FRAGILE

TO

FROM

AGILE

INNOVATING IN UNCERTAIN TIMES

A PERSPECTIVE FROM

We are living through some of the most disruptive times in history. The pace of this change is phenomenal, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

Everywhere you look, old norms and accepted paradigms are being broken or transformed - Brexit, the rise of populism in Europe and the USA, Russian foreign policy, Artificial Intelligence, the increasing economic powers of China and the Millennial generation’s desire for a different relationship with their employer. Businesses are dealing with continuous upheaval and there is massive uncertainty in politics, the economy and consumer confidence. The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P index of US companies is now just 15 years,1 with some experts predicting it will reduce even further to just 12 years.2

Alongside political and economic uncertainty, there is digital disruption and omnichannel media distribution, which threatens to render obsolete and quickly irrelevant any organisations that are not able to adapt.

This constant and rapid disruption is creating significant challenges for business leaders as they develop their strategies and look for growth.However, some leaders and their organisations are winning in a constantly changing world. They are able

to adapt to and even anticipate change. They are constantly evolving to stay relevant and grow their market share.

At The Innovation Beehive, our team has been privileged to visit and study some of the world’s most successful and innovative organisations. In this White Paper we share our experience and some principles that will help your organisation to innovate and thrive in these disruptive times.

Think of this White Paper as your blueprint for how you can help your organisation to be more innovative and to ensure it anticipates the market’s direction of travel, while responding confidently to volatility and uncertainty. Over the next few pages you will learn how to work smarter and faster, while creating solutions that are going to deliver real impact to your end user and to your bottom line!

Mok O’Keeffe, March 2019

INNOVATING IN

UNCERTAIN

TIMES1 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-166110402 https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction

Image Copyright Arvind Juneja, Digital University, Poland

Foreword by Mok O’Keeffe Author and Founder of The Innovation Beehive

Your head may be beginning to hurt now, with this talk of quantum physics and atoms.

So, let’s link it back to business and innovation.

Innovation is about solving problems. These problems are usually concerned with a customer or end user’s unmet need, pain or desire.

From an innovation perspective, the First and Second Industrial Revolutions can be seen as ‘The Age of Speed and Simplicity’. The cause of a problem was easily identifiable; and once the solution was developed, the implementation of a standardised and repeatable solution would fix it!

This approach also saw the beginning of a formalised approach to the management of an organisation’s resources, with Taylorism or Scientific Management being the front runners. These approaches codified cause and effect and created efficiencies of workflow and replicable systems, to ensure solutions were delivered in a timely and resource efficient manner.

We characterise The Third Industrial Revolution and the exponential growth of digital, as “The Age of the Expert.” Businesses were still able to identify problems to solve, but these problems were increasingly complex in origin; and often, external experts were required to support the organisation in creating the appropriate innovative solution.

As we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are experiencing a world where change is constant, information is everywhere and there is massive economic and political upheaval.

How can businesses innovate in a world where there is so much change and disruption? How do they solve problems when the expert no longer has all the answers? Or when a problem is so multifaceted that its genesis is unclear?

We believe that Agile Innovation provides the answer.

By Agile Innovation we don’t mean what you might know more traditionally as Agile working practices. This White Paper is not about Scrum Masters, or Product Owners, or a million different other complex internal processes.

Whilst “creativity loves constraint,”6 and you do need some structure and discipline to innovate, we believe that to respond to the increasingly volatile world in the 21st Century, a new and simpler definition of Agile Innovation is required.

This White Paper provides a blueprint for this simpler form of Agile Innovation.

According to Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of The World Economic Forum, we are living in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.3 The First Industrial Revolution was characterised by a move from an agrarian based society to mass urbanisation. The Second Industrial Revolution occurred just before the First World War and was characterised by the creation of the means of mass production. We have just experienced the Third Industrial Revolution which is characterised by the rise of the digital economy, through the development of the internet and an explosion in personal computing.

Schwab argues that the Fourth Industrial Revolution will see the merging of the virtual world and the physical world, along with a blurring of the lines between machine and biology. This blurring will be enabled by the developments in the Internet of Things, Robotics, Machine Learning and Quantum Computing.

