Client: Fortune 250 Benefits Provider

Challenge: How can we leverage our existing strengths to offer more value add services in the dental health and wellness space?

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Overview:

Stepwise Innovation collaborated with a top Benefits Carrier to navigate the complexities of the dental insurance market and envision bold, innovative business models that could redefine dental health and wellness. The objective was to explore alternative revenue streams and differentiate the client in a rapidly changing market.

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Approach:

Our journey commenced with an in-depth exploration phase, where we sought to deeply understand the dental market's key stakeholders: dentists, patients, and benefits brokers. This began with ethnographic research, involving one-on-one interviews with a variety of stakeholders. Our aim was to uncover their pains, aspirations, and needs within the dental health and wellness space. By engaging directly with these individuals, we gained invaluable insights into their daily experiences and challenges.

Our research methodology combined both primary and secondary research techniques. The primary research involved conducting detailed interviews with twelve stakeholders, including dentists, patients, and internal stakeholders. This allowed us to gather firsthand perspectives on the current state of dental health and wellness. Additionally, we performed secondary research by scanning market trends, exploring analogous industries, and delving into online communities to understand broader market dynamics and emerging trends.

As we synthesized our findings, we began to identify thematic patterns and potential opportunity areas. These insights laid the groundwork for our design phase, characterized by rapid, iterative cycles of ideation, prototyping, and testing. Each week, we set specific learning goals, developed new concepts, and tested them with our target audience to gather feedback and refine our ideas.

During this phase, we created several innovative concepts, ranging from new dental membership plans to transparent pricing models and personalized dental insurance products. These concepts were designed to address the unique needs and preferences of the dental market stakeholders we had engaged with during our research.

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Outcomes:

• Ethnographic Insights: We gained a deep understanding of the perspectives and needs of dental market stakeholders, highlighting key pain points and opportunities for innovation.
• Opportunity Areas: We identified multiple opportunity areas, each with defined and iterated product concepts, ready for further exploration and development.
• Concept Development: Our efforts culminated in the creation of two tangible product concepts, each supported by early customer feedback and ready for further refinement.
• Strategic Recommendations: We provided them with a comprehensive insights and opportunities report, outlining the strategic paths they could pursue to innovate and differentiate themselves in the dental health and wellness market.

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Client Testimonial:

“We feel extremely comfortable engaging Stepwise. They perfectly fit into our team dynamic and produce excellent work, even leaving us learning from a new framework or two. This isn’t the first time we’ve engaged Stepwise and it certainly won’t be the last.”

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Conclusion:

Our collaboration with this Benefits Carrier exemplifies the power of strategic innovation and deep customer understanding. By combining rigorous research with iterative design, we helped them envision a future where they can lead the dental health and wellness market with groundbreaking business models. This case study underscores our commitment to making ideas that matter happen, driving impactful solutions through empathy-driven research and innovative thinking.