 Well, it is 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, here in New York City, so with that, I'd like to welcome everyone, hello, and good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for Short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest in our 2016 webinar series on the topic of using the Lean Business Model for Social Innovation. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'm the Director of Programs here at Engineering for Change. I'll be moderator for today's webinar. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit more about our webinar. Social entrepreneurs are concerned with solving urgent social challenges by applying business techniques and private sector approaches. To succeed, start-up social enterprises must first invest in defining their own business model, and articulating how they will achieve their intended impact. Thank You, Greater Villegro has worked with numerous social enterprises to do just that across India and Africa. So, we've invited Paul Belknap, the lead for Villegro's health incubation team, to share how Villegro utilizes the business model canvas to help their start-ups focus on finding scalable business models to solve in social challenges. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the E4C webinar series team. If anybody out there has questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. The webinar you're participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. 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And welcome, welcome to everyone from Houston to New Jersey to Brooklyn to the Netherlands. We're very excited to have you here with us today. All right. And with that, I'd like to introduce our speaker, Ant Beltner, who leads the health incubation work at Velgro. He joined Velgro after spending five months working as an MBAs without board of advisors to the organization during which time he helped the company with business development and internal information flow. Paul holds an MBA from Penn State's Neal College of Business during which time he was the president of the Met Impact Chapter. Prior to completing his MBA, he worked for five years as a mechanical engineer designing capital equipment for the paper industry. Much of his time has been working on a number of new product development project teams. Paul also participated in and led multiple internal process improvement teams. So we're very excited to have Paul here with us today, joining us from India, and I will turn it over to him. Yeah, thanks for the introduction, Yana. And yeah, greetings to everyone today from Bangalore, India. I hope everyone's off to a good start to the day. So I guess if I can get a little more feedback from the audience, it would help me present a little bit today so you can just enter that in the chat window as well. It would be great to hear how many of you are currently starting work on a product that's intended to create impact for low-income people around the world. That can help me understand if you guys are more generally interested in just learning about the business model canvass or if you intend to kind of apply it to something you're already thinking about. So I guess before we get started, I just wanted to... was kind of a credit to Alexander Osterwalder and Steve Blank. A lot of this material is adapted from their work and definitely greatly appreciate it and encourage you to check out the great work that they've done and a couple of specific examples of that. We've definitely benefited greatly from it. Whenever we talk about the business model canvas, we always step back and think about what is really the purpose of the startup because that is... you have to kind of frame the purpose of the business model canvas within that. And so a startup is really a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. And the startup really exists to iterate on that and pivot until it finds the thing that it's looking for. And then it often turns into more of a traditional organization, but it often looks very different until it accomplishes that initial goal. And one of the things that that organization needs to do is understand what its mission is and what is driving it, what context it is trying to build that business model within. And so you need to define the mission of the company and that really can be boiled down to who do you serve and for what purpose. And the goal here is to define a mission statement that is specific enough that it gives you some constraints to work within, but general enough that it will be durable through the inevitable pivots that you'll face as you try out different business models and different product configurations and really try to find that fit that is scalable and also makes the impact that you want to make. So we want to answer the question, and this is a good exercise to go through before you actually start working on your business model, is to identify this mission and answer these questions. The challenge here is to do it in roughly eight words, less than eight words, and that typically what we found is that that gives the right mix of specificity to give you some good bounds to work within, but also keeping it somewhat not too specific where you start defining, for instance, the product that you're building rather than the mission you're trying to accomplish to the people you're trying to help and how. So the challenge there is to limit it to about eight words. Vildrow has managed, as an example, has managed to get it to four, making impactful innovators succeed. And each word in here really has to hold its own weight and carry itself through and justify its position in the submission statement. So we started off with action saying, we're going to make these impactful innovators succeed and we defined who we want to help and how we want to help them. So this is something that I think we always suggest people start with before they actually jump into the business model canvas because it gives you a really useful context to work within and it's, you know, because there will always be trade-offs as you're developing your business model canvas and as you're, you know, really working through your startup and really the tough challenges really come when you start actually trying things on the ground and you need to make tough decisions about things that are working and things that aren't. One great example of this is we were working with some