If Schwab is right, then we are in very unchartered waters; and the current is about to get a lot stronger.

Gordon Moore, a co-founder of computing giant Intel, predicted that the number of chips on a transistor board would double every two years, whilst at the same time he predicted that the cost

of producing them would decrease at the same rate. This became known as “Moore’s Law,” and his prediction has proved correct.

We have seen the development of computers that are increasingly smaller, whilst being increasingly more powerful. We have experienced the exponential growth of smart phones and personal computing. This has resulted in the same amount of computing power inside an iPad, as there was in the world’s most powerful computer in 1965.

However, from 2017, it has been increasingly difficult to reduce the size of chips further “as they are approaching the size of an atom,”4 and even Intel has recently said that “it is harder to roll out smaller transistors in a two-year time frame, whilst also being affordable.”5

Whilst it is not totally clear what is coming next, Quantum Computing (which uses the laws of quantum physics to solve problems faster) and neuromorphic computing (where computers are capable of remembering and learning) are key development areas. And both these fields of computing will have a profound impact on society and the economy.

WHY AGILE INNOVATION?

INNOVATION AND THE FOUR

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS.

6 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2006-02-12/creativity-loves-constraints

3 Schwab, K, The Fourth Industrial Re volution. Penguin Books, 20074 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhHMJCUmq285 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv_2C95cO6s

In the Fourth Industrial Age, with its increasing complexity and pace, many businesses are struggling to even define the root cause of problems, let alone innovate to solve them. Introducing a traditional Agile Programme may give the Executives a level of mental reassurance but, from our experience, these programmes often focus on the input rather than the customer or a value creating outcome.

In order to navigate and win in uncertain times, businesses need to operate with a simpler definition of Agile Innovation.

WHAT IS AGILE INNOVATION?There is much talk in academic and business publications about Agile. Like for the word Innovation, it has come to mean many things. Agile was developed in the IT function, where it was created to give a framework for rapid product innovation.

But our experience of what is traditionally seen as Agile is something that has become increasingly process-driven and complex.

From our experience those organisations that are truly Agile are less concerned about what they call things, or about what stage of a process come next. Instead they are obsessed about bringing the voice of the end user into the room, actively breaking down hierarchies and testing new innovations early.

This may not be your text book or HBR definition of Agility. But we have seen it work. And we have delivered it with our clients.

For those of you who are concerned that we are about to advocate a revolution, the key thing we want to stress is that working in our Agile manner does not mean there is a trade-off between stability and speed. You can still have structures and processes in place, but you need to ensure that you keep the output as your primary focus.

Spotify, who initially followed every stage and implemented every tool of traditional Agile thinking, before freeing up their teams to work in a way much closer to The Innovation Beehive’s definition of Agile Innovation, sum this up wonderfully when they say:

“Rules are a good start. But break them when needed.”7

And Agile working is not just for the funky start up community or digital platforms.

Thames Water operates in a complex and constantly changing environment, with a decentralised workforce and a business that is significantly impacted by weather conditions beyond its control. However, the L&D team have successfully adopted an Agile way of working, which has enabled them to become more responsive to their users, and to ensure their product development is truly focussed on their user needs and on the needs of the business.

Their approach is summarised by Katharine Ward, Knowledge Management Manager at Thames Water, when she says

“For me agile is understanding the problem, engaging with the problem, engaging with people, and being targeted and relevant with actions and having an impact.”8

7 https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/8 http://www.hrmagazine.co.uk/article-details/agile-ld-doesnt-mean-not-planning

3.Have an

EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET

1.Work with FOCUS

2.Move at PACE

Rules are a good start. But break them when needed.” Spotify

OUR DEFINITION OF AGILE INNOVATION

Our favourite of Google’s Nine Notions of Innovation is ‘Creativity loves constraint.’

Those organisations that are able to sustain their innovation and work in an Agile manner, often place deliberate parameters around their innovation efforts. This constraint actually enables their innovation, rather than hindering it; and this allows them to innovate with absolute focus to develop a far more impactful solution.

