C4(Comfort Cure & Confident Care)
Discovering unmet needs of stakeholders for a new senior care center
Client
Korex Industries
Project Period
2024
Deliverables
Consulting Report
Business Concept
Idea list
Objectives.
The project was conducted with the aim of identifying potential needs and key insights of home care recipients and their families that are not visible on the surface and identifying differentiating business opportunity areas for senior care services (“long-term care insurance and day care centers”) that have become a social problem in the process of entering the ultra-elderly society, and reflecting them in the establishment of a new concept of day care centers.
Approaches.
In order to find the differentiating clues of next EV, we conducted a variety of ethnography-based research targeting ICE and EV users in three European countries (Germany, France, and the Netherlands) to holistically observe car-related contexts for customer insights and applied the HCIA(Human-Centered Innovation Approach) to define the direction of EV differentiated value proposition from the customer perspective. With the customer insights and latent needs, we gathered customers in the target countries and conducted a creative workshop to make seed ideas.
Findings.
“Because seniors who use the centers are not considered for senior care until they need assistance with daily activities, they are completely dependent on their caregivers, who are then left to deal with the financial and psychological burden of what happens next when they are not fully prepared.”
While seniors and their caregivers generally perceive their home as the safest place to live, we found that they were living in spaces that were less safe than centers, including lack of basic stability equipment such as safety bars to help them walk and, for unaccompanied seniors, hygiene issues. Seniors also expressed a need for day centers to make it easier for them to find like-minded people and spend quality time with them, but current center programs were not impacting seniors' willingness to attend these day centers.
In addition, while caregivers were actively involved and engaged in the process of exploring and deciding on senior care services, they often did not have many opportunities to intervene and engage with services after enrollment in a facility, and in many cases were not willing to do so. At the same time, caregivers were burdened with roles and responsibilities in most areas of their elders' lives outside of the center that went beyond the services provided by the center, and they had a need to be fully recognized and rewarded for their efforts in caring for their parents. Finally, caregivers, the primary workers in the care service, knew that they would continue to work after obtaining their qualifications in order to provide direct family care and meet their financial goals. Despite the current distribution of workers in the center and the frequency of their interactions with the elderly, there was an overall hierarchy of roles, with the largest group of caregivers having a strong need for broader participation and recognition in the decision-making process.
Based on the core needs of each of these stakeholders, we were able to derive two representative business concepts: a customized day care center concept that improved existing pain points and a linked and integrated care center, and proposed detailed usage scenarios and subsequent validation plans.