entrepreneurs interested in solving the problem of access to female hygiene products here in India and they started up this, you know, that was essentially their mission, was to make female hygiene products available to people in rural India. They started up a rural distribution network, came up with a, you know, and started working on education around menstrual hygiene and things like that. But then, and they started adding a few other products to the sales basket so that these women entrepreneurs could have a sustainable business. And what they found is after a few months is that the women were selling everything but the feminine hygiene products and they faced a really difficult decision to and ultimately shut down a successful distribution channel and business because they knew that they weren't accomplishing their mission. And I think that's why it's important to really understand what you're trying to accomplish before you set out and it's good to even understand that before you start sketching out your business model. So moving to the next slide, we're looking at what is a business model and it's really nine components that come together to really outline the business. And these, I think what we found is that they're, they fully define the business but they're also fairly flexible and they can fit a lot of different contexts. They define how the organization creates, delivers and captures value. The numbering of them is important. We kind of start with the core of the business and then build outwards from there. And I think there are a couple of other things to mention about the business model generally before we dive into how you build one. First of all, we prefer the business model canvas over a business plan because we see it as something that is more comfortable and more practical as a living document where something that you should be revisiting as you learn more about your customers, about your value proposition, about all elements of the business model. And so you want to, we see one of the strengths of this is that it should be iterative, it should be something that you have up on your wall that you're revisiting consistently. And so that's really critical. The other thing to mention is that you'll often develop multiple examples or multiple versions of the business model as you're even sketching it out initially. You may have multiple ideas about primary customer segments or value propositions that you want to deliver. And sometimes if you just have two customer segments, you can just list those on one version of the business model canvas. But if you start realizing that those two customer segments each require different channels, different customer relationship strategies, different key resources, partners, then it's time to create two different business model canvases. And that really is good to highlight to you how different those two customer segments may be and how difficult it may be to serve both of those segments as a startup because startups do have limited resources and it's important to kind of focus those resources. So it's a useful tool from that standpoint as well. And it can often highlight which ones, which of those two customer segments or which of those two opportunities say within the customer relationship management are more manageable for a startup and may direct your strategy in a particular direction. So with that introduction, we'll move into the beginning of the business model canvas, which is the value proposition, which is really at the heart of the business model canvas, which is why it's right in the middle. Before I proceed the whole, another kind of overall topic is that the value proposition and everything to the right of it are often referred to as the front stage and they're the customer-facing side of the business model canvas. You can kind of see the right side is really the customer-facing side. The left side is really the back stage or the delivery side of how you deliver that value proposition to the customer. So that's another way to kind of organize this in your head. Value proposition really defines what are you building in for who and we've actually argued about this a little bit internally. The customer segment and the value proposition really could both be labeled one. You can't think about one without the other, but the value proposition is really most core to this and it could potentially be delivered to multiple customer segments. So you really have to start thinking about those two things almost at the same time and start iterating between the two. So we'll move on to thinking about how you actually design a value proposition. So this is an area where Alexander Osterwalder really developed the business model canvas and the materials around how to put this together and realized that the core and the foundation of the business model is really in the value proposition. So he then went back and wrote a book specifically zooming in on designing the value proposition. I've gone through this book. I've presented on this book and it's absolutely fantastic. If you're at the stage of your business where you're really trying to understand your customer and figure out what you are trying to build for them, I would definitely recommend looking that book up and using some of the materials. It's a very practical way to structure your thinking and I definitely think the materials walk you through a really structured logical process about how you understand your customers. So I would highly recommend looking that up if that's a place where you are with your idea at this point. And so we're kind of going to do just a quick dive into that but you can really go into detail on this and this is really important to get right. If you get this right, everything else will flow from that very logically. So you start off by understanding your customer jobs and really to do that you need to talk to, I often say 50 to 100 customers. Now in some cases in a kind of a B2B sitting there may not be 100 customers out there within your context but I think that the point of really making sure you talk to a large number of customers is really important. And so the first thing you want to understand is the customer jobs. What are they trying to accomplish within the context of the product or service that you're trying to develop? And some of these jobs will be just the functional jobs of getting a task done. Some of these jobs will be emotional jobs. So for