Innovation Through Experimentation

“Your customers are responsible for your company’s reason for existing” – Marilyn Suttle

It does not matter how innovative one’s product is if it is not able to fulfil the needs of the targeted market. Innovation is driven on a company’s knowledge of their target market and this is the success formula for any company trying to launch a new product in the market. In order to gain customer insight we conducted an online survey through surveymonkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/mycardsurvey). We tried making the survey as simple as possible by just allowing the user to select options then instead of trying to type in data. At the same time we made sure the survey covered all the necessary questions that we needed.  We had sent our team members to libraries, coffee shops, railway station and many other places to conduct these surveys face to face. This allowed us to explain the product to the person filling in the survey so they knew what they were answering.

This survey helped us immensely in understanding our target market’s behaviour in context of our product. We realised that majority of these people carried a cardholder or something that allowed them to carry multiple cards. If our product was to launch in the market they would interested in it. They also mentioned their major concern with the device would be the security and maximum they would pay for the device would be around 40-50. This allowed us to position our product better in the market.

 

MyCard: Accessibility, Security and Reliability

 

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Analysing our personas we realised that these people travel frequently and they all carry a wallet or a cardholder along with them in which they carry all their necessary cards that they think they might need. These cardholders have a certain limit to which they can hold cards and sometimes our persona might not carry the card that they might require or they might have lost card by dropping it somewhere while trying to taking out another card. We thought our business idea should focus on solving this problem. We thought in today when the world is virtually connected then why don’t people use their cellphones to overcome this problem when they already use it for several other purposes.  Then we realised that not many people consider their cellphones safe enough to store all their card details as not everyone can afford an expensive cellphone. Also probability of a cellphone being lost due to negligence or theft was higher.

We came up with a simple (for them) yet complex (for us)  solution to our persona’s problem; MyCard. MyCard is a simple yet secured device that shall store all card information given by user. It has a touch screen and a home button with a biometric fingerprint scanner. It has a storage capacity of 1 GB along with internal storage of 2 GB and in order to feed in information the user has log into his MyCard account via web and put in the card information. The device has a CDMA sim card placed inside that allows the device to be connected to our servers via internet. Also we shall not relying on any OS provider but shall design our own as it shall help us in having more control on necessary aspects like security, battery life and information transmission. The most important aspect of the device is that they shall have an NFC chip and RDID chip inside that shall felicitate any contactless card swiping depending upon the reader.