In our experience the FOCUS needed for Agile Innovation is manifested in three key areas:

1. A clear Innovation Direction2. Listening to the voice of the customer3. Structuring with intent

A CLEAR INNOVATION DIRECTIONIn “The Innovation Ecosystem – how to Turbocharge Innovation in your Business,”9 Mok O’Keeffe noted that the world’s most innovative organisations all have a clear “Innovation Direction.” The leadership team in these organisations articulate a clear direction of travel, and this clarity enables employees to understand fully about where to focus their innovation efforts.

When the team at The Innovation Beehive work with innovation teams, we have noticed that the clearer, and better understood, the Innovation Direction is, the greater the quality of ideas that are generated, and the higher the probability that the innovation will be taken through to execution.

A clearly articulated Innovation Direction enables a razor-sharp focus, ensuring that innovation teams don’t fall down rabbit holes of distraction or end up chasing the latest shiny new thing.

This clarity requires leaders to take time to reflect on the organisation’s innovation requirements and support teams who are working hard to deliver upon them. However, there is clearly more work to be done when in the 12th Annual State of Agile Survey Report, 42% of respondents said that they had inadequate management sponsorship for their innovation efforts.10

HOW TO DELIVER AGILE INNOVATION.To deliver Agile Innovation you should focus on three areas:

WORKING WITH FOCUS.

In order to articulate a clear Innovation Direction, it can be helpful to classify the innovation opportunity by one of three components – customer experience, business process and technology systems.11 Once you have worked through this classification, it is important to have absolute clarity on which person in your business owns the constituent parts of each of these three components. Without this clarity, you are unable to drive accountability and empowerment.

This is well demonstrated by the USSA,12 who organise innovation teams around specific parts of the customer journey. Their COO Carl Liebert explains:

“I want to walk into an auditorium and ask, ‘Who owns the member’s change of address experience?’ And I want a clear and confident response from a team that owns that experience, whether a member is calling us, logging onto our website on a laptop, or using our mobile app. No finger pointing. No answers that begin with ‘It’s complicated.’”13

9 O’Keeffe, M. The Innovation Ecosystem: How to Turbocharge Innovation in Your Business, Rethink Press, 201810 https://stateofagile.versionone.com11 https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale12 The US financial services company for those serving in the Military.13 https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale

3.Have an

EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET

1.Work with FOCUS

2.Move at PACE

LISTENING TO THE CUSTOMERAfter reading this White Paper, you may well not choose to restructure your teams around the three components of customer experience, business process and technology systems above. However, if you even do just one thing after reading this White Paper, please let it be to question how you can ensure the voice of your customer is in the room whenever you are innovating.

The first attempt to articulate an Innovation Direction is often inward looking and based upon the needs or strengths of the business, rather than upon the needs of the end user. Initial articulations may focus efforts where the business has strong competence in a particular market segment, or where R&D has developed a new piece of technology. By taking the time to gather real customer Insight around an Innovation Direction, innovation teams can successfully identify the scope of the opportunity and create clearly defined opportunities and a focus for their ideation.

The focus of your initial Innovation Direction may change, as you define more clearly the needs, pains and desires of your end user (and thus the innovation opportunity) to your organisation.

At The Innovation Beehive, one of our values is “We are on it!” This means we move with real pace and get things done. Some of our clients can initially be surprised at the investment of time we take in defining a clear Innovation Direction. We make time to investigate (with fresh eyes) the needs, wants and desires of the customer or end user.

By taking time to develop a truly customer focussed Innovation Direction, we are subsequently able to

An engaged workforce is motivated to solve customers’ problems and create new innovations to respond to their needs.

STRUCTURING WITH INTENTIt may seem counter intuitive to talk about structure in a White Paper on Agile Innovation. But the Google notion of constraint has worked very well for them, so it is definitely worth considering where structures can help rather than hinder your innovation efforts.

Spotify ensure that they build both virtual and actual structures to encourage the flow of information across teams to facilitate collaboration.15

At Spotify, each team member is part of an Innovation Squad16 of approximately 8 people, all of whom work together on a specific area of the business.

More traditional organisations are divided according to function; but members of the Spotify Engineering Teams are placed in an Innovation Squad, which has accountability for one particular innovation or product area.

Individual members of the Squad remain connected to those who have a similar skillset outside of their Squad by being part of a ‘Chapter.’

