 Hello? Yes, I'm Uli. Hi. And we are representing a startup called Bloodlink. Bloodlink is an Indo Danish startup. We were founded in Copenhagen, Denmark. We are still based there. But we are also working in India now, which we will tell more about. Bloodlink is basically connecting blood banks, hospitals, and blood donors with the sole purpose of making blood collection as easy as possible and making a blood-sufficient world. So how many of you has ever donated blood? Quick for you. Fantastic. And how many of you have encountered a situation where you got a message on your WhatsApp or Twitter that somebody is in need of blood, and then you went and donated blood? I see few hands. So in India, and in most part of low-income countries in the world, there is this practice of replacement donation, where if somebody is in need of blood, the hospital or blood bank will give the blood they need, but then they expect the family or friends to replace the blood. Has anybody experienced that here? Exactly. Blood is a fundamental component, even though it is 0.001% of the cost of a big surgery, but it's the most vital component. We feel that access to blood should be democratized. Everybody should have access to blood without any hassle. And with blood link, we embark on a journey to figure just that out. So in 2002, my father went through a kidney transplant operation for which he needed few units of blood. I was based in Mumbai, living in Mumbai back then. The hospital gave him the blood he needed. His surgery was done, but as soon as he came out of the operation theater, one of the persons from the hospital came up to me and said, Amit, we gave your father four units of blood. Who do you get donors to replace the blood he used? It's like, yeah, I could do that, but right now I want to be next to him. But they said, no, could you do it now? Now, they explained that there is a shortage of blood. I'm not sure to date if that's the case, but in my head, I was in a conundrum. On one hand, I wanted to go and sit next to him and see if everything is okay, but on the other hand, there was this pressure that I need to find blood donors. So I contacted some of my friends just to complete that story and my cousins, and then I was lucky to live in Mumbai, so some of them showed up. One of them had alcohol the night before, he couldn't donate, then I had to call again. So there was this frantic journey of finding those donors just to reimburse the blood the hospital needs. I have received other messages, and this is what I was talking about in WhatsApp and Twitter, where somebody is in need of a specific type of blood, platelets, plasma, so on and so forth, and they broadcast it. Well in our belief, this shouldn't be the case. There should always be blood available wherever we live. Timely availability of blood is very important, especially in situations like epidemics. Dengue, which we all know, which surges up during the monsoon, or if there's a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or even if somebody has a rare blood type, which in India is the Bombay blood group and it's prevalent in the central parts of India. So this is a global issue. Currently, World Health Organization estimates that there is a global annual shortage of about 10 million units of blood. On top of that, 10 to 15% of all collected blood is wasted due to limited self-life of blood. Blood expires in 35 days, and certain components like platelets, they even expire in five days. I talked about replacement donation. It is a practice which we believe should not exist anymore, which is the case in most developed countries where if you need blood, you go to a hospital, you get it and there's always blood available. The pressure is not on you to find blood. So the thing part, this is what happened last year when early, early 2016, when I wanted to donate blood in Denmark. And I was told because I couldn't speak or read, I'd recently moved to Denmark, I couldn't read the legal guidelines to donate blood, that I mean you cannot donate blood here. I was like, I usually donate blood after my dad's experience, but this is weird. And of course, they have their legal reasons where you need to understand why you're donating and so on and so forth, it's the case in Nordics. But then I made a little research, figured out that Denmark is blood sufficient, small country, five million people, pretty homogeneous, not that big an issue. But what about India? I went back in 2002, and then I started using Google for things like finding out what's the scale of problem in India. And that led me to a point where I figured out it's not only a problem in India where there's three million units, blood shortage, there's a rampant wastage, but the shortage and wastage is fueling a thriving black market of blood. Maybe some of you are aware of it, or if you call, if you say a red market. And this is not in India. It's the case in most low income countries and even in parts of Eastern Europe, which are supposedly more developed, but the problem is rampant. So then what do we do? I decided to embark on a journey of blood link, and how do I go about tackling this sensitive issue? So the first thing I did is build a team, an international team, people with different disciplines, from marketing and communication, to design, to even social business, or social entrepreneurship was picking up, it's still picking up, and we are still working on a very social enterprise model. Impact is profound for us, but that's not the topic of discussion for today. Blood link was conceived, we have come far, and we put a team together, we started talking to different people, but we realized that it's such a sensitive topic, and we decided to do it in India, just because we knew the problem was profound here, and we could make an impact. We did a lot of research speaking to regular donors, NGOs, blood banks, and we figured out that there is sensitivities like, I'm afraid of blood, I'm afraid of color red, or I'm a vegetarian, I don't want blood from