This article is from the public account Tencent Research Institute (ID: cyberlawrc).

On January 11, 2020, the third annual “Technology for Goodness” annual forum hosted by Tencent Research Institute was held in Beijing. This forum focused on “Technology for Action” and focused on Action path, sharing advanced cases and latest research results at home and abroad.

Zhang Zhidong, the founder of Tencent, shared a theme entitled “Technology for Good, a Product Capability” at the meeting.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Dear distinguished guests, I am very glad to have the opportunity to participate in this seminar. The topic of my speech today is Science and technology is a product capability. Science and technology for good is a relatively big topic. In the past two years, discussions on technology for good have begun to increase.

Many people think this is a kind of “will for public welfare”, an additional public welfare act, and a technology ethics choice that only large companies with money and leisure need to consider. Personally, I believe that technology can be regarded as a product capability, a product opportunity, and can be considered and practiced by all technology companies and organizations.

Today, I want to talk about a few good examples of goodwill from a product and technology perspective. The first two are small examples of commercial companies incorporating goodwill into their products. The latter two are examples of new NGOs and new enterprises.

First case, Chess and card app: Make an appointment with a middle-aged uncle

In the summer of 2018, the Tiantian Chess team at the Goose Factory IEG received a very special request for help. The child of an elderly chess player asked to limit the length of time his father’s account played. Because he was seriously ill, he had just finished surgery and needed to rest. However, the elderly played chess for several hours in the evening while the family was not paying attention, which affected the physical recovery after the operation.

The team and users explained with patience, because their father was an adult and the goose factory as a service provider, restricting their right to play chess did not comply with the law. The family members said that if they took away the equipment of the elderly and banned the elderly from playing chess, it would make the elderly feel that they had lost their joy in life, would be very emotional, and would not be conducive to physical rehabilitation.

This is a very difficult new problem for the chess and card team. The difficulty is that adults cannot restrict their freedom. They need to find a way of persuasion that adults can accept without objection. After consultation, the team found a way to calculate the backstage users who play a long time and have a high level of fatigue. In the product, guide the users to set up some health appointments and join mandatory breaks after several consecutive games.

After communicating with the patient’s family, the old man also became the first group of users to participate in the pilot. After this mechanism went online, the chess players were a little praised, and there were also grotesques. After a period of improvement, many heavy users began to understand the goodwill of the team. Proper encouragement of rest in the product can help heavy users ease their eyes. And physical fatigue.

The other is a card game. The team of Happy Landlords spent a lot of time and energy studying the game habits of serious adult users. They designed a mathematical model of fatigue in card games.

Note: where t is the number of minutes a player has been playing continuously; k is the fatigue acceleration index. The current model is k = 2; m is a constant. m = 100; (If the player plays for 100 minutes, it is divided into two upper and lower 50 minutes, and there is a rest in the middle, then the fatigue is 50; if there is no rest at all, the fatigue is calculated for 100 consecutive minutes of play; if it is 200 consecutive minutes , Then fatigue = 400)

This mathematical model mainly reflects the continuous long-term game, which will accumulate the fatigue of the user into acceleration, not just linear addition. They use such mathematical models to calculate the fatigued adult users, encourage them to set their own health appointments, and remind them to take a proper rest.

The practice of the landlord team has also achieved relatively good results. The proportion of users who are very fatigued has declined by a relatively large amount because of the healthy design of this product.

In 2019, these two chess and card games of the Goose Factory IEG won the Green Innovation Award inside the Goose Factory for their attention to adult health fatigue and product practice.

This is a small test of two chess and card games exploring the fatigue of adults. The mathematical model of fatigue is not perfect, and the chess and card team is still polishing. The relevant experience is expected to be applied to other chess and cards in the Goose Factory in 2020. Game.

The second example, Takeaway APP: No Cutlery Option

The takeaway industry has grown tremendously in China in recent years.Take the largest Meituan takeaway platform as an example. In 2018, the daily order volume exceeded 20 million orders, and in 2019, the daily order exceeded 30 million orders, serving more than 3 million merchants and 300 million consumers.

The booming development of the takeaway industry has brought great convenience to merchants’ business expansion and consumer life, and has also increased the pressure on waste disposal. The takeaway industry needs tableware, lunch boxes, and packaging bags, which has become an environmental issue. In the second half of 2017, Meituan put forward a “Aoyama Plan” dedicated to optimizing environmental protection issues in the takeaway industry.

From the announcement of Meituan, the Aoyama plan includes the idea of ​​promoting the environmental protection packaging industry, the waste sorting industry, and the recycling industry, which is a pretty big plan.

From the product point of view, I am more interested in the details of some of the products that are sold on the APP. Here only select a product UI details to talk specifically. The following UI is a UI that encourages users to use their own tableware to reduce disposable tableware.

