What actions did Embrace’s founders take to solicit feedback from prospective customers and what did they learn from these efforts?

When Rahul Panicker, Jane Chen, and Linus Liang enrolled in Design for Extreme Affordability, a course taught in the Design School at Stanford University, little did they know that the class would change their lives.

And little did they know that, a short three years later, premature babies born in rural India, who often don’t survive because of hypothermia, would have a new chance at life because of a product they designed.

The Design for Extreme Affordability class draws students from across the Stanford campus. The goal of the class is to develop solutions for formidable, real-world problems. The project Panicker, Chen, and Liang were assigned was to develop a low-cost infant incubator for use in developing countries. This was a topic that the three knew nothing about. They were electrical engineering, MBA, and computer science students, respectively. To get started, they did some simple Google searches. They learned that 15 million pre-term and underweight babies are born annually in developing countries.