Client: The Hartford Small Business Innovation Lab

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

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Overview:

Stepwise Innovation partnered with The Hartford’s Small Business Innovation Lab to embark on a transformative journey aimed at reimagining how small businesses manage risk. Our mission was to deeply empathize with small business owners, uncovering valuable insights and identifying innovative opportunities to enhance risk management practices.

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Approach:

Our journey began with the Explore Phase, where we immersed ourselves in the world of small business owners. This involved leaving the confines of the office and engaging with a diverse array of business owners, including florists, landscapers, realtors, restaurateurs, and pest managers, both at their workplaces and in their homes. The goal was to gain a comprehensive understanding of their daily operations, perspectives on risk, reliance on insurance, and use of digital tools.

To capture authentic insights, we developed early concept prototypes and assigned research homework to provoke thoughtful feedback from our participants. This hands-on approach allowed us to gather rich, nuanced data directly from the source.

After weeks of intensive fieldwork, we began to identify thematic patterns that provided deep insights into how small business owners perceive and manage risk. These insights revealed four key opportunity areas where The Hartford could make a significant impact. Recognizing the value of a focused approach, we decided to concentrate on small, local crafts-focused business owners, particularly addressing their challenges with demand-planning and talent management.

With a clear direction in mind, we moved into the Design Phase, characterized by rapid, iterative cycles of research, design, build, and testing. Each week, we set specific learning goals, explored potential solutions, and created prototypes to test with users. At the beginning of each cycle, we defined our learning goals, explored our hunches, and built initial prototypes to address the identified problems. During the middle of the cycle, we conducted targeted research to validate our assumptions and inspire innovative solutions. By the end of the week, we analyzed the feedback, refined our point of view, and validated or invalidated our hypotheses to ensure we were on the right track.

To maintain a human-centered approach, we conducted numerous interviews to gather authentic feedback from our target audience. Additionally, we examined current solutions and market trends to understand the broader landscape of risk management for small businesses, drawing inspiration from other industries to adapt creative solutions to our context.

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Outcomes:

• Ethnographic Insights: Our research provided a profound understanding of small business owners' perspectives on risk, highlighting their unique challenges and needs.
• Opportunity Areas: We identified four promising opportunity areas, each accompanied by early prototypes and concepts to include in The Hartford’s innovation portfolio.
• Concept Development: We honed in on a final concept, designing digital prototypes and creating a high-fidelity digital experience that resonated with our users.
• Venture Model: Collaboratively, we developed a venture model and an experimentation plan, laying the groundwork for The Hartford to launch and iterate on their new product offerings.

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Client Testimonial:

“Their deep empathy extracted nuances and insights that we would not have been able to gather on our own. Stepwise Innovation’s storytelling ability allowed our executives to feel as if they had done the work themselves, truly understanding the power of customer-centricity. Their broad business skillset brought forth tangible and actionable concepts for us to build and launch.”

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Conclusion:

Our collaboration with The Hartford’s Small Business Innovation Lab showcases the profound impact of empathy-driven research and iterative design. Together, we crafted a future where small businesses can confidently manage risk and thrive, embodying our commitment to making ideas that matter happen. This case study highlights the value of deep customer understanding and strategic innovation in driving forward-thinking solutions tailored for small business owners.

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Gallery

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In our "Explore" phase of ethnographic research, the team left the office and focused on speaking with small business owners at work and at home. This included a wide range of business owners, including florists, landscapers, realtors, restaurateurs, and pest managers. 

This work allowed us to understand the day to day of small business owners, understand their view of risk, their views on insurance, what digital tools they rely on, and understand what opportunities might be out there. We brought prototypes of early concepts and assigned a number of different research homework assignments to provoke different types of interview feedback. 

Our research was rooted in patterns and themes that we observed across small business owners:

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We also dug into specific insurance takeaways and pain points:

After weeks in the field, we began to see a number of thematic patterns that helped us truly understand small business owners and their definition of risk. Insights emerged and we began to feel strongly about four areas of opportunity that could allow the Lab to take a bold step forward in redefining how small business owners manage and mitigate risk .

We proposed four areas of opportunity that would transform small businesses relationship with their insurers:

The team quickly decided to create focus on a niche segment and one particular opportunity with the belief that we could develop a deep understanding for a small segment before broadening the scope. We specifically chose to focus on small, local crafts-focused business owners and the demand-planning and talent challenges they face. 

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