By Brian Moelich
Business Designer
Innovation Enablement, CX
Citrix
Organizations have the ability to generate innovative ideas, but
are failing to integrate them back into the enterprise.
Innovation practices like design-thinking and lean startup are being adopted by organizations as
the path to new growth. The challenge though is that as great as these practices
are for generating and prototyping creative customer-centric ideas, rigorously
testing them to gather evidence and make decisions based on that evidence, they
fall short on how to incorporate those ideas into an enterprise.
From my experience incubating new ideas within an enterprise,
I’ve found a few methods, when paired with innovation practices, increase the
likelihood of those new ideas being pursued and accepted into the fold of the
organization.
Understand
who your stakeholders are and get their buy-in throughout the innovation
process
Just as you use design-thinking to interview and understand who
your customer is and what their underlying needs are, do the same with your
executive and business unit stakeholders. Put yourself in their shoes. What is
top of mind for them? What keeps them up at night? What are their needs?
As you generate new ideas, tailor your ideas to your
stakeholders and create gains or solve their pains for them. Do this throughout
the process and not just at the beginning. Take prototypes to your stakeholders
and co-create with them like you would your customer.
Have
all your strategy ducks in a row
Strategy in its purest form is about making choices and
tradeoffs. You can’t be everything to everybody or you will be mediocre at
best. Design-thinking and lean startup may not make strategy explicit, but
successful corporate startups do.
As you learn who your customer is through interviews,
prototyping & testing ideas and gathering evidence on what resonates,
clearly articulate who that customer is. Go beyond just a persona and use
language from the Business
Model Canvas, because this is what corporations understand and want to hear.
Is your idea B2B or B2C? Is it a two-sided market? Where will
you play geographically? How will your idea get into the hands of your
customer? How will customers become aware of your idea and what will you do so
that the idea is sticky with them? At what part of the production line will you
play and do you need to partner with someone? What is the customer willing to
pay for?
One last thing on strategy, explain why your customer will
choose you every time over the competition. Your idea will be truly compelling
to your organization if you can articulate, and preferably, visualize why you
standout from the competition.
For example, Steve Jobs showing the iPhone back in 2007
Image credit: Earnest
Kim
Model the
financial metrics that matter
For a startup seeking funding, it’s a no-brainer to come
prepared with a market size and capital expense estimate, revenue forecast,
customer acquisition cost (CAC), average revenue per user (ARPU), lifetime
value, churn, etc. Just as an investor loves to see these numbers, so to do
organizational stakeholders.
You will learn about possible revenue models and how much people
are willing to pay for your idea through your innovation process and modeling
these out will give you more information on the way forward. For each option,
do quick back-of-the-napkin estimates for market size and expenses necessary to
get to market. Think about customer awareness and activation, what will that
cost and how much of your target market could you feasibly reach?
Understand
what capabilities you will need and how they fit into your organization's
existing capabilities
Organizations are great at understanding what their core
capabilities are and what the necessary activities are that produce those
capabilities. Your goal then becomes, knowing what the core capabilities and
supporting activities are that your idea will need. I like to think in terms of
an activity system, pictured below.
Example of Nespresso below, Credit: Heather Fraser
Use this then to compare to your organizations core capabilities and supporting activities. What can you leverage? What needs to be built out? What should be done in-house or should certain activities be outsourced to a partner?
Tell it all with a great story
When you’re ready to pitch the idea, sum all of this up, alongside everything you learnt along the innovation process, and help your corporate stakeholders understand the relevance of all of it with a heartfelt story.
Take the story of someone you interviewed. Explain who they are and emphasize their pains to allow the listener to empathize with your customer. Then get into what the future holds for your customer with your new idea in hand and how it delivers on their needs and solves their problems.
Now with your stakeholders primed, explain your idea with a clear value proposition, why it is better than the competition, how your organization is uniquely positioned to develop it and why they should care, i.e. the value it will create.
The success of corporate startups depends on more than innovation practices alone
Innovation practices like design-thinking and lean startup are great for generating new ideas, and I hope you’ve learnt a few ways to increase the likelihood of those new ideas being pursued by your organization.
By Victor Cho
Chief Executive Officer
Evite
From Evite's Ice Cream Sundae Bar guide, sponsored by
Reddi-wip
Help users
solve problems, deliver real value and make them smile, and they'll reward you
with positive word of mouth and remember you when they're ready to buy: This is
the promise, at least, of content marketing. But could it work for your
company? Here's how Evite tackled that question for itself.
Pitch Perfect
Long known as
the leader in online invitations, Evite set out in 2013 to expand on its
mission with sponsored content about how to host a party. The hypothesis: This
content would be compelling for both our users and our advertisers -- and
could, in turn, deliver a significant additional revenue stream.