Finally, best practice and knowledge sharing is encouraged by the creation of Guilds of like-minded team members, who form virtual teams across the business around topics that are of interest to them.

At first these structures might seem quite restrictive; but in practice, they encourage huge Squad accountability for a particular customer problem or innovation opportunity, whilst also ensuring connectivity across the wider organisation. This allows ideas, best practice and solutions to be shared, and also makes it possible to overcome them quickly!

But maybe you aren’t yet ready to re-organise your entire organisation into such formal innovation structures? However, there are still some other, simpler structures you can put in place to focus innovation efforts.

We have found that the most effective innovation teams are cross-functional. In our consultancy

interventions, we create Working Parties with representatives from many different parts of the business. They each bring a unique point of view to the innovation session. You may already have established Working Parties or multi-disciplinary innovation teams yourself. And if they are working out for you, that’s great. But if they are not, just ask yourself this one simple question:

‘Have we articulated a clear Innovation Direction that focuses on the customer’s needs?’

In our experience, if you are able to articulate a customer focussed Innovation Direction, your Working Party members will be lifted out of their functional silos, and this will help remove the constraints of achieving their own personal objectives. They will then be able to work together to find solutions to the needs, pains and desires of your end user.

If you are not considering creating specific innovation teams, there are still some structures you can put in place to drive innovation in an individual team.

Quicken Loans17 IT function have designated Monday afternoons as “Bullet Time.” For four hours every week, the team focuses on:

1. Working on something outside of everyday work.2. A project that benefits the company.3. Nothing that interferes with daily work flow.

This way of working aligns with their philosophy of empowering team members to be “obsessed with finding a better way.”18 Ideas are captured and fed into in an ideas portal, known as “the Cheese Factory.”

You may not have the resources to set up an ideas portal right now; but putting a few hours aside on a regular basis, with a clear set of principles on where to focus your energy, is still a structure very much worth considering.

move at pace and co-create solutions for our clients – often in much shorter timescales than traditional Agile Innovation programmes can deliver.

The Chinese goods manufacturer Haier bought the failing GE Appliance business in 2016 and implemented a radical programme to drive customer centricity, empowerment and accountability. They implemented a management philosophy called ‘rendanheyi’ which translates as “employees and customers become one”. The organisation operates like a start-up and the business is divided into micro enterprises. Each micro enterprise is measured on a quarterly basis and has “zero distance” between itself and the customer. Middle management do not exist – there are only front-line teams (who are customer-obsessed!) and Senior Management. Front line teams are organised around products instead of the usual functions like HR or Supply Chain. Everyone who is involved in the manufacturing of a product works in the same enterprise and has a vested interest in creating a product solution that is really going to deliver an impact for the customer, as well as a positive performance for their enterprise. This enterprise’s closeness to the customer ensures that unmet needs, desires and opportunities are captured and capitalised upon. And it is delivering results! In the first quarter of 2018, revenue growth in Haier’s GE Appliance business grew by 11%.14

WHO IS THE CUSTOMER?We believe that Innovation should not only be concerned with the external world. When we use the term ‘customer’ or ‘end user’ it encompasses internal customer and employees. The link between employee satisfaction, external customer satisfaction, and financial results has been well established. HR functions are in a unique position to use innovative thinking and Agile Innovation to create employee experiences that increase engagement.

14“A Chinese farewell to Six Sigma,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 11th, 2019.15 https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/16 https://www.growly.io/spotify-engineering-model-with-squads-tribes-chapters-and-guilds/

17 America’s largest mortgage provider.18 http://www.michipreneur.com/quicken-loans-innovates-with-a-small-business-culture/

ALIGN BEHIND THE INNOVATION EFFORTSWhen Bosch implemented its version of Agile Innovation, it fundamentally changed the way its Executive Team worked. They became leaders of innovation and adopted several innovative tools and techniques to run their board meetings and to interact with their direct reports in new ways.19

The Executive Team became Innovation Coaches collaborating together (and with) the business, on new projects. This behaviour encouraged a new way of working throughout the entirety of Bosch’s work structures.