instance, if I'm thinking about the customer job of hey, I want to go on a date on Friday night, the functional job would be I want to spend time with somebody. I want to do something fun. But another example is thinking of one of our entrepreneurs has developed a neonatal temperature monitoring product which helps with maintaining healthy weight gain and keeping infants out of hypothermia in India. And there's the functional job of just alerting the mother if the child's cold but there's also a lot of social jobs that the customer is trying to accomplish in terms of satisfying extended family and things like that that are really critical and the product can help the customer with. And so along with the customer jobs there are also pains and these are risks that the customer sees related to accomplishing that job, negative consequences socially, functionally, etc. that the customer faces as they're trying to accomplish these jobs. And those are things that make them kind of dread doing these tasks and things that obviously you'd like to help them avoid if possible. And there are also gains. So there are more positive things like if you can provide a really great experience on my date night on Friday night then that can be a really positive thing for me as well. So it's not all bad, it's also there's some positive opportunities there. So there are a number of human-centered design tools that you can use to get to that to the customer profile. And as I've brought up here you can use the empathy map. That's one that we've used a lot. What does the customer think and feel? What does the customer see? What does the customer hear? What do they say and do? What are their pains and gains? And this would all be within the context of those jobs that they're trying to accomplish related to what you're developing. As I alluded to before the materials within the Value Proposition Designer book are also really good in a structured way to step through this. So that's one way that you can handle this. And then if there are other tools that you're more comfortable with I think they all work really well. And as long as you use something to structure your thinking I think they all kind of do a very good job of it. I would say that what I have what I've seen is that some entrepreneurs don't approach this in a structured way and they tend to struggle. So the key takeaway here is use whatever tool you like to get to understanding the customer jobs the pains and the gains. Just make sure you use a tool so that you're structuring your thinking in a meaningful way and making sure you're asking the right questions. So once you've kind of gathered that information you need to rank the customer jobs in terms of importance to the customer. You need to rank the pains and the gains in terms of importance to the customer. Then you really start on designing the Value Proposition. And the Value Proposition is a list of products and services that you're putting together and it may be a mix, it may be a couple of products or features that the products need to have. This is really defining the requirements for what it needs to deliver to the customer. And then you're putting those things together in a bundle and then you're defining how those that bundle relieves the pains that the customer has and also creates gains for the customer. And the key here is to really you're not going to be able to define a product or a bundle of products and services that necessarily addresses every single customer job every single pain and every single gain. Otherwise I think we as engineers have often been accused of trying to create things that are a little too have too much going on and over engineered. You really need to focus in here and the way to address that is to focus in on the top two or three most important jobs, the most important gains, and the most important pains. And if you can address the top ones with a nice concise product then you'll be off to a really good start in terms of establishing a value proposition that your customer will be willing to pay for. So with that you now have kind of created a value proposition and another way to think about this is that your customer segment is all understood through observation and it really explains the why of why you're building what you're building and what you're developing, what you're developing. And so then the value proposition is what you end up creating in order to address the customer's needs. And so that's done through design and you end up creating a value proposition. So we've already kind of drilled into the customer segments. There are a couple of notes here. I think we've already talked about how to stand your customer segment. But there are a couple of things that I think are particularly interesting when you're doing this for a social enterprise. And one of the key things here is to understand that your customer segment is often your purchaser and beneficiary. Maybe different people. Social entrepreneurs often end up with even more stakeholders than that who may have an influence in the purchasing decision. And so that's something to keep in mind here is you need to understand potentially multiple customer segments and it's good to list those here. So in the case of medical devices where I work the customer in India or the US, the user of many of the products is not necessarily really the decision maker because the doctor has most of the information and the patient does whatever they say. And so it's important here to define who's making those purchasing decisions, who is the decision maker potentially on other criteria and then who is the actual end user. And you need to make sure that things are lined up for everyone otherwise there's a strong value proposition for at least the most important stakeholders or your product will struggle with adoption. So this is an important criteria to keep in mind as you're designing your product and you're designing your value proposition. I think that's something that other entrepreneurs face in terms of having to deal with multiple customer segments and disconnect between beneficiaries and purchasers and things like that. But I think social entrepreneurs often end up with a more complex web of stakeholders than others. So just something to keep in mind as you're building this. Moving along to channels you also need to define how does your product get to the customer and that's a really critical piece that is