Learning from BSP’s flaws over the new P5 coins (How Design Sprint Can Help You Save Enormous Amounts of Time and Resources)

​Learning from BSP’s flaws over the new P5 coins (How Design Sprint Can Help You Save Enormous Amounts of Time and Resources)

BSP recently launched the new 5-peso coin after the reveal last November 29, 2017. However, Senator Nancy Binay urged the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) to suspend the release of the new coins; citing the public’s confusion over the new P5 coins released this month which greatly resembles with the current P1 BSP coins that feature the national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal. 

Ideally, nobody does anything with the intention of messing things up. Most -if not all, intends to do a positive change, and same goes for the people in BSP;

"The 5-peso coin is a part of New Generation Coin Series boasting “corrosion resistance” abilities and were reportedly enhanced to prevent forgery." (Amancio, 2017)

In addition, this was thought of as early as 2015 in reference to an article by GMA News "BSP to mint, issue new peso coins by 2019"; which means that the effort and resources invested in order to conceptualize, develop, and launch it was at the very least, a year. 

Now let us simplify the information we gathered into 4 main ideas:

1. It is corrosion resistance = reduce cost
2. It aims to prevent forgery = reduce/eliminate fraudulent activities
3. The public is getting confused by the similarity of 1-peso and 5-peso coin
4. The concept-to-development span at least a year = time and money were invested to do this

It is clear that what BSP has done can be classified as an act of innovation in which the purpose was to benefit their business (reduction of cost) and their customer (reduce/eliminate fraudulent activities). 

Now, if BSP is a business, the act of innovation they’ve done will clearly back fire due to the public’s confusion, making their invested time and money in conceptualizing and developing their product go to waste. Why? Because customers will definitely look for other means to conduct their activity in a less confusing and lesser hassle way. bitcoin anyone?

Innovation is really a double edged sword. If it works, you will really reap the rewards, but any failure in doing so, may turn your customer off.

Design Sprint (Design Thinking v2.0) addresses these issues: It eliminates uncertainties in any of your innovation initiatives, marketing strategies, and product or service development; letting you reap these rewards:

• Lesser development time and cost
• High success rate
• Increase market share

Going back to the scenario of BSP, three simple tools of Design Sprint would have sufficed to prevent it from happening:

1. Customer Journey Mapping – to understand how the general public commonly uses and identify the 5-peso coin in their daily life such as this one:

“pag magbabayad ka sa tricycle at medyo madilim... mahirap kasi titignan mo pa yun nakalagay sa pera.. di tulad dati na malaki at gold yun 5 at medyo maliit at silver ang piso”

(if it's dark, you have to exert extra effort by closely looking at the coins. Unlike before, you can identify by feeling their sizes or by a glance since it's distinguishable by color.) 

2. Storyboarding – Using the Customer Map, they can now merge the general public’s perception and their idea into a single visual concept for the BSP to easily evaluate and identify any loopholes in their initiatives while still considering their customer’s sentiments; 

3. Prototyping - without producing a single coin, the BSP could have done a makeshift 5-peso coin using materials that may look and feel real on the façade. This way, a customer input could have been gathered using a very small crowd saving them time and resources from correcting any mistakes while still embedding the features they desire.

Just imagine, using only these three tools, the flaws in BSP initiative could have been prevented making their invested time and effort worth it. Using the Design Sprint methodology makes any innovation initiatives faster while bringing in the guarantee of a higher success rate.  

If you want to know more how Design Sprint can help you become the game changer in your company and industry, you can contact us via email: ask@schoolofdesignsprint.com , we offer public classes for Filipino professionals to learn the methodologies.

We also welcome in giving assistance to corporation's innovation initiatives. 

ask@schoolofdesignsprint.com / 632-357-6830
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