The Executive no longer sat through PowerPoint presentations – instead they held their meetings standing up, ran Innovation Sprints and articulated a clear Innovation Direction for the business. This new way of working also allowed them to spot systemic blockers to innovation, while simultaneously breaking

MOVING AT PACE.

This way of working has had some significant business impact. Bosch’s strategic growth plan focusses heavily on monetising the opportunity offered by the Internet of Things (IoT). However, IoT is complex and constantly evolving. Linear and hierarchical ways of working do not lend themselves to such a pioneering field. As a result of the cultural Environment being built by the Executive Team, the business is able to move at pace, with high levels of experimentation and autonomy. This has resulted in many new innovations and spin off businesses; such as a new way for asparagus farmers to monitor ground temperatures via a smart phone app, a project which was itself spun into a separate enterprise and took just three weeks from ideation to first prototype.21

EMPOWER INNOVATION TEAMS TO MAKE AUTONOMOUS DECISIONSTo ensure innovation is delivered at pace, leaders must empower their teams to take decisions without constantly seeking permission from managers and other stakeholders within the hierarchy.

This autonomy & empowerment improves motivation, and it is a corner stone of Spotify’s innovation programme. Innovation Squads are empowered to make the decisions required to move a project forward and to experiment with new Prototypes, while also “minimising hand offs and waiting, so we can scale without getting bogged down with waiting and dependencies.”22

To deliver successful autonomy and empowerment, it is important that everyone understands where their work fits within their overall Innovation Direction, and

when a decision should be made locally versus when it might need to be escalated. Spotify compare their innovation Squads to players in a jazz band, each of whom have an important role to play, but who still need to listen to each other and focus on the whole song together. No one individual is more important than anyone else, and they each have a particular skill that they are able to bring to the table. However, if one player goes off score, the overall effect is chaos and disorder; and the entire performance is ruined.

To ensure that appropriate checks and balances are in place, whilst creating an environment of high autonomy WL Gore have developed the concept of ‘the waterline.”

“Everyone at Gore consults with other knowledgeable Associates before taking actions that might be "below the waterline,” causing serious damage to the enterprise.23

This concept futureproofs the organisation by ensuring that no team member can sink the ship by taking the organisation below the waterline; i.e., by creating an innovation where the risk is so high that it endangers the existence of the wider organisation.

down barriers that have traditionally slowed new ideas down.

The leadership team at Bosch were building an Innovation Environment, the second element of The Innovation Ecosystem20 – they were creating the cultural conditions to encourage and enable innovation.

As part of this move to become a truly innovative organisation, Bosch articulated a series of new leadership principles, deeply rooted within the world of innovation.

By articulating leadership behaviours that link so closely to innovation, Bosch are re-enforcing the message that the way the work is done is as important the work that is actually done, and indeed symbiotic with this. Their Executive Team are role modelling both an innovation methodology and innovation behaviours.

19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=59&v=jYpAVKgqFig20 “The Innovation Ecosystem” O’Keeffe, MOK, Rethink Press 2018

21 The Internet of Things, De Sauiles Martin, Routledge Focus, 201622 https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/23 https://www.gore.com/about/our-beliefs-and-principles

Agile’ is not about Executives asking their teams to achieve their objectives or to innovate faster. However, an output of working in an Agile manner can often be an increase pace and speed.

To achieve this increased PACE, leadership teams need to:

1. Align behind the innovation efforts and role model innovative ways of working and thinking.2. Empower innovation teams to make autonomous decisions.

(source http://w

earebosch.com

/index.en.htm

l)

EXPANSIVE AND REDUCTIVE THINKINGInnovation is as much about behaviour as it is about process. Behaviours influence mindset and mindset influences the ability to stretch boundaries and imagine something that currently does not exist.

At different stages in innovation, you are required to think in different ways.

When creating an Innovation Direction think expansively, scan the horizon for opportunities and listen to end users to identify unmet needs, desires and problems. Once you have identified these opportunity areas, think Reductively and articulate an initial area of focus for your innovation efforts.To ideate you should return to an Expansive mindset.

HAVE AN EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET.

In The Lean Start Up,24 Eric Rees calls this “Build, Measure, Learn.” Rees argues that start-ups create scrappy prototypes, called Minimal Viable Products, and quickly place them into the hands of the end user. They study the responses of the end users and learn what works and what doesn’t work. This learning is used to iterate the product, improve it and make it more responsive to the end user’s needs.

