Client: The Hartford IOT Innovation Lab

Challenge: How can we help small businesses better manage risk?

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Overview:

Stepwise Innovation partnered with The Hartford’s Internet of Things Innovation Lab to help them hone their IOT strategy, and focus on the property/real estate industry to understand future moonshots for the IOT space.

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Approach:

We partnered with the Lab team to leverage ethnographic research and future design to explore and pitch transformational opportunities for small business and personal lines customers.

To kick the work off, we co-designed and facilitated a Stakeholder Swarm workshop to introduce some foundational concepts of design thinking, to generate potential design target segments, and to build hunch-based prototypes to direct our research and inform future investigation.

The team chose to focus on the property management stakeholder ecosystem with the strong hunch that we could identify core, adjacent and transformational connected device opportunities in this space.

We dove into the field ethnographic research across Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, speaking with property owners, managers, and builders. We brought prototypes and concepts into the field, explored secondary market signals that prodded at our belief of what could be possible, and sought to develop an empathy for the people we met.

We combined experimental concepts and brands from within each of these moonshot opportunity areas with the Lab’s existing portfolio of concepts in order to prioritize its focus. Ultimately, we selected two concept areas that the team will be focusing deeply on in the coming years.  

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Outcomes:

• Ethnographic Research: Themes & Insights
• Innovation Moonshot Opportunity Areas & Concept Prototypes
• PropTech & Risk Management Sacrificial Concepts
• Stakeholder Swarm Workshop Design & Facilitation
• Internet of Things Market Primer
• Innovation Concept Prioritization Framework

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Client Testimonial:

"Their team was engaged, enthusiastic, and incredibly insightful when it came to framing ideas based on customer empathy. They facilitated workshops that encouraged us to incorporate customer perspective into our internal idea generation. We have an extensive list of concepts and a well-defined path forward for us to pursue."

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Conclusion:

Our collaboration with The Hartford’s Internet of Things Innovation Lab showcases the profound impact of empathy-driven research and iterative design. Ultimately, we developed five moonshots within the PropertyTech space that we strongly believe will represent enormous opportunities in the coming decades for The Hartford to tackle.This case study highlights the value of deep customer understanding and strategic innovation in driving forward-thinking solutions tailored for property tech owners.

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Gallery:

We gathered all of the project's stakeholders early on to align on the project objective and to generate hunches to explore. As a group, we all sketched out and prototyped our hunches to inform our early field research efforts.

The project's stakeholders helped generate and define 200+ consumer segments where they believe there is the opportunity to design for and create impact. We focused on generation before selection.

After weeks of field research across property stakeholders, we engaged the team in a participatory share-out of the stories and empathy that we brought back with us.

We leveraged our field research, expert interviews, analogous inspiration, and other market signals to develop moonshot futures that will help the Lab set a North Star to experiment towards.

The collective project team used the 3C Framework above to generate feedback on each Moonshot Opportunity.

The collective group worked together to dig into each Moonshot to understand its potential and to prioritize it for tactical next steps.

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