Deloitte Digital and Market Gravity bring open innovation effort D5 to Santiago

Deloitte Digital have partnered with British proposition design consultancy Market Gravity to take their concept D5 to Chile. Creatives and professionals from the consultancies will work together over a five week period to uncover the most significant issues across a range of industries with a focus on entrepreneurs and young scaling businesses. 

After a successful run-through in Canada earlier this year, Market Gravity’s Canadian team will head south and bring The D5 Project to Santiago. The project is one of the first joint ventures between the two since the Big Four firm acquired Market Gravity last year in a bid to bolster its creative consulting services. 

Market Gravity’s expertise lies in creating and launching new innovative products and services, fused together by customer insight, commercial rigour and design experience. The consulting firm has partnered together with big names including Visa, HSBC and Aegon to create initiatives including an open banking platform, an IoT device and platform to prevent car breakdowns, and a retirement tracking, saving and management platform.

The D5 Project uses the same design, discover, deliver methodology which enable Market Gravity to identify large-scale challenges for their clients above. However, instead of focusing on a challenge for a particular business or industry in these labs, they will concentrate their energy on solving more endemic issues. 

For instance, the goal of the first D5 program was to uncover the biggest challenges faced by Canada's small businesses and create five ways that banks can solve them. The program begun with an issue that spread deep into the veins of Canada’s startup scene – and likely beyond the country’s boarders – in that the majority of small business owners were dissatisfied with their financial institution’s services. 

The biggest problem according to Iain Montgomery, Managing Director of Market Gravity in Canada, was that starting a business is complicated and confusing, and banks only added to that rather than help to diminish it. “From completing the business registration to learning what grants and funding could be available to them [entrepreneurs]. SMEs thrive on momentum but for new entrepreneurs it can be tough understanding where to start.”

The solution was to create Launchpad, a platform which removes the hassle and headache from starting a business and connects directly with financial institutions. Launchpad brings together all of the necessary documentation and processes so that new business owners don’t have to worry about having to deal with“incorporation forms, uncover grants and go through complicated application processes,” Montgomery said.  

With a focus on establishing a solution that tackles problems faced by a select group of society, D5 will tackle how life is changing for the younger generations. The D5 team will “be exploring how more people are living by themselves in Santiago and the impact that has on how people are working, living, shopping, banking, playing and travelling” according to Montgomery. 

“Over those 5 weeks we’ll be sharing our insights and stories along the way to create 5 big propositions that we’ll be publicly sharing that we hope will actually get launched by some of Chile’s biggest brands,” said Montgomery, who has been travelling around the US and Mexico working on The D5 Project.

“We’re doing this for a reason, a couple of months back we realized there is a great opportunity to enhance Deloitte Digital in Chile, so working with our friends across Deloitte we’ll be making this real to show how it’s done, build our network and create something we can be proud of for Latin America.” 

The D5 Prject is set to kick off this week with the aim at openly addressing some of Latin America’s issues towards innovation and entrepreneurship. The program will be run by Carlos Escalante, Emily Horrocks, Philippe Soeters, Bianca Santillana, Jorge Rojas, Jaime Morales and Sergio Dubo Fuentes. Market Gravity has offices spread across  London, New York, Edinburgh, Toronto, Sydney, Manchester and Vancouver, and this venture marks the firm’s first steps into Latin America.