RACQ

Leading insurance company RACQ worked with Exponentially to embed pretotyping and rapid experimentation into their innovation process. We ran a two-day introductory workshop and a subsequent two-week rapid experimentation sprint with the team in order to embed pretotyping within their innovation methodology.

Throughout this process, RACQ wanted to test whether there was a market for mobility-as-a-service, in which a customer buy a taxi ride, flight, train journey and Uber ride on one ticket that gets them door-to-door. This is a service that is successful in some parts of Europe, so the popular opinion was that this would be a great offering for customers. But opinions don’t prove anything, and can lead you into dangerous territory full of zombie projects. Instead, you need reliable data to determine whether or not an idea is worth developing. So, we pretotyped it.

We guided RACQ through the design of their pretotype. They mocked up a website offering mobility-as-a-service alongside three days of Google Ads that appeared when people looked at online flight bookings. Then, they waited to see what happened. “We had zero uptake,” says Greg Booker, Chief Information Officer at RACQ.  After only three days and a tiny outlay, RACQ was able to kill the mobility-as-a-service idea and save millions by not building the wrong thing.

RACQ’s experience shows that pretotyping and rapid experimentation is incredibly helpful because it allows you to see what customers really do when offered a new product or service, rather than just what they say they’ll do. As Booker says, "if you have people who don’t know they are being watched, you get a more reliable result and you get it more quickly." By gathering reliable data quickly, companies are able to identify which ideas are worth investing in, and which are duds, without wasting precious time, money and energy.