Blog 3

“If there is no competition, there is no market.” It is hard to imagine competition for a social venture. Why would you want to compete with me when I’m trying to make people’s lives better? If we are working towards the same goal, why don’t we work together? But I realize that this is because I am assuming social ventures work as purely altruistic entities. That is not the case for any venture, or really anyone intent on making money. Social ventures seek to do good, but they also seek to do it better than anyone else. The customers I serve should be served better by me than the next best alternative. There are similar participatory design firms such as Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) and Latent Design, but they tend to operate in specific geographic areas. Latent Design, in particular, only operates in the Chicago area at the moment, whereas KDI operates continuously in Los Angeles and Nairobi while branching out to other areas for the occasional project. If I keep my geographic scope narrow, for instance staying within one Pittsburgh neighborhood at the start, I can likely avoid directly competing with other participatory design firms until I have a distinct advantage of having already made connections within the community served. Not all competitors are going to be other design companies. Anyone who offers a solution to the needs of the neighborhood could be considered competition, however this is where things get fuzzy. As a guiding figure, my company does not intend to actually supply the resources to the neighborhood, rather it will connect the neighborhood with the provider that best suits their needs. So providers are at once competition and also collaborators.

This also creates some problems when pricing my services. If the competition is viewed as other design companies, I will be operating in a different geographic region with a different cost of living (and different costs for many goods and services). If the competition is viewed as urban developers and providers of certain resources, the price would be affected by the resource provided and not the connection to a resource. Competitive pricing can thus only provide a very broad estimate of the price range for the service. Viewing the pricing from a cost- and margin-based angle is also murky. There may be some marketing costs, taxes and legal fees, but there is not much overall fixed cost for offering a participatory design service. If there are variable costs, such as covering costs of acquiring access to a resource for the community, it would be added to the price for that project. Primarily, the price will likely be dominated by the value created for the community. After all, even the variable costs are likely ones that would be encountered if the resource were acquired without going through the design thinking process. So, that being said, I suppose the real question when determining the price of my service is how much do communities value using the design thinking process to find and fill opportunity gaps?