Innovation

Why do organizations tend to pull back budgets for exploration and opportunity discovery when they fail to meet their revenue goals, despite having aggressive revenue targets moving forward?

When uncertainty creeps into the core business, the natural reaction is to stay away from it. But this is actually 'risk-taking'. Isn’t continuing to execute the way 'it’s always been done' in the face of uncertainty a path to failure?

 It does not have to be a resource intensive endeavor. The goal is to bust assumptions and cut through biases to gain new knowledge, mitigating risk and improving efficiency in delivering the desired outcome. The likelihood is that teams will also discover insights that point to new growth opportunities.

How do you change the nature of work in a 300 year old company employing more than 50K people in more than a dozen countries? How do you teach, inspire and manage them? How do you bring new skills to middle management? How do you become truly customer driven, fast moving, and agile?

In partnership with the Chief Innovation Office, MTN and ING pioneered a transformation model named “PACE” for customer-driven innovation and employee empowerment to accelerate the speed of brining bold products to market.

AI and Digital technologies are creating a seismic shift that has reshaped industries, disrupted traditional business models, and left no corner of the world untouched. At its core, effective AI adoption and digital transformation requires a human-centric approach. Enter Growth Innovation — a blend of methodologies that acknowledges and navigates uncertainty and complexity effectively, enabling businesses to adapt to ongoing disruptions quickly.

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Brant Cooper discusses what it takes to complete rapid experiments and how it can be the fast track to overcoming uncertainty.

The goal is to separate what customers will do vs. what they say they’ll do. Too many entrepreneurs and corporate product people rely on “positive feedback” to make decisions. Countless hours and dollars are wasted assuming they know what their customers want based on little to no evidence. With rapid experimentation, customer behavior is a key part of the process.

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Innovation is a powerful force that can drive organizations forward and make a meaningful impact in the world. But it is not a one-size-fits-all concept. Every organization must define innovation within its unique context and aspirations. Understanding the multi-faceted nature of innovation can provide a framework for organizations to define and pursue innovation in a purposeful and strategic manner. By defining innovation beyond mere technology and patents, and embracing an innovation mindset everywhere, organizations can embrace a broader perspective that encompasses problem-solving and value creation.

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Brant Cooper discusses what innovation truly means and why so many organizations fail at it. It often means something different to varying members of the organization. It needs to be defined by the organization, then shared with everyone.

While “innovation” might be one method of achieving priorities and goals, having an innovation mindset is required no matter the pursuit. The innovation mindset is characterized by behavior reflecting learning and exploration. It’s how to deal with uncertainty.

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Whether discovering a new value stream for a still-to-be-launched product or seeking to improve existing value creation in the face of new uncertainty, the task may seem daunting. The Value Stream Discovery Loop and Moves the Needle is available to help. The tool provides an intuitive progression to enable both value stream discovery and optimization.

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Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product). “Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation. But what if the value isn’t there? Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating?”

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The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective.

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The future of successful innovation labs is NOT to take on the responsibility of invention or figuring out new business models that will disrupt their industry. Rather, it is to become a “center of excellence” for supporting an “innovation mindset” throughout the organization.

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In this episode, NYT bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper goes over the common errors associated with innovation labs and the real pivot they need to make in order to survive their 3-5 year lifespan. 

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Innovation labs have expertise but it's not invention. They excel at exploration work, and exploration is the solution for how companies should deal with uncertainty.
Therefore, we should be turning the innovation lab into a source that can drive exploration using KASE (Kickstart, Accelerate, Scale, Endure).

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Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)

There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.

What’s so interesting about KPIs and OKRs is every few years there’s a new framework for metrics, but essentially, they’re always about outcomes. So, what are the desired outcomes?
We want more customers. We want happier customers. We want more revenue, more growth, and more market share.

That's going to keep the bosses happy and their bosses happy. And ultimately, will make investors and Wall Street happy. The challenge is when we’re down levels from those mega-desired outcomes, we don't feel like we can influence them too much.