Stakeholder Analysis at Philips

Learning Objectives:

• Analyze a marketing message for the principles of effective communication of innovation ideas
• Compare stakeholder groups for resistance to an innovation concept and propose a communication strategy

To explore how communications are targeted to specific stakeholder groups, review the following Philips promotional video transcript.

RICHARD TOWBIN: Phoenix Children's Hospital as an institution is evolving. Our job is to take care of children of all sizes, where each of those have different sensitivities and needs.

DIANNA BARDO: Examining children on a daily basis is somewhat challenging. We're looking at things in earlier stages, maybe more subtle disease in a child than an adult might have. The main objective is getting the best images so that we can make a diagnosis in as few imaging modalities as possible.

RICHARD TOWBIN: The most sensitive people to radiation are children because they're growing. So we have to follow that with dosing that relates to their size.

DIANNA BARDO: With Philips technology, knowing that the imaging can be immediately transferred and understood is key to that patient's care.

RICHARD TOWBIN: The importance of sharing information in health care is extreme. The portal is that connecting piece.

DIANNA BARDO: The images are transported electronically to the 3D Innovation Lab. We can do any manner of post-processing in any axis, any plane, to help us unravel the diagnosis out of the anatomy that we're looking at. We can even produce a 3D model of a cardiac patient's heart. The surgeon can actually turn the structures around to help understand the anatomy better. And they're also used to give to the patient. To see a child hold a model of their heart in their hand and a parent witness that is amazing. To share part of their health care just pulls at your heartstrings. They are so resilient. They're fabulous.

RICHARD TOWBIN: Our relationship with Philips has improved all aspects of our department. It's just a matter of pushing ourselves to do the best we can for every child that walks in the place. It's a privilege.

VOICEOVER: Innovation and you. Philips.

While patients, shareholders, and insurers would all be impressed by this video, the message specifically targets radiologists, technicians, doctors, and other providers in this specialized area of healthcare.

The beginning of the video builds curiosity and then highlights both the rational and emotional rewards of the innovation—easing the concerns and status-quo bias of this group of stakeholders.

How might this video be different if it targeted patients or shareholders instead?

The video’s presentation, and the information it presents, would both be different. For example, if it targeted patients, there might be interviews with parents and children in addition to providers. If it targeted shareholders, there would likely be more of a focus on the economic potential of Philips technology.

As you have learned, some users and stakeholders may immediately understand the relative advantage of your innovation concept, while others may not. One tool for comparing these differences among groups is stakeholder analysis.

You can create a stakeholder analysis table by following three steps:

1. Identify stakeholders or stakeholder groups.
2. Assess where they are in support or opposition.
3. Determine where they need to be for implementation to succeed.

The table that follows is an example showing where patients, providers, and insurers might be in accepting the imaging innovations that Philips presented in the preceding video. Each X indicates where stakeholders currently are. The O’s indicate where the designers need them to be.

These rankings are not definitive. They assume that providers and insurers might have reservations about the costs of implementation, the effort of training, and other factors. You may have a different opinion, but the point of the tool is to surface and debate these important differences between groups.

For another example, consider the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, the program designed to introduce healthier school-lunch options. For that case, we might create a table like the following:

In this case, the rankings assume that teachers would be indifferent, students would strongly oppose the removal of foods they like, parents would be glad their children have more nutritious options, and administrators would be concerned about the logistics of implementation. But you should base these estimates on research whenever possible. For example, teachers in some schools might have strong opinions based on their lunch-related duties or experience with children’s health and energy levels.

Before you begin crafting a communication strategy, it is helpful to compare stakeholders’ resistance and pain points. In targeting the groups with the most status-quo bias, you may uncover approaches that are useful for all groups.

To explore another example, Sean Carney will explain in the following video transcript how Philips developed a diagnostic innovation for patients in Africa that affected multiple stakeholders.

I think the fact that we're impacting people's lives, we're bringing care to under-served communities, this stuff is too important just to create these concept cards that never see the light of day. I want to make sure that as we're bringing the power of design into this space, it does have a material impact on the way in which people experience care.

An example of that would be, we identified a population in Africa of women who are in high-risk pregnancies. Obviously, too many women were dying during the latter stages of their pregnancy and too many babies were being born stillborn. All for preventable reasons.

So we went into Africa. What, of course, many of the health care professionals were saying was, if only we had ultrasound available to us in the field where we could really take an image of the fetus, of the baby inside the mother and understand what the problem really was. So do diagnosis in the field with ultrasound.

But of course, our ultrasound machines were great big $100,000 plus carts that required electricity and were very difficult to operate, and you needed a trained sonographer to interpret the images. So what we did was create then a mobile solution with an individual transponder that would plug into a cell phone or an iPad, a tablet, in order that we could then look at the baby in the field.

Now if it's a trained sonographer, they could already interpret the images. But we would now apply artificial intelligence to that image in order to interpret the image and give clinical diagnostic support in real time on the ground right there at the side of the mother.

So that would already take us forward in a big step to identify those at-risk pregnancies. Now went one step further because these devices, of course, were connected, we're able to then also send those images to a central radiology center who would then have trained radiologists or pediatricians or OB/GYNs interpret the image, and also be able to give some advice to the person on the ground what sort of treatment or therapy was required in order to help prevent further deterioration of the condition.

In this case, it is difficult to make definitive claims without research, but the stakeholder analysis table is a discussion tool, like the concept poster, that structures debate around how to make innovation communications more effective and user-focused. We could, for example, produce a table like the one that follows.

Again, these rankings are not definitive. As the people directly involved in the use of the devices, patients and sonographers would need to strongly support them, but they might clearly see the benefit compared to the alternative. NGOs might already understand the issues in this area and be on-board with a solution.

Would the status-quo bias truly be this easy to overcome?

You just used the stakeholder analysis tool to consider how key stakeholders might react to an innovation, and how you might use the other communication tools to move those people closer to accepting an innovation concept.

Some innovations will always be a challenge to advocate for, but concepts developed from the beginning with a human-centered focus will be more likely to match Everett Rogers's factors. In other words, the surest way to reduce the challenges of implementation is to ideate based on deep empathy and an understanding of the functional and emotional benefits of the innovation.

These benefits, which can be assessed and strengthened through the attribute value mapping tool, both speak to relative advantage and compatibility. In addition, identifying pain points and design principles and experimenting on ideas through prototyping will help reduce the challenges of behavioral change during implementation.

These foundational steps and the design heuristics all speak to observability, trialability, and reducing complexity. If this work was not done before implementation, for example, if you are asked to redesign an already developed product, it is not too late. The flexibility of the design thinking framework allows you to go back to any phase and any tool to iterate on a design.

And now, you can use the factors of innovation as end goals for your work– improving the relative advantage, trialability, observability, and compatibility, or reducing the complexity of the innovation.