particularly challenging in many developing countries where the distribution channels are often much more fragmented and challenging to navigate. I had a friend who worked at a multinational both in the US and in India and was working in the supply chain side of things and was just spent about a year here in the middle of his time with this company and was just shocked with how much more challenging it was to do logistics here in India. And so that's an example of how it is potentially just something you need to keep in mind as you're building your product. The other thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to take into account how complex and how big of a behavior change your product or service is for the customer. And the more complex more education is needed the more behavior change is needed for your product or service. The further to the right of this slide you'll probably need to go in order to get your good adoption of your product. The downside is the further to the right that you go the more expensive the channel is to the company and the more direct expense to the company where you're taking on a lot of risk if the product doesn't sell. Because you typically as a young entrepreneur will only have or a young business you only have one product and if that's selling you've got a fixed expense of your sales force and not much revenue coming in and that can be a tough thing to deal with as a small business. If you do have a product that's more a pulp product very similar to other products in the market then you can move towards the left towards whole saleers, partner stores and those are cheaper ways to sell but they typically can't do any concept selling for you. They can't do any real customer evangelization for you. And I think the company that I worked for here SustainTech was selling commercial wood cook stoves small roadside eateries here in India they've been in business for I think six or seven years now and they've had to maintain their own sales force even with a product that isn't a huge behavior change from the existing products but it does require a fair amount of education to explain to customers why it's better than the competition partly because it doesn't look so much different than the competition and so that's something that you have to consider and build in as you're kind of thinking about your business model. So those are some examples of our channel operate again thinking about different ways that your distribution will work. These are just some examples really kind of get the juices flowing there are many other opportunities here there are a lot of times that you will need to innovate here to really reach your customers develop partnerships with aligned organizations like NGOs and things like that and that can fit into your channel strategy sometimes. The other thing is you know that I think a social entrepreneur needs to think about is how you manage your customer relationships really deal with once you attract your customers once you get them to buy your product how do you keep them and how do you grow them and I think I've seen this can be particularly challenging for entrepreneurs working in emerging markets where connectivity isn't quite as good sometimes or customers are more likely to change phone numbers or move their business without informing somebody things like that and so it's something that is increasingly a challenge I think that you know there are solutions in terms of digital platforms that can help with this this is just again a few kinds of customer relationship management options that are there ranging from personal assistance really as some of the more hands-on and costly options all the way down community and co-creation type customer relationship and self-service customer relationship management which are maybe a little less expensive. Again you need to match this to the value proposition that you're delivering and the customer segment you're working with how capable will they be to manage an automated service how you know you have a very concentrated customer base of a handful of five clients you probably need personal assistance because every client counts a lot if you have thousands of clients personal assistance probably won't be an option but you really need to match that to the skill level of the client the complexity of the product and all of the things that really you already will be thinking about in terms of developing your value proposition and understanding your customer segment you just need to make sure that this is aligned with that those two buckets and so then moving along to the last box on the right hand side revenue streams and so this is how you make money and you make the business sustainable and scalable and I think this is an area where social entrepreneurs have really that the most traditional business model is really the asset sale I sell you a widget and a watch or a solar lantern and then you pay me cash for that up front more and more we're seeing things like solar power delivered on subscription models I think we've seen increasingly here in India an example a lot of farm equipment is needed on a seasonal basis it's often not particularly affordable for a small farmer to buy certain implement because he only needs it for a handful of days a year but it also gives him significant labor savings and so we've seen a lot of people doing product as a service so potentially through an intermediary somebody buys this equipment and then rents it out and when you think about the fact that maybe this product will be delivered as a service you need to think about the fact that there's a farmer is your end beneficiary and an equipment renter who is or a service provider really who would be the actual paying customer and this comes back to thinking about those multiple customer segments that you need to address in order to really make your product successful so we've seen a lot of interesting models springing up there where potentially where people are seeing good results with the rental of agricultural equipment for some of these very seasonal products that are needed but not necessarily something you want to have around all year so moving along just kind of stepping back and realizing that we've just completed the right side of the business model canvas which is really the customer facing side it's the understanding the customer and creating a value proposition based on that it's building up our channels