clever people who don’t work day-to-day on these kinds of problems.
What is in it for you?
- It takes very little time
- Learn about a totally different field and problems
- It’s a chance to practice your creative thinking
- And for those ideas that get selected for further development, you can become filthy rich…or at least get a $100 gift card For those who choose to share their name and preferred email, if your suggestion is selected, we will be sending you a $100 Amazon Gift Reward.
How do I know if I have the expertise to participate?
We are looking for creative people who are skilled at spotting unexpected relationships and associations.* At the heart of it, we believe that people who see patterns, where others do not, are the secret ingredient to discovering new and better ways of doing things. Often times, the best solutions come from far outside the specific field of expertise.
What happens after I submit to the challenge?
All submissions will be reviewed when the challenge closes. All participants will be contacted directly by our team to share the winners. For this reason, please ensure that you provide correct and up to date contact details. Winning contributors will be contacted and an award will be sent.
How do I get involved with future challenges?
If you enjoyed this challenge, you’ll LOVE being a member of the Deliberate Innovator Network. It’s costs you nothing but will give you a lifetime of delight! It’s Free. No Strings Attached. We just love bringing together awesome people.
Back to the challenge details
Ideas from the community
John Deere Getting Farmers to Adopt New Tech
Smoothie King Making Digital Displays Smoother
M-Pesa and Digital Payments
Step off my Cash Register!! The Rise of Toast and Square
TeleMed Model
EV Charging Stations in Rural Gas Stations
RADx diagnostics: Successful government scaleup of COVID testing
OPower - Leveraging Peer Influence and FOMO
HANS could have saved The Intimidator
GenAI eats creative agencies
Front line leadership: Ambassadors to success
It's all about WIIFM!
Simplify life and add opportunities.
John Deere Getting Farmers to Adopt New Tech
John Deere introduced GPS-guided equipment in the late 90’s to enable precision farming. Initially, many farmers were hesitant to adopt this complex technology due to its perceived difficulty and high costs.
Initially, farmer’s thought they knew all their fields like the back of their hand but were surprised what the data revealed about harvest variation from field to field.
John Deere addressed these concerns by offering hands-on demonstrations, providing financial incentives, and establishing support networks to assist with the transition.
By showcasing the long-term benefits, such as increased crop yields and reduced resource consumption, they successfully encouraged adoption among skeptical farmers.
4
Smoothie King Making Digital Displays Smoother
Local owner-operators of Smoothie King franchises have historically relied on printed menus in lightbox displays — inside and outside — to present ordering options to customers. But updating physical menus often takes weeks
They faced challenges in encouraging franchisees to adopt new digital ordering systems. To address this, the company involved influential franchisees early in the process, making them feel vital to the selection and implementation of the technology.
After speaking with the initial franchises they found that the digital displays enhance operators' ability to localize their promotions and menu items, as well as upsell high-margin add-ons.
That insight allowed the team to encourage all franchises to eagerly adopt the new displays.
The team also developed a white glove" service that had extremely fast turnaround, and an availability to reach their technical support group 24/7 to deal with any hardware-related issues for all franchise owners
2
M-Pesa and Digital Payments
In Kenya, mobile payment platform M-Pesa revolutionized small business transactions by enabling users to send and receive money via mobile phones. Initially, small shopkeepers resisted adoption due to fears of fraud, technology learning curves, and distrust of non-cash systems. These businesses often relied entirely on cash, and the idea of moving to digital payments seemed risky. Strategy: M-Pesa provided free workshops to train business owners, implemented secure systems to build trust, and incentivized early adopters with fee waivers for six months. Over time, as customers demanded digital payments, resistance softened.
0
Step off my Cash Register!! The Rise of Toast and Square
The Cloud Based POS Systems, like Square or Toast, struggled to get adoption early on. Independent cafes were a major market and they resisted for a LONG time. Owners faced hurdles in technology adoption. Owners worried about upfront costs, training staff, and potential disruptions during busy service times. Why change your operations so these fatcats could get rich! One of the game changing strategies was showcasing case studies. Toast had similar-sized cafes highlight their journey. They showed how it increased efficiency and revenue growth, building confidence among adopters.
0
TeleMed Model
It was only a few years ago, but during COVID, telemedicine became essential for small clinics to continue patient care. However, many independent medical practitioners initially resisted due to lack of technical infrastructure and concerns about patient satisfaction. Telemedicine platforms offered free setup, low-cost equipment leasing, and virtual training for staff. Highlighting increased appointment availability and patient convenience helped persuade hesitant clinics to adopt the technology.
2
EV Charging Stations in Rural Gas Stations
When Tesla first decided to try to rule the world :)... they knew they needed to have EV chargers all over the country. The problem...small gas stations in rural areas were very resistant due to perceived high upfront costs and uncertain demand. All they could see was LONG payback time and potential operational disruptions. Tesla solved this by partnering with gas station owners to subsidize installation costs, offering revenue-sharing models where stations retained a portion of charging fees.
1
RADx diagnostics: Successful government scaleup of COVID testing
RADx initiative by National Institutes of Health (NIH) was a large-scale initiative to tap into the skills and resources across the country to develop and scale up COVID 19 diagnostics as quickly as possible. The government doesn't always act quickly but the national emergency demanded action and the NIH rose to the occasion!
0
OPower - Leveraging Peer Influence and FOMO
Utility Companies have tried in vain to encourage homeowners to install energy efficient home solutions and curtail energy consumption. However, home owners were relucant to switch over due to lack of incentive to change. Opower was created and formed a partnership with several energy companies in order to reduce household energy consumption. OPower developed the Home Energy Report (HER) which compared consumers’ current energy usage with that of similarly-sized households and highlights their most “efficient neighbors.” Opower works with utility companies to generate and distribute these reports to consumers on an ongoing monthly or bi-monthly basis. The HER shows households how much energy and money they would have saved if they had consumed at the same level as their neighbors.