The UI details of this product are very interesting. There is a green [Energy + 10] encouragement to guide consumers in [Number of Cutlery]. This small UI, after its launch in June 2019, has brought a substantial increase. In the article “Research Report on China’s Takeaway Industry (First Three Quarters of 2019)” issued by Meituan, Meituan provided a statistical chart of the effects brought by this UI.

In addition, in July 2019, in the Shanghai area, they also experimented with allowing consumers to make the necessary choices for tableware. In Shanghai, consumers who choose not to use tableware have experienced a large increase. Millions of consumers are participating in this environmentally friendly option.

Another product detail is the design of the small ticket of the merchant. This small ticket is also very interesting. [Environmental note] A few words of remarks, using large fonts, remind merchants and delivery takeaway brothers, don’t let down the consumer’s Fan environmental protection.

These small product innovation details reflect the environmental protection of the product team behind. The problem of environmental protection in modern society has a long way to go. This is just a small beginning. We look forward to continuing the delivery of the takeaway industry, integrating technology with more environmentally friendly materials, and encouraging environmental awareness and participation by consumers .

It is not easy for enterprises to establish an incentive mechanism

The two small cases above, the health agreement of the chess and card app, and the tableware options of the take-out app have not affected the business smoothness, did not affect the revenue, integrate goodwill on the appropriate product path, and can also bring warmth to users. Feelings, bringing social benefits.

But there are still few such cases. Many technology companies will have the desire to improve science and technology, but companies will always have a lot of pressure for survival and development; the KPI of an enterprise’s assessment is usually market share, user volume, income, profit, which is a particularly clear number. Benefits are not easy to quantify, and it is easy to be placed on a low priority in the fierce competition of enterprises.

I have talked with many product team leaders inside and outside the goose factory. Only a few team leaders can recognize that this is a product opportunity. A larger proportion is such a misunderstanding. They agree on the meaning of social effects, but the team he led, because the pressure for business survival and development is too great, has not been able to free up time and energy to try. Only then can I try.

I’ve also seen many companies that, after gaining profits and developing to a certain stage, they will set up a charity fund to donate money for social welfare; some companies will also set up a charity team, which contributes money and contributes; however, For technology companies, these are actually very infancy.

Can high-tech companies face the industry in which they have a positive and negative impact on society? Can we establish a mechanism to encourage product and technical teams to take the impact on society as the latitude of product design?

High-tech companies are the beneficiaries of the technology age. The employees of technology companies are young, energetic, highly knowledge-intensive, capable and intelligent. If companies can establish positive long-term mechanisms that encourage social benefits, they may be able to transform such wisdom and vitality to help ease social problems; Social benefits are difficult to quantify, and it is not easy to establish an incentive mechanism in an enterprise, but this should be a subject worthy of consideration by high-tech companies.

“Product power” or a positive heuristic

“Goodwill + products” is not a contradictory relationship with business survival and development. If the product team can be intelligent and find the appropriate product link to start with, it may be able to find that good faith innovation can bring positive help to the product, which can be regarded as a product opportunity instead of a burden.

In the past few years, the healthy “WeChat donation step” in WeChat and the “ant forest” in Alipay to encourage tree planting are two particularly creative and productive cases. These two cases have helped the two service brands WeChat and Alipay in a positive way. As a result, the company has received a large number of users’ emotional recognition, and the company’s benefits and social benefits have been very good.

In good faith, innovation does not have to be done on platforms such as WeChat and Alipay. For any mass technology company, if its business model is to use technology to help work and life more efficient and more enjoyable, the team only needs to focus on doing their job, product and technology, and service quality. In fact, it is a very good technology for good. When products and services have developed a large influence, in addition to focusing on their own revenue, the team can also pay attention to the user’s health and the impact on the social environment. At the same time, willingness to reflect on yourself and find product mitigation methods is actually a good opportunity for innovation and redevelopment.

In this era of technology, I believe that there will be more companies and more organizations that use “technology for good” as a product capability, and find new business opportunities and new development opportunities from it.

The third case, Scratch: Let children create and collaborate from play

Let ’s talk about Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu), which was born in 2007 by MIT Media Lab’s LifeLong Kindergarten group led by Professor Mitchel Resnick.

Scratch is a free visual programming for children all over the world. It expresses their own platform through programming and inspires children’s creative thinking and cooperation ability. Scratch 1.0 was released in 2007, 2.0 was released in 2013, and 3.0 was released in 2019. After 12 years of development, there are about 50 million registered users in the Scratch community, distributed in more than 100 countries, and translated into 50 languages.

The following figure shows the growth trend of programming projects shared by users in the Scratch community over the past 12 years. Each year, more than 10 million new projects are shared by users.

I’ve visited the Scratch team, and they’re in the LifeLong Kindergarten lab at MIT’s Media Lab building. This team has been developing and operating the Scratch platform for the past 12 years, from 1.0 to 3