“Rees argues that this approach reduces the risk of failure as “The Lean Start Up methodology has as a premise that every start-up is a grand experiment that attempts to answer a question. The question is not "Can this product be built?" Instead, the questions are "Should this product be built?”25

“Build, Measure, Learn” creates a continuous feedback loop between the end user and the innovation team. It reduces uncertainty and encourages rapid experimentation. At each stage, customer feedback is used to rapidly iterate (or re-build) the MVP; which is then tested against a set of criteria (Measure); and the resulting customer or end user feedback is used to improve the offering (Learn) or to change direction and try something new (pivot).

Start-ups work in this way, and at this pace, because they are often focused on staying financially viable for just long enough to successfully scale their innovation and to finally realise their value.

Whilst most corporates are fortunate not to be in this position, early prototyping can provide innovation teams with a structure to help ensure they listen to the voice of the customer and adapt their innovation to respond to it.

AN ACCEPTANCE OF FAILUREThe ‘F word’ is often mentioned in the context of innovation.

If innovation is about developing new solutions to problems, it is logical that sometimes these solutions will not work – or indeed that they will fail or that the first attempt may not be 100% perfect.

Yet we have been taught from an early age to avoid failure or that failure is bad. Most business executives have not got to the position they hold today, by failing.

At The Innovation Beehive, we believe that there is often confusion between failure and poor performance. It is this confusion that has led to a fear of being seen to fail.

Failure is an intrinsic part of doing something new. If you don’t fail, you are not thinking expansively enough, and you are being reductive too early in the innovation cycle.

What is important about failure, is failing at the right time.

We have noticed that by the time a new innovation is publicly shared, it may have already received significant investment or resources. It has reached an element of scale and there are vested interests inside the organisation that can work hard – even subconsciously- to avoid seeing it fail.

We encourage you to share your prototypes with end users as early as possible. Put a rough version in their hands. See how they interact with it and what they use it for.

If your end user doesn’t respond to your prototype as you would have imagined, what is their behaviour telling you is important or needs to be in place?

A fear of failure can be reduced by actually building it into the innovation process. It helps to reduce risk before you start to scale.

Failing at a job or delivering poor performance is very different from innovation failure. Poor performance can be caused by a number of issues, such as a skill gap or a lack of engagement. It should be addressed as part of everyday management practice.

It would be true to say that a poor performer or an unengaged team member is unlikely to create your next and most exciting innovation, but it would equally be true to say that someone who constantly fails during the innovation process, is very likely to do that job for you. They will constantly learn from your end users and are, therefore, more likely to create an innovation of true value.

This may be supported by different brainstorming techniques to help you to generate new ideas and solutions.

Finally, once you have generated ideas, you will need to think Reductively and judge the desirability and feasibility of your ideas. You should decide which of them you will build into early prototypes, to be shared with customers and end users for feedback and iteration.

EARLY PROTOTYPINGThere is much discussion in the world of business around start-ups. From our experience, what start-ups are particularly good at doing is two things - early prototyping and iterating.

24 Reis, E. THe Lean Start Up: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business, 2011.25 http://theleanstartup.com/principles

The final element of delivering Agile Innovation is working with an experimental mindset.

Whilst you may have the most robust or sophisticated innovation process in your industry, if you do not have an experimental mindset, you will simply be completing a series of tasks and following a process. You will not realise the true value of any innovation process unless you demonstrate the three elements of an EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET:

1. Expansive and reductive thinking2. Early prototyping 3. An acceptance of failure

During our innovation interventions with clients, we use a tool called Parallel Worlds, where we look outside the organisation at another industry; to see what we can learn from their approach to the challenge we are trying to solve! This is more than simply taking best practice and implementing it in our client’s business. Parallel World thinking identifies the principles behind that best practice and then uses those principles to idea generate; but always in the specific context and culture of our client’s business.

We used this approach when working with a client on developing structures for identifying growth opportunities.

We had a very clear Innovation Direction - how to encourage and enable their front-line airport management to spot some good opportunities to grow the business.