0
HANS could have saved The Intimidator
It took 15 years and two tragic deaths to gain acceptance of HANS, a life saving device for race car drivers. The first death was in 1981 during routine testing. Patrick Jacquemart's crash did minimal damage to his Renault race car. He was less fortunate. He suffered a basilar skull fracture, a direct result of his head experiencing excessive G forces while his body was restrained by his racing harness. As Roy Ritchie wrote in Car and Driver, "Jacquemart’s friend and fellow racer Jim Downing wondered what could be done to avoid such tragedies. In response, Downing and his brother-in-law Dr. Bob Hubbard, who earned his Ph.D. in engineering studying the mechanical properties of skull bones, invented the “head and neck support” now known and marketed as the HANS device." Downing started using HANS in 1986. He had little company. Race car drivers accept risk as inherent in the sport. HANS was perceived as something for wimps. Dale Earnhardt, the legendary NASCAR driver known as "The Intimidator", spoke out against adding safety measures. "Tie kerosene rags around your ankles so ants don’t crawl up and eat your candy ass,” he said. Tragically, it was Earnhardt's death at the end of the 2001 Daytona 500 that turned the tide. For NASCAR, the crash seemed hardly noteworthy. Drivers routinely walked away from far more spectacular wrecks. Which made it so shocking that Earnhardt died of a basilar skull fracture, the very injury that HANS was designed to prevent. Up to that point, only 250 HANS devices had found their way into race cars. That many were sold the following week. Today more than 140,000 are in use. The device is required by most race-sanctioning bodies around the world. As tragic as Earnhardt's death was, it provided the catalyst for making HANS an accepted necessity instead of a ridiculed oddity. References: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15121817/the-physics-of-how-the-hans-device-saves-lives-feature/ https://www.autoweek.com/racing/nascar/a42690387/how-the-hans-device-flipped-the-script-on-the-safety-narrative-in-2000/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_F1mJrHnRg
1
GenAI eats creative agencies
Marketing departments using generative ai for creative/as development rather than their long-term creative agency.
0
Front line leadership: Ambassadors to success
As you are well aware - change = disruption and discomfort. At least at first and its in our nature to resist change, specifically when the current process is "working". One key is to ensure the any change is well defined before rolling it out to the organization. That means creating a work standard or SOP to execute the task. Testing and getting input and feedback on that work standard - and ultimately buy in from the people who will actually be running/executing the new task. Not just the engineering or leadership team who think its a great idea. Often your best solutions/idea people are those on the front line executing the business. Utilize their feedback to refine the work standard and establish processes for their ongoing feedback/engagement. Getting their buy in and having them as ambassadors for the new process are key.
0
It's all about WIIFM!
At a successful pharma/biotech company, the R&D and IT groups collaborated to create a best-in-industry data reporting and integration system to facilitate faster insight discovery and decision-making. Successful implementation would require many data generators to change their process and invest time up front to organize data consistently and capture necessary meta-data. Understandably, there was initially resistance despite agreement that long-term benefits would be significant. Key success strategy: Determine an early WIIFM (What's In It For Me) for the most impacted stakeholders in addition to the longer-term benefit. Implementors worked carefully with data generators to understand pain points they currently faced relevant to data reporting. Then solutions to a few key pain points were prioritized for testing very early in the project. Early testers were given access to interim benefits (e.g. automated reports) before the final project was rolled-out. This built trust and created enthusiasm to invest more and anticipation for the final experience. Asking the question "how might we provide an early benefit to our most impacted stakeholders?" changed the course of this project and led to a successful experience!
0
Simplify life and add opportunities.
Can´t go into details, but paraphrasing some winning approaches: - Make sure what you ask it not a one-off. If the business owners need to implement / get used to something new just for this single activity, probability of acceptance is low. Partner, grow, build to make sure there will be plenty of similar activities and opportunities once they implement your activity. - Make their life easier by taking a buden off their shoulders: How can your activity reduce a non-core, cumbersome and unnerving activity the business owners have to do but hate to do?
0
Open Challenge
We encourage you to participate in our open challenge. Please see our active challenge below
Frequently Asked Questions
Our Deliberate Way of problem solving is super interactive, smartly designed AND generates hundreds of non-obvious ideas and actionable solutions that are ready for your team to execute. We do it by combining exceptional facilitation together with crowdsourcing and behavioral science techniques. Traditional problem solving workshops use the same old, familiar approaches and produce the same old ideas.
We follow a systematic and multi-step approach to planning your offsite.It starts with our team conducting a fact-finding session with your sponsor and/or planning team to define your goals, outcomes, wishes and concerns. We turn those findings into an offsite planning brief that will enable us to start designing a highly customized offsite experience.During the planning process, we conduct regularly scheduled (often weekly) planning meetings to ensure alignment. And weeks prior to the offsite, we conduct a comprehensive “run of show” review with the planning team. We also frequently host a “Participant Briefing” session to prepare and inspire participants in advance of the offsite.
Most ideas in workshop lean towards the familiar and incremental. Our Deliberate Way helps to break those traditional patterns of thinking. We use crowdsourcing to generate a wide array of useful metaphors, contributed from both our Deliberate Innovator network. We turn those metaphors into use cases and creative prompts to your specific challenge in order to accelerate problem solving and generate non-obvious solutions.
