7A

1) Pick an opportunity you would like to pursue. From this point forward in the class, many of these exercises will be related to a specific venture you want to start. Here's where that path starts.



Height adjustable drive through ATM machines.


2) Clearly state the opportunity you have identified, including the who, what, why.


People who have sports car and use drive through lanes at the bank often find themselves having to inconveniently reach up to make deposits or use the ATM. Similarly, people who have minivans or sports utility vehicles often have to reach down to make deposits or use the ATM.



I believe there is an opportunity to install drive through ATM machines and drive through deposit slots which automatically detect the high of the window of each vehicle and adjust to it making it convenient for customers who drive all types of vehicles to make deposits and transact business.


3) This is your 'hypothesis' about the opportunity. It is a statement of your belief related to an opportunity. I'd like you to test the boundaries of the hypothesis by pushing and prodding each of the three elements. That means:


Testing the who: Are there others who have this need? Or, does everyone in your current 'who' share the need?

The people who have the above-described need are pretty much anyone who uses the drive through lanes of their bank to transact business who does not drive a regular sedan.

Testing the what: What are the boundaries of the need? For the example above, the questions you'd ask could include, "Are all drugs a challenge, or just some drugs?" "Are all patients a challenge, or just some patients?" "Is it just Medicare, or does it include Medicaid or private insurers?" Etc.


All bank customers who drive sports cars, minivans or SUV’s must struggle and reach in awkward positions to use the drive through deposit lanes and drive through ATM machines.


Testing the why: Not everyone will perceive their need the same way; here, I'd like you to test the boundaries of the 'why' -- for the people who have the need you have identified, what are the range of whys that they offer? Does the "why" you have identified hold for everyone? For the example above, maybe some hospitals will see their need rooted in logistics, maybe they'll blame government bureaucracy, maybe they'll blame the nurses and doctors.


Some bank customers will not likely perceive the need as essential as they have become accustomed to struggling to reach the drive through ATM or deposit slots. Others, who are young and flexible, may also not perceive the height of these ATM machines and deposit slots to be such an inconvenience.

4) In Part 1, you must interview five people. These interviews must be lengthy enough for you to get the information you need. In these interviews, you want to ask questions that try to capture the variation in the whos, whats, and whys, and your objective is to test the boundaries of your opportunity hypothesis.

5) Include your write-up of each step in your assignment. For step 4, please summarize what you find. Given your interviews, what do you know about the opportunity that you didn't know before?

I interviewed five people for this project. Four were customers of banks who regularly made deposits in drive through lanes and the other interview, which actually was the most interesting, was that of a bank branch manager. Three of the four bank customers interviewed never really gave any serious thought to the issue as they deemed having to reach higher or lower to constitute only a minor inconvenience. When the potential solution of having the ATM machines and deposit slots adjust to the high of each vehicle was given to the interviewed customers, each customer liked the idea.


When I interviewed the bank branch manager he surprisingly said this was not that new of an issue to him and that several of his elderly and disabled customers had complained to him about having to reach excessively to make deposits into the deposit slots of the drive through lanes. He also shared that he received the same complaint about drive through ATM machines. The most interesting aspect of my discussion with the branch manager was when he told me that he knows of a company in Germany named Wincor Nixdorf International which has invented an ATM machine for drive through banking which adjusts to specific vehicle heights and tilts the ATM screen in the direction of the customer to account for each vehicle’s height.


A summary of the interviews led me to some definitive conclusions. Firstly, the average bank customer who uses the drive through ATM or deposit slots does not perceive having to stretch to do banking as such an inconvenience. The second thing I learned was that the technology I believed did not exist actually does exist; it just is not employed in any banks that I have visited. There still might be an opportunity to be an exclusive distributor for this German company in Florida or the United States. Whether such an opportunity truly exists will be determined by the banks’ desire for this technology, the costs of each machine, their reliability and security.