and customer relationships how we manage our relationship with that customer segment and then also come in based on that now we'll start with the left hand side and just to note we've actually renumbered the key activities, resources and partners because we think it makes a little bit more sense to think about it this way so just in case you notice that discrepancy that was intentional and so I think we'll walk you through why we're thinking about it that way so the key activities are what's the most important thing for the business to deliver that value proposition what does the business need to do in order to really you know, wow the customer with a value proposition that they have to have and so there are three three main buckets that that lives under and those are production and then potentially also service delivery platform and so production is really what you're thinking about in terms of a physical product or even some other options there problem solving service is often associated with consulting but it can also be you know the what I just talked about where an enterprise might choose to provide some kind of physical product as a service to its customers and then finally a social media platforms and there's other platforms that can help farmers construct agricultural linkages et cetera networks of information that help them understand how to get better prices for goods, understand best planting practices et cetera and so you know as you're defining your key activities for your business you want to get into a lot more detail and I'm really discussing here but you know these are three buckets that can kind of get you started some businesses will really only have activities under one of these others will have a few activities listed under two or three of them depending on the nature of the business that you're trying to provide keep in mind that you know as a startup with limited resources you need to focus your activities pretty carefully. So next is key resources and we really look at the fact that the key resources are the things that are the most critical parts of the key activities of the business and so what are the most important assets that your company has in terms of delivering your value proposition what of the key activities do you really want to take control over understanding that you're a startup with limited bandwidth you know what do you are you not comfortable sharing with a partner so those may be physical assets in the case of a production company those may be intellectual assets in the case of you know if you've developed some interesting intellectual property for your business or also in the case of a consulting type firm they may be human resources in terms of developing a distribution or sales force and they also could be financial resources in terms of providing financing to individuals in the case of finance or other innovations where people are helping low-income individuals access improved livelihoods through financial services and again these are kind of the buckets that you would want to arrange your resources under but you should go into some detail here in terms of kind of identifying those key resources and understanding which ones you really have to have internal to your company and so the key partners really if you take, if you start with your key activities and you list out your key resources the things you have to do internally the key partners should really add up to anything that's left from your key activities and there may be a few additional things under key partners but if there's anything in key activities that isn't accounted for under key resources and key partners then you have a problem and you need to figure out how you're going to accomplish that and so you know it's things like partners suppliers of raw material designers, anything you're outsourcing whether that's some of your production activity whether that's design in R&D and there's a lot of reasons to do this for a social entrepreneur often times the product development process may be a one-time activity or something that needs a specific input from something that's a fairly highly specialized skill set but then won't be needed and doesn't make sense to have a client over the long term for the business there's also a lot of key partnerships that social entrepreneurs would form that would help them reach their customers and they may not quite fit into the channels bucket but they would be an important partner in terms of really maintaining a customer relationship or some other organization that just gives the entrepreneur the reach that they need to reach their customers and they do provide you some more flexibility than necessarily developing every single capability in-house from day one and these can be fluid as your business evolves and you understand your business model better I think that's one of the key takeaways here is to make sure that you're always evaluating whether or not a partnership or a key partner needs to change to something you're doing in general or vice versa based on what you learn about your business model and so finally the cost structure really takes into account all of the activities on the left side of the business model canvas and says what does that cost us to deliver this value proposition and our channel strategy and customer relationships to the customer and you know you want the basically you want box nine to end up to be less than box five and then you have a profitable business and that's a pretty big simplification but ultimately that's what it boils down to and that's the kind of businesses that we're supporting at Vilgro is ones that really do have a sustainable and scalable business model that can really grow and serve a large number of customers and so it's important to understand your costs to think about those up front and make sure that you have something that makes some financial sense before you embark on that journey there are lots of opportunities often to reduce your costs as you scale up but you need to understand and think realistically about how that's going to happen as you scale so now we've kind of walked through the business model canvas and covered all the buckets here and what they each contribute to you know really how you you know how you reach your customer and deliver that value proposition wanted to reiterate at this point that it's often good to develop two or three different versions of the business