non-vegetarian. So how do you digitize a solution for this? This is how we began designing our service, and we have come far, service design or human-centric design, I didn't know anything about, because I personally come from a very tech background, I'm an electronics engineer, but then when I heard about it in Denmark, I figured out this is the way to go forward, because in order to answer all the social idiosyncrasies and mindsets, which science has already proved is irrelevant, we need to design a service which people can connect to, otherwise we are not gonna make any difference. We didn't want to go towards an approach of making a tech platform, just because it wouldn't make that impact. So this is where Bloodlink's journey became even more interesting, we put our faith in service design and human-centric design, and we decided to listen to our customers or stakeholders. Yeah, that's where I kind of came on board, at least some time ago, and I think if I had to pick the word that is most important as a designer or a human-centered designer, it is to listen, especially if you work in a startup. It's easy to get carried away by the tech solution that somebody came up with or your own first solution as a designer, and it's extremely hard to keep that listening up. So I think the listen part is the one word I would pick if I had to describe service design, because you constantly have to tweak your solution and stay open to new ideas instead of sticking to your first idea. So this is just a short, so this is the loop that Chris mentioned earlier. It's like you build something, you test it and you learn from it, then you analyze it, you build again, you talk to people again, you learn from it, you build again and so on and so on. So those are just some impressions from our India trip. So we spent one year going back and forth between Denmark and India, and because it was always a flight involved, you become really aware of whether it's worth going or not, as opposed to just stepping out your door and researching with people next door. And I think that's a takeaway, not like in Indian context, but that I will take away from my work for the rest of my life is because I had to go to India and it was really a hard work here in India, I realized how valuable it is to have users nearby that you're designing for. I mean, it's kind of like common knowledge, but you should always value access to your users, because for us it was a big step to get that kind of access. So getting out of the office, how you want to call it, is of course about understanding the context. This is kind of one of the standard examples, I guess, if people are using books, manual bookkeeping to write down blood donations, how are you gonna digitize that easily? If they don't have internet, how are you gonna use your smartphone app? How are you gonna sell your smartphone app to the technician who's actually taking the donations? So I think that's the logical part that everybody knows about service design that you learn about the context. But as I said, because it was such a long journey, we became even more aware of how important that is. Another thing is, as opposed to, let's say, talking to a random user in Europe or Germany where I'm from, you can be pretty direct. And if it's a casual user, you can ask them questions. If it's a doctor in a complicated environment, that's complicated. If it's a doctor in India in a complicated environment, that's even more complicated. So just the value of face-to-face conversation with a doctor is so much more than just sending an email. You cannot just send a survey to people, like nobody answers that. I mean, even in Europe, nobody answers that. But at least you can get information online being this kind of half-stranger from someone in Germany. A doctor in a hospital in a blood transfusion office is busy, has political things going on. They don't want to share all this kind of information that might be okay to share, but they just don't want to take any risks. So it's important to build a trust information and be on the ground, especially in the medical field and the social field. And of course, you can build short iterations. Our iterations when we were in Denmark were like a month or so. Our stakeholders would get back to us after weeks and weeks of nagging them. When we were here, we'd just walk into the office, show them the prototype, and then we would get instant feedback. So a lot of these things seem obvious. But again, just if you are designing for users next to your house, then do that. It's just a reminder, I guess. So all these iterations brought us all the way from the first solution that was blood bank to blood bank, very business-oriented, and we figured out there's just too many hurdles and it's not gonna work, at least for now. But how can we make the same impact with the same solution over many iterations? We ended up with a chatbot for donors. And I know chatbots are super 2015 or something. But it's something we want to try, right? So I'll tell you a bit more about it later, but it's a pilot that we're running now. And it actually makes a lot of sense based on our research. Although at first I was super skeptical when I made brought up the idea. I was like, oh, that's nice. Anyway, but we did our research on that one. So the basic things we're trying to solve is to educate users. So being a vegetarian does not stop you from donating blood. But there are no stupid questions. People need an easy way to get their questions answered. Maybe chatbot is one way to do it. For now, we think it might be, it looks good, but we're still testing on that. Second one is convenience, right? You want to have the convenience to donate blood easily. Our chatbot can assist you and do this very basic assistance of finding a blood bank near you. Which is also like, I didn't even know where blood banks were back where I live. I had no idea where to go. So it's also about awareness a lot, right? And then eventually it's a bit fuzzy, but eventually you should also be able to