It’s daunting. It’s risky. It’s one of the smartest, most lucrative decisions you’ll ever make. By diversifying your business and branching out into new markets, with new products, services, or initiatives—no matter how tangential they are to your mission—you can find new forms of success. Among the likely outcomes are a stronger brand, a clearer voice, an electrified customer base, and, ideally, a new, interested audience.
How you ultimately choose to diversify your business will depend on obvious factors like your industry’s current climate and your company’s clout. However, it’s often what’s less obvious that counts the most; paying attention to what or, more importantly, who is being under-served is crucial.
Take modern medicine, for example. Solid networks and services have been built around the relationships between doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and patients. However, one group is consistently overlooked: caregivers. These caregivers are normally family members and friends who have chosen to shoulder the responsibility of taking care of their sick loved ones—in fact, it’s the case 42% of the time.
However,despite this distressing statistic, very few resources are available to help this group through what is often both a mentally and physically challenging endeavor. Teva, the world’s leading pharmaceutical manufacturer, decided to take on the problem together with jovoto’s creative crowd’s help. Enter We care for the caregiver, a two-part open-call project.
We care for the caregiver’s objective is to develop a smart service or product that can fully assist and support caregivers throughout their day-to-day routines.
“Caregivers need moments of relief, an embracing gesture, to find out how they can deal with the exhaustion, the depression, and the loneliness that some people feel. This is a very strong call to all of us, and we believe that jovoto is an ideal community to deal with the topic.”
-Dr. Markus Leyck Dieken, General Manager, Teva Germany/Austria
In the first phase of the project, a public open call was kicked off to all of jovoto’s creative professionals. 226 creatives submitted 78 ideas, and after a halftime feedback session and further development, four solutions were selected as the winners, with the jury awarding Care City by Berlin designer ElGuero first place. Care City offers a platform that can provide caregivers education and information, as well as a way to connect through a supportive neighborhood-based web. In turn, caregivers could donate virtually-earned tokens to selected local initiatives. In addition to the platform, Teva would sponsor periodic, educational in-person workshops.
In the second phase of the project, the four winning creatives from the first phase were given the opportunity to further develop and enrich their ideas in order to create a “pitch presentation.” This time the final winner was the Teengivers app by Grecian product designer Anna Maria Triantafyllid. With her app, teenagers are encouraged to carry out small, positive social actions, such as sharing a walk with someone in wheelchair. Teva licensed the app and is currently testing it out.
On the surface, by diversifying their business with a new service, Teva was able to expand upon its brand and go beyond what it’s known for—medicine, as well as reach a previously untapped market. However, it also did much more than that, and with the We care for the caregiver project the company demonstrated its dedication not just to the sick, but to those who are most directly connected and invested in their well-being—their caregivers, or rather, their family and friends.
Find deeper insight and details on the cocreation process of Teva’s We care for the caregiver by checking out its success story.