We looked at the success Quicken Loans have had with Bullet Time and then identified some principles to help us to generate an idea:

1. A dedicated and diarised time put aside for innovation

2. The whole team coming together to innovate3. Short and repeated sessions, rather than

multiday workshops4. Clear next steps for any idea generated

One of the ideas created out of our innovation workshop was ‘An Hour for Growth’ – each front-line operation identifies their top 3 strategic priorities; and once a week, they have a session of no more than 60 minutes, where they look for growth opportunities in one of the 3 areas.

Alongside this, an internal project team worked on reviewing the way ideas were advanced from the front line up the organisation and begin to simplify the process.

WORKING WITH FOCUS TO DELIVER BUSINESS GROWTH

u Setting a Clear Innovation Direction

u Structuring with Intent

HOW WE

HAVE DELIVERED

AGILE INNOVATION

WITH OUR

CLIENTS

A global pizza chain had a difficult challenge: much of its new product development was coming from the US-based centre of excellence and was not testing well with the UK customer pallet.

We implemented a programme of customer insight gathering, with a Working Party tasked with coming up with a new product innovation which would significantly differentiate the brand and the customer experience.

The Working Party were sent out to spend time visiting and eating in the company restaurants. They went as real customers, with their friends and families. They were not the usual head off (announced) visits.

The Working Party were encouraged to write down what they heard and observed in the restaurants. At the innovation workshops, they shared their experiences, using an innovation tool delightfully known as ‘Storytelling.’ As the Working Party shared what they had heard and seen, key themes and opportunities began to emerge.

It became clear that the current menu offering was contributing to customer dissatisfaction with the brand.

The brand was a family and value focussed proposition, and yet the menu offer ensured that a family meal was significantly more expensive that competing brands because in order to give every member of the family the pizza they wanted, they were required to buy individual pizzas, which resulted in a large bill at the end of the meal.

If the parent tried to control the cost of the meal by reducing the amount of pizzas being ordered, it risked one or more of the family members having to eat a pizza that they didn’t really like, and this significantly reduced their experience.

WORKING WITH FOCUS TO DEVELOP AN INNOVATION TRAINING PROGRAMMEu Listening to the Voice of the Customer

u Structuring with Intent

We were approached by a manufacturing business to develop a bi-annual training programme which would develop the innovation capability of their global high potential talent.

We interviewed a number of internal stakeholders to understand their experience of successful and unsuccessful training interventions. This gave us some real insight into their experience and expectations as our internal customers.

We met with R&D, customer service and the sales teams to understand what was happening in the market, what their customers wanted, and what innovations and changes were on the horizon. We found out what pockets of the organisation were delivering innovation and customer closeness well; and we included these examples in our training material.

We developed key insight platforms, from which we created a prototype of ‘Delivering Innovation Workshop.’ This workshop was then tested with internal customers, similar in profile to our end user.

We gathered feedback during the session and created feedback loops after the session. The final training programme shared this internal best practice and the identified customer needs, and had real credibility because it constantly referenced the business context.

We have successfully run a bespoke Delivering Innovation programme twice a year for the last three years; and each programme is adapted and amended based on delegate feedback. We have recently moved away from classroom-based learning and much of the content is now delivered virtually. The workshop is now focussed around a real business challenge; and our delegates learn by doing, using the content taught virtually, in advance of the workshop, to solve a real business challenge which is set by the business.

Additionally, the parent would also have a poor mealtime experience, as they were obliged to deny their child the dinner they wanted!

We decided that our Innovation Direction should be:

“Make Mum a hero and not the meal time referee, trying to keep order!”

We took the problem of serving everyone the pizza they wanted, whilst still maintaining a value proposition. Using Expansive Thinking and another innovation tool called “Challenge the Assumptions”. We questioned all the beliefs we had about pizza, how it is made, and the distribution of the toppings.

We developed a prototype pizza which was square, and which also contained four toppings in any combination the customer wanted. It was totally at odds with the entire pizza industry and required a real leap of faith by senior leaders, both mentally and financially; as they had to invest in some whole new stock of square-shaped baking tins.

Their empowerment of the innovation team to make the right decision paid off.

This innovation was massively successful, delivering a 9.8% sales increase.

