Designing a business model from two months of fieldwork in rural India

01Two months mapping farmers’ daily lives across rural India

DSM was developing a new livestock feed supplement for rural India, effective but expensive, and needed a business model that could work in a market where most of the target customers had never seen anything like it before. DSM was a Dutch multinational working in health, nutrition, and materials; it merged with the Swiss company Firmenich in 2023 to become dsm-firmenich. Source DSM was a Dutch multinational working in health, nutrition, and materials; it merged with the Swiss company Firmenich in 2023 to become dsm-firmenich. Source Designing that model meant understanding rural Indian farming life firsthand rather than from a spreadsheet, so we spent two months traveling across three Indian states, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, and Gujarat, interviewing farmers, local NGOs, and livestock stakeholders.

02The three stakeholder groups that shaped the whole project

The field research focused on three groups: the farmers themselves, farm-related stakeholders like the local milkman and veterinary practices, and local NGOs already working to improve farmers’ lives. Understanding how those three groups related to each other, not just to DSM’s product, was the point of the research.

In practice, that meant sensitizing people before we ever sat down with them: simple diary and picture exercises that got farmers, NGO workers, and local stakeholders thinking about their daily routines and priorities in advance, rather than answering cold in an interview. Sleeswijk Visser, Stappers, van der Lugt, and Sanders’ “Contextmapping: Experiences from Practice” (CoDesign, 2005) formalized this approach: mapping the context around a product, not just reactions to the product itself, surfaces needs people wouldn’t otherwise think to mention. Source Sleeswijk Visser, Stappers, van der Lugt, and Sanders’ “Contextmapping: Experiences from Practice” (CoDesign, 2005) formalized this approach: mapping the context around a product, not just reactions to the product itself, surfaces needs people wouldn’t otherwise think to mention. Source Field research in rural development had already been through a similar shift for years, from rapid rural appraisal, where an outsider extracts information from local people, to participatory rural appraisal, where local people share, analyze, and own the process themselves. Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development, 22(7), 1994. Source Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal,” World Development, 22(7), 1994. Source The group sessions that followed used those same generative materials, drawings, collages, and cards, to surface things people wouldn’t necessarily volunteer if you just asked them directly.

To get past the obvious awkwardness of a design team showing up and asking personal questions, we designed conversation starter cards. The photos on the cards were taken all over India: farmers would sometimes react to imagery from a different region with “that’s not how we do it here.” This exposed our own assumptions, but made great conversation starters. The photos on the cards were taken all over India: farmers would sometimes react to imagery from a different region with “that’s not how we do it here.” This exposed our own assumptions, but made great conversation starters. A way to introduce ourselves, break the ice, and steer the conversation toward farming, livestock, spending patterns, and general needs and aspirations, without it feeling like an interrogation.

03Co-designing business models with farmers and NGOs

For farmers specifically, we started with a finance-focused tool to map their actual spending patterns and priorities around livestock. That gave us something more useful than a survey answer: real evidence of how much they’d be willing to spend on a feed supplement, and what their weekly spending priorities were.

From there, we moved to local NGOs and other partners, running whiteboard sessions to map out potential business models directly with them, using cards drawn from the research to keep the discussion concrete. Osterwalder and Pigneur’s “Business Model Generation,” which popularized the canvas format used here, had only been published a year earlier. We didn’t apply it as-is: sessions ran through translators, and we adapted and improvised the format as field conditions demanded. Source Osterwalder and Pigneur’s “Business Model Generation,” which popularized the canvas format used here, had only been published a year earlier. We didn’t apply it as-is: sessions ran through translators, and we adapted and improvised the format as field conditions demanded. Source

The specific business models that came out of those sessions stayed confidential to DSM, but the goal behind all of them was the same: a win-win-win that worked for farmers, for local partners, and for DSM at once.

Based on our research, that goal ran into a hard constraint early on. Farmers had very little to spend, and the finance data we’d gathered showed almost all of it went toward short-term needs: seed, feed, medicine, things with an immediate return. A feed supplement paid off too, but only over months, sometimes a full season, and that mismatch made it a hard sell on its own merits. This was exactly the kind of market Prahalad’s “bottom of the pyramid” was arguing companies were getting wrong: real buying power, but only for a business model built around how that money moved. C.K. Prahalad, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits,” Wharton School Publishing, 2004. “Bottom of the pyramid” is the term Prahalad and Stuart Hart used at the time; it’s since been widely criticized as pejorative, and “base of the pyramid” has become the more common term. Source C.K. Prahalad, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits,” Wharton School Publishing, 2004. “Bottom of the pyramid” is the term Prahalad and Stuart Hart used at the time; it’s since been widely criticized as pejorative, and “base of the pyramid” has become the more common term. Source

04Based on our research, a subsidized model was the only way forward

Back at DSM’s Delhi office, we ran a separate set of workshops with internal stakeholders, to prioritize what we’d found in the field and get everyone’s input on the concepts on the table. The way through was to bring in a third party. Rural livestock data is hard to gather in India, and other companies wanted exactly that. Those companies could subsidize DSM’s feed supplement for farmers directly, in exchange for access to the data DSM was already positioned to collect.

That structure became KISAN.DAT, Hindi for “farmer’s data," "Kisan” comes from the Hindi kisān, itself from the Sanskrit kṛṣāṇa, “one who plows.” The name put the farmer, not DSM or the data buyers, at the center of what the platform was called. "Kisan” comes from the Hindi kisān, itself from the Sanskrit kṛṣāṇa, “one who plows.” The name put the farmer, not DSM or the data buyers, at the center of what the platform was called. a platform designed so every party involved, farmers, DSM, and the third-party data buyers, came out ahead.

Finally, we designed a toolkit to onboard new partners into KISAN.DAT. A win-win-win model with three different kinds of stakeholders is not something you can explain in a slide deck; it needed to be interactive and physical, letting a new party walk through the model themselves rather than sit through a pitch. The toolkit let a farmer, an NGO worker, or a prospective data-buying company each see, in terms specific to them, what they’d be putting in and what they’d be getting out, so the value was something they discovered by using it rather than something they had to take on trust.

05Two months in the field changed what DSM understood

This business model would not have surfaced from a desk in the Netherlands. It came directly out of two months spent listening to farmers, milkmen, and NGO workers in the field, not out of assumptions about what a business model for rural India should look like. The subsidy structure traces back to one specific finding, that farmers’ spending was entirely short-term, which only showed up because we’d built a tool to map real spending patterns rather than ask people to estimate them.

The three-way “win” only became a workable model because the whiteboard sessions forced farmers and NGOs to push back on ideas that looked fine on paper but didn’t survive contact with how people lived. A team working from a generic idea of “rural India” as one market would have built something that read as reasonable and never got adopted.

That fieldwork came with real challenges, most of which no research plan drafted back in Delft could have anticipated. Interviews ran through translators, in heat and dust, and a “private” conversation with a farmer would regularly turn into a village event, with neighbors, children, and passersby all weighing in whether they’d been invited or not. Sessions built around one respondent had to be improvised on the spot into something that could handle a crowd.

That meant a lot of flexibility: coming prepared with more tools and formats than we’d ever use in one session, so there was always another option to reach for when the plan we’d walked in with didn’t survive contact with the situation. It also meant staying disciplined about processing what we were learning as it happened, capturing and making sense of insights on the fly, rather than letting two months of material pile up to sort through once we were back home.