In the
beginning, we experimented with content marketing with a team of just two
employees who were originally hired to create content for SEO. We put together
packages and pricing based on early competitive research and our sales team
began pitching it along with more traditional forms of digital advertising. And
within only a couple of months of launching content on Evite, we brought in our
first content marketing deal.
Watch
& Learn
We quickly
developed internal guidelines for how we would showcase brands, both in text
and images, which were challenged by a few sponsors eager to push a harder
sell. And we learned some great lessons in those early stages. For one content
deal, for example, we used promotional photos from the advertiser rather than
shooting new images ourselves. Did it save us money and make the client happy?
Sure. But users didn't like it. It felt too much like an advertisement, so our
audience didn't share it, and meeting impression goals was tough. Based on that
experience, we now shoot all original photos so the content feels like an
organic, natural fit with our site as a whole; ultimately, that's best for the
user -- and in turn, for the client.
Scaling
the Mountain
Next, we
developed a network of blogger experts to distribute our sponsored content,
offering tremendous (and scalable) reach. For example, a Coke content marketing
campaign that ran for two weeks in January racked up 12 million page
views from blogger content distribution on top of the 200,000 from Evite alone.
At the same time, we also encouraged these bloggers to contribute content of
their own, allowing us to scale up to approximately a thousand articles and
videos in 18 months. Translation? More page views, more profits.
What's Next
Recently
we've begun exploring how to weave content more deeply into our product so the
content becomes part of the user journey rather than a side trip; for example,
we might promote tropical drink recipes brought to you by Dole Pineapple Juice
right on a pool party invitation. In addition, we've expanded the model from
sponsored advice for hosts to sponsored guest-focused content to take advantage
of the dozens of guests we have for every one host.
Evite has gained a
significant new revenue stream and very rapid growth in our content scale via
content marketing. For us, as for any company, the success of new consumer or
advertising-facing products alike is built on testing and iteration.
PRESENTER
Phil Swisher
Senior Vice President & Head of Innovation,
Brown Brothers Harriman
SESSION ABSTRACT
Guest speaker Phil Swisher shared his company's approach to innovation as he elaborated on two of the company's long-term goals: generating meaningful revenue from new businesses and building a stronger culture of innovation. BBH's approach to innovation is a strategy of what you do and do not do. An innovation does something different than the core business. The same mindset and processes of the core business will not lead to different outcomes. He also articulated some things his company will not do when it comes to innovation, which included ROI analysis, creating detailed business cases, allocating costs to other business units, and attending boring corporate meetings.
BEST PRACTICE(S)
Six primary activities practiced by BBH involving solution building and infrastructure building:
- Pursue ideas using team and firm resources for direct idea advancement
- Utilize an internal venture capital fund for funding the commercial ideas of others
- Seeks external wisdom, engages with the rest of the world for insight
- Innovation, used as a catalyst
- Innovation, used inside the firm
- Metrics and advocacy
TACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT
Use a different measurement methodology to determine how innovative your new product or service really is. It can be best described as a cumulative test asking questions such as, “Who else currently offers this product or service?” Points are awarded based on the multiple choice answer picked. The higher the score, the better.
TAKE-AWAY
When building innovative new products, alignment across four populations is critical: the innovation team, business unit management team, IT department and one of BBH's 38 owners. Approval is required only from the partner who oversees innovation and the partner who oversees the business unit in which Innovation is investing.
ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT
Swisher suggests that management ask the following questions of top performing management teams in order to make innovation a strategic priority:
- What commercial projects is your team working on, where outcomes are uncertain?
- How are you building innovation into the lives of your team members?
- For each member of the management team:
- How are you participating directly in the creative process?
- In the past month, how many clients have you spoken with, excluding sales situations and service problems?
- Who has made the most significant positive impact on your innovation efforts?
BEST PRACTICE(S)
Deployment Values for best practices:
- The standalone revenue generated by Innovation’s new product
- The revenue benefit of the new product retaining clients of the core who would otherwise have left
- The revenue benefit of the new product helping the core business win new clients, or new business from existing clients
- The technologies, people and methods used by Innovation set new benchmarks and precedents, which increases the knowledge, permitted toolkit, and capabilities of the core, and creates productivity improvements and cost savings in the core
- Portions of Innovation’s work, both product development work and product’s code, can be reused or adapted for projects in the core, which increases speed and quality while reducing costs
FINAL THOUGHT(S)
Career advice from Mr. Swisher: The world is small, life is cumulative, always look for ways to help others. Optimize for great mentors and maximum learning, especially earlier in your career. Be passionate about the major areas where you invest your time. Have a runway – you can’t negotiate unless you can walk away.