model canvas based on you know potentially different customer segment strategies different propositions different channels etc that you think are highly probable ways that it could turn out and then those are things that you can go test and as you're doing this you should always be designing the whole business model canvas from the customer perspective that's really a critical element here is that you think about this from the customer perspective you design your channels you design your key activities about what the customer needs and I want to think of this you know if you're familiar with lean manufacturing only do what the customer needs so thinking back to those customer jobs the gains and pains and thinking about what they need in that value proposition and then making sure that every activity every resource, every partner that you're designing in this business model canvas is something that they need and if they don't need it then it shouldn't be there and lean would think of it as waste so to kind of translate this into that language try to keep this whole thing lean in terms of how you're designing the business model canvas now what we've done here is talk about how you would sketch out a business model realistically even if you spent a fair amount of time talking with some of your customer segments there's still probably a lot of assumptions and it is admittedly quite difficult often to get real good answers from customers when you come to them with a bunch of conceptual questions and so what you've got now is some things that to varying degrees are assumptions and you're basically guessing about what all of these boxes are and so the next job is to really admit that to yourself and identify two or three really critical assumptions that you're making you know is it the channels that kind of make or break your business is it the key resources within your team that are going to make or break your business and then your next job is to really go test those in a structured way go out go back to the customers with an MVP prototype with a box that you know is starts that conversation figure out how you can do it in a lean way to start testing each of the boxes on the business model canvas starting with the ones that are really the make or break aspects of your business and so that's the next step once you think you're done you start testing and you really walk through and test the whole thing and so with that I think we've kind of been through the whole business model been through the process of how you then identify the most important parts to test and hopefully that's helpful in terms of thinking through how your ideas can really create an impact for low-income individuals in the emerging markets and I think now we can open it up for questions. Thank you so much Paul this is very insightful and very visual so I think that our listeners are very appreciative of that and we already have some questions coming into our Q&A channel so I encourage those of you who have questions to please populate them there so the first question is this individual says we have several products at the Enterprise Institute that these are the comments for another individual. Alright so replacing the revenue and cost with a customer focus on the revenue and cost i.e. what will they earn and pay for the product and how does that relate to achieving the value promised to the strong customer ROI? So I think I'll just restate the question to make sure I've understood it well. Yeah so I think you do want so that's a great thing to think about this. You too you want to think about this from a customer perspective and you know really start with understanding and we encourage entrepreneurs to do that and that's a key piece of understanding you know what you can charge for a product so you start with okay my customer and this is where I went back to so this is a good example to talk about agricultural equipment so if there is a for instance sugar cane planter here in South India and the planting season for that is say 45 days long twice a year and you know your machine costs $5,000 and that you have to understand you know if this equipment rental person is going to buy that piece of equipment how much can the market bear you know how much can a farmer afford to pay that rental agency to rent this machine out so if you can kind of multiply through okay this guy can get you know X dollars for 90 days a year it starts to give you an understanding of whether or not this is going to be a good rental value proposition for that customer you know for the equipment renter and then you also understand from the sugar cane farmers perspective okay so what's the how much is he paying for labor today you know that's going to be a big driver of how much he's willing to pay for a rental to somebody that might own this piece of equipment and so you know we do encourage the and we work them on this where we think through okay what's what are the economics for the farmer what are the economics and the value proposition for the equipment renter and then how does that translate into is this a a profitable product for you to even produce so I hope that answers the question but yeah you can apply this at different levels to really kind of understand whether this makes sense for everyone involved yes and I think you've actually addressed another question I came into the chat about the importance of having people or communities in developing nations pay for at least some of the product so in the case of this particular organization they are developing low cost aquaponics and they want the customers or the users to be able to maintain the systems after you know this group leaves but also don't want finances to be a deal breaker so perhaps can you speak a little bit to maybe hybrid models or approaches where you know costs are shared somehow across a number of organizations perhaps from your experience in terms of this cost structure yeah so you know I think those are those are complex and so I'll start with that but I think we've seen interesting models there and we do always we have always shied away from companies that are giving away anything I think a really good example of this is you know a lot of the clean cook stoves that have gone out there I think there's multiple case studies about adoption challenges with some of the clean the household clean cook stoves that were given away now some of the ones that have required some