WORKING AT PACE TO DEVELOP A NEW PRODUCT OFFERING u Aligning Behind Innovation Efforts

u Empowering Teams to Make Decisions

SUMMARY.We are living in a time of great change, and old norms and uncertainties are being broken and reformed at a tremendous pace. To thrive in this context of constant disruption, organisations need to be agile and adapt to their environment, as well as to changing customer needs.

There has been a great deal of discussion about Agile working as something which offers a real solution to the problem of adapting to these fragile and uncertain times. However, it is our belief that traditional definitions of what it means to be Agile can actually slow the organisation down; rather than moving at pace, the focus becomes managing the Agile process.

We believe a new definition of Agile Innovation is needed to enable us all to compete in uncertain times. Our definition is grounded in over 10 years of innovating and reviewing the practices of some of the world’s most innovative organisations.

To be truly Agile and win in these disruptive times, organisations do not need yet another process. Instead, their innovation needs to have a clear focus which is deeply rooted in the voice of their customer, with structures and lines of communication that allow them to operate at pace and to encourage an experimental mindset that tests scrappy prototypes early; to minimise risk, and to ensure the final innovation satisfies their customers’ needs, pains or desires.

A global and iconic restaurant company asked us to create an intervention that would enable them to become customer obsessed. We were initially invited to create and deliver customer service training.

Rather than create a customer service training programme, we adopted an Expansive mindset; and we took the Executive team to visit and reflect upon organisations that delivered a consistently positive customer experience.

We then adopted a Reductive mindset and practiced the tool of Parallel World Thinking and identified the Principles that existed within each of the customer obsessed organisations.

It soon became clear that each of these organisations focussed on the welfare and care of their employees first. And this did lead to significant employee engagement. Employees treated each other and the customer with respect, and both reported high levels of satisfaction.

This focus on taking care of each other to take care of the customer was led and role modelled by leaders within the business, and it was ultimately part of their cultural DNA.

We identified our Innovation Direction – our project was not about hospitality training, it was about culture change.

We developed three prototypes ‘Conversations’ for leaders to have with their team. Lasting no more than 90 minutes, these group-based conversations explored what it meant to care for each other and the

customer when things are going well; and of course, when things are not going well also. Examples and scenarios were rooted in our client’s business; and this gave the Conversations both credibility and impact.

We worked with key stakeholders in the business, to gather their qualitative and quantitative feedback about which prototype had the biggest impact on employee and customer engagement. We constantly iterated the prototypes throughout the pilot, adapting the content or delivery mechanism that failed. Eventually two of the prototypes were rejected due to factors such as their failure to deliver sufficient impact, their operational complexity or their labour costs.

The final prototype of our Culture Conversation, impacted both employee and customer metrics above the company average; and these scores were maintained over the subsequent months.

Our client is rolling out this programme as the foundation part of a culture change programme in 2019.

HAVING AN EXPERIMENTAL MINDSET TO DELIVER CULTURE CHANGEu Expansive and Reductive Mindset

u Early Prototyping

u Accepting Failure

WHO WE ARE.THE INNOVATION BEEHIVE EXISTS TO RELEASE THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF PEOPLE AT WORK.

We are innovation practitioners and trainers. Our consulting practice informs our capability building practice, which means our client work is always grounded in practical application and the latest innovation thinking.

We work with our clients in three main areas:

u INNOVATION – We work alongside our clients to develop new innovations around customer experience, business processes and employee engagement, in order to drive growth. We focus on developing our client’s internal capability to deliver innovation for themselves, so that our interventions are still impactful long after we have left.

u CULTURE – We help our clients to articulate their desired culture and help to develop organisations that have high employee engagement and high levels of customer satisfaction.

u LEADERSHIP – We work with leadership teams to develop their organisation’s Innovation Ecosystem, at it is this which is going to deliver continuous innovation and growth.

For more information on how we could help you release the creative potential of your people and deliver growth for your business, please visit: www.innovationbeehive.com.

Or contact our Innovation Director, Joe Nagle: Joe@innovationbeehive.com

www.innovationbeehive.com

hello@innovationbeehive.com

RELEASINGCREATIVE POTENTIAL

THE

OF PEOPLE AT WORK