00:15 Yes, indeed. This is the best place to get captivating and inspiring insights on innovation and entrepreneurship in Africa. Zoom Africa is produced by BoP Innovation Center. I'm Ken Owino. In this episode, we are looking at validating your innovation. In other words, how do you test your ideas with consumers to ensure that they embrace your product or service?

00:46 When you're developing a new type of cookstove, you do know what one to risk manufacturing thousands of these cookstoves that your consumers ultimately do not want. Unfortunately, this happens all too often because innovators neglect to validate their ideas with their consumers. Why don't they do this? You may ask. One, some think that they already know what their consumers want or sometimes an innovator might be true preoccupied with fine tuning the technicalities of their product or service.

01:20 Patrick Walsh has mastered the art of testing and defining ideas all throughout the innovation process. This is right from the very first rough idea to a functional prototype to their first production series ready for sales. Patrick is the founder and CEO of Greenlight Planet, a social business that designs, distributes and finances solar home energy to under-served global consumers for whom the electrical grid is either unavailable or too expensive.

01:54 I'm Patrick Walsh, and I started a company called Greenlight Planet. We make solar powered lights for off electrical grid areas of the world. Most of our consumers are in Africa and South Asia.

02:10 The best way to test your ideas before you have your final product or service is to create a prototype. Prototypes are imitations and working models of your product or a service. A prototype has just the right amount of detail necessary to test your offering with consumers before you actually take it to the market.

02:31 A lot of the technology development process in our very early stages was focused on the risk at that specific stage. For example, the first prototypes that we developed were targeted at essentially just validating that there was a market. We weren't trying to build the products very affordably. We weren't trying to make them necessarily marketable to a broad audience, but we were just trying to build prototypes that could be offered to a small set of trial consumers to see whether they were interested in actually using and purchasing products like this.

03:10 Testing the first prototype received a good response from the consumers confirming that there was indeed a market, and most importantly, consumers were willing to pay for the product.

03:24 Those prototypes, of course, they weren't very pretty and they weren't very easy to make, but they allowed us to test the market and we brought them to villages and showed them to people, and people immediately said, without us even prompting them, can I buy them? That was a key validator that this was something that we wanted to actually go forward with as a business because there's clearly a consumer need and a consumer demand for this technology.

03:55 Having confirmed that the product would be demanded, the next step was to design the product in such a way that it can be produced in large quantities while keeping the cost of production as low as possible while still taking into account the needs of the consumer.

04:12 The next step then after we had that market validation was making a product that could actually be manufactured affordably at scale, and making something that was reliable enough for the needs of this consumer. Of course, one thing we had to do was design it in a way that it could be mass produced efficiently, and then we had to add features such as water ingress protection. We knew that in the field, consumers would be using these products in very harsh conditions and we had to mitigate the risk that they would be damaged.

05:03 They were thinking that the solar panel was not just an energy generating device but actually storing the energy, when in fact the battery is in the land. It's a totally understandable confusion to have. If you've never seen a solar panel before, you don't know exactly where the energy gets stored. It wasn't something that we've been thought to put in the instructions.

05:31 These insights from the consumers enabled Greenlight to make more changes on subsequent products. This was necessary not only for a better user experience, but also to differentiate and position their products from other competing brands in the market.

05:49 Giving people text instructions is usually not very helpful because obviously, people speak many different languages. There can be literacy issues and even in a best case scenario, people just don't read instructions a lot of the time. We've actually built very robust charging indicators as one of the key features of our products. You see, a lot of products in the market, maybe they have a red light that will indicate charging, but it won't tell you how fast the product is charging.

06:16 We have a display that indicates on a scale of one to five in bars just like you would see on a mobile phone battery or something like that. The consumer can see how fast their lamp is charging, how much power the lamp is getting, so then that avoids situations like we would have other consumers install the solar panel on their wall or on their door so it's facing horizontally, which if you just have a simple binary charging or not charging indicator, they won't know that the product may be charging, but it's just charging very slowly.

06:49 Incorporating that charging indicator that scales from one to five really helps consumers understand the relationship between how you position a solar panel and how much power it's actually generating. It reduces the amount of education that you have to do in order to help people gather the most solar energy that they can.

07:07 Zoom Africa where innovation meets entrepreneurship.

07:12 Are you developing a product that targets low income groups? Patrick has some advice for you on the key components of prototyping that you should bear in mind.

07:22 It's been a series of these risk mitigations with the technology. I think the key ones are around quality and reliability and then just thinking about how people are actually going to use the product and trying to plan for the real world usage and not just idealized lab usage scenario.

07:40 You are listening to Zoom Africa with me, Ken Owino. We have been talking about validating your innovation through prototypes as seen from the remarkable experience of Greenlight Planet. As an upcoming entrepreneur, please bear in mind that, one, prototyping is a continuous process. Two, make prototypes based on consumer feedback. Three, always think about how consumers are going to use the product with a lot of ease.

08:16 That is all we had time for on this episode of Zoom Africa. I want to take this opportunity to thank Patrick Walsh for sharing his insights with us. Let's link up again for another informative episode of Zoom Africa where we get the best of entrepreneurship and innovation in Africa. Until then, keep on innovating.