payment by the customer have turned out to do pretty well and so I do think that you know to the question or the question to ask the question's point making sure that the customer has some skin in the game is really important and so you know I think what you have to do is look for a cross subsidy model where you know the value proposition and the economics make sense for everyone involved and so that is often a tricky balancing act I think we've seen a lot of places where that hasn't necessarily worked out but I think it comes down to really in management consultants speak aligning incentives for everybody and you know it takes a lot of study and probably a lot of experimentation to get that piece right but I think it's about understanding what value the product delivers for each customer segment and then going from there one thing that we're seeing on the medical devices side is that there are a lot of opportunities to sell some of these products at significantly higher prices both in upmarket situations in India the higher end private hospitals as well as in developed markets like the U.S. and Europe and so some companies are able to kind of develop a couple of versions of products off the same core technology and then charge a higher price for one and then the low cost version they have a lower margin on they still make money the customer still pays for it but they maintain profitability and scalability by having multiple product versions that offers a couple of different segments so that can be one way to kind of cross subsidize Absolutely and if folks and listeners out there are interested in checking out some really specific examples the Engineering for Change Solutions Library includes the BioLite Cook Stokes since you spoke about Cook Stokes Paul which is an organization that in fact uses that type of hybrid model whereby they have a high end product that is targeted for developed markets that subsidizes the cost for a portion of the cost for a much more scaled down version with still good performance in developing regions so I'll include a link to that later for anybody who's interested in diving deeper into this particular example number of questions are coming in so hopefully we'll be able to tackle most of them With the Business Model Canvas obviously it is a great tool for continued experimentation to refine your value proposition and really arrive at the right business model for your organization The question here is should it be shared? Is it also a good alternative to a traditional business plan for the purpose of sharing with potential financiers or funding ranchers? Is it appropriate? That's a great question. Thanks for asking that. I forgot to mention that up front. One of the primary benefits of the Business Model Canvas is that it is a good common language for entrepreneurs and investors to kind of come together around We encourage entrepreneurs to share them with us when they're doing fundraising or when they're fundraising from other investors I think I obviously want to think about who your audience is and what level of detail you're sharing Make sure you're comfortable with that I think the more you can share with investors about even the risks that you see within your business model the more seriously they'll take you I think it's a great communication tool to share with investors and really get that conversation started about where the opportunities and the challenges are One very specific question is and perhaps you can speak to some of your experience if anybody within the Velcro Network has applied the Business Model Canvas to Sanitation Services in the developing world So I think the question hopefully was how do you gather customer insights and I'll answer that question Hopefully that's the right one So I think it really depends on your context and I'll speak to the a couple of examples that I know So one of them is agriculture What we found is that at least in India there's an active agricultural outreach program that's been in place for quite a while and is very effective So the entrepreneurs often start with really approaching them getting some introductions from the local extension officer and then once they start networking into the local farmer community as long as they're asking good questions and having treating their farmers respectfully the farmers will make introductions to other people and they're able to move out from the initial set of farmers to additional farmers The other one is similar in the healthcare space where I do a lot of my work I think what we found to be particularly effective is to reach out to You typically can find a few people within the med tech sector that can introduce you to again a few doctors that are really interested in understanding you know or in helping innovations come along and then they'll introduce you to some of their colleagues and that kind of moves on and on through hospitals and other you know other care organizations So I guess what we've seen is that you get a few initial connections in the space that you're interested in through you know potentially your own network or through an industry organization and then a branch out from those initial connections just by saying hey I'm trying to do this research for you to suggest any of your colleagues, friends that would be good to talk to So I hope that that was useful for people and I think we're Yes, I'm back Was that the question? That was absolutely the question even though I only caught a portion of the answer I think that telecom is not always stable in Brooklyn either as it is not in many parts of the world So with that we are quite over time but thank you so much Paul for staying a little bit longer and thank you to all of you who have joined us for this webinar For those of you who are interested in professional development hours for this webinar, the code is listed on the current slide We will have a recording of this webinar up within a week or so on a professional development page If your question wasn't addressed and you have a burning desire for an answer please do email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org We encourage you all to join us as members to get information and invitations for the upcoming webinars in our series With that I would like to thank Paul again Thank everyone for joining us and we look forward to catching you on our next Have a fantastic morning evening or afternoon wherever you may be Thank you