rate the procedure and give feedback so that the whole system goes back and to the end of the donors. The donors are the ones giving their blood and sometimes they're not treated the way they should be treated. That's why there's no voluntary donation. That's why people have to be forced to their family members to donate blood. At least that's one of the reasons. So it's important that donors feel that they are in control and maybe rating a blood bank and giving feedback to the system, which is currently a black box is one way to do it. So there's some quick learnings here as well. If we could start over, or I mean we're constantly starting over, but something we're doing now is we want to start even smaller. We limited ourselves to Mumbai. Right now we're still limited to Mumbai, but we wanted to get like a bigger group of people and so on. If you can, start with the smallest town you can. Start with one friend trying to send money to this friend or giving blood to another friend if whatever you're designing. Do the one to one first. That could solve a lot of issues and in the end we spend a lot of time talking to a lot of stakeholders that we could have spent on designing for like a one-to-one interaction, which we still have to do now. It's like, but we just waste a lot of time trying to balance a lot of different opinions, which you should do, but just be aware that for the products and designing cycle, sometimes smaller might be better. We should have worked a lot more with communities. I mean, we did work with communities, but in a social and health context, communities are the ones that are the multipliers. For almost every social cause, there is a community out there that can help you, give you feedback. We talked to a handful, but we should have talked to even more of them. Especially in India, people are very aware of problems and people that aren't those communities, they're very eager to help. And I was surprised how enthusiastic they are. Maybe again, from my cynical Berlin background, people are like, you know, they're hard to be enthusiastic sometimes, especially students in Germany. I feel like here we talk to mostly college students, they're the most enthusiastic people I've met. So we should have done more of that. And something we've been doing, but it's an ongoing struggle, is to consider your impact. I think that also goes back to the keynote. We saw today, don't design for the obvious solution and keep the impact in mind. So this would be your standard journey, which would probably be loop as well. You have a design process, you have some kind of usefulness that you can validate. And then that hopefully translates into money or some kind of product strategy that informs your next product and your strategy. What's missing here, but we had to do a lot, is we didn't just wanna build a startup and sell it, we wanted to have a social impact. So we had to spend a lot more time on the left side of this, talking more to stakeholders, acquiring more domain knowledge. I knew nothing about blood donation and get a knowledge of the ecosystem. So we could avoid unwanted impact. So we could avoid undesired impacts and foster the desired impacts. And sometimes that money thing there, that would be easier, it's easy to please a blood bank if you build something for them or easy to appeal to someone in the system, let's say, the existing status quo. But if you're a social enterprise, you wanna change something, right? So you cannot just build something for them to operate smoother, which the upper part might lead you to that kind of solution. You have to make sure that you balance the impacts, right? So building something for a certain stakeholder might not have the desired impact. So I don't know who has tried the latest Facebook, find a blood donor feature, anyone? So Facebook recently released a feature where you can find donors around you and where organizations can find donors. And to be honest, I didn't spend enough time on this yet to make a proper judgment, but I gotta make one anyway. Or at least ask a question, right? And what they're doing is they're connecting donors to patients or people in need. Isn't that sound familiar? That's exactly what Amit's problem was in the first place. Like, yeah, he's the one in need and he had to message people on Facebook what's up to find a donor. Now Facebook is building a feature that just makes the broken system run smoother, like replacement donation times 10, right? So I hope this is not the case with what they're rolling out and I'm sure they can change, but that it immediately struck us as this kind of direct approach that might not always be the best solution. So if you wanna help us with the pilot, hit us up on Facebook Messenger that's currently on the platform that supports our chatbot. It's an early prototype, so any feedback is appreciated. We also look for UX designers who wanna work with us in the long run. People on the grounds to shorten that iteration cycle, right? Yeah? Just quick note, so if you wanna know more, just feel free to reach out, we'll be here for the rest of the day. A lot of you might have seen startup, lean startup and design, and it can be orthogonal as processes, but we have tried to bring them together. So just one key learning as a founder I wanna share is that it has been really useful for us to use service design or human-centric design to refine and validate our value proposition. So anybody who's from the startup world, they know the business model canvas, it has really helped in that, making very sure that the value proposition is concrete and how do we validate that with real customers. This has taken us a long time, but now we see our learning loop is shorter. So try our chatbot. I mean, if it's still in a prototyping phase, it's still, you know, we are working on a prototype nine blood banks in Mumbai. The pilot runs till the 14th of November. Give us any feedback if you have, give us any ideas and check us out at bloodling.life. Let's make every drop count. Thank you. Woo!