How can you go Beyond Digital?

It’s the battle royale of business. On the one side are the poster boys of global commerce today, the 21st century born digitals. Armed with gargantuan valuations that are disproportionately higher than their assets, revenue or profits, they are riding a promise of a virtual tomorrow built with a Midas touch version 2.0. On the other side are massive 20th century giants, with a far greater share of current assets – capital, people, customers, etc. Having led the way to the turn of the millennium, they are being reborn digital, determined to emerge leaders of the new world as well.

The victor is yet to be pronounced.

The reality however is that the victor will not be found in any one of the two worlds – virtual or physical. The emerging winners of the 21st century will be enterprises who are able to unite the physical and virtual world into experiences that are a competitive advantage unto themselves. This is probably why Uber and Amazon are the rock stars of the 21st Century. At HCL we have spent significant time thinking through this 21st Century Enterprise concept and you can read about this construct here.

Let’s take the question a step further today: What is the single most important factor driving the creation of this United Experience?

The answer is no rocket science. It lies in the ability to industrialize innovation; near-real time. But, hang on a minute – while the “What” of this answer may not be rocket science, when we look across our 500 clients who are primarily G-2000, it does appear that the “How” of this answer is not that easy.

Recently, Anant Gupta blogged about digital transformation in an article titled “Sprint vs Marathon”. The premise was that digital winners have been successful in converting high quality sprints into a continuous journey of digital transformation. And this I believe is the challenge most enterprises face with innovation – too often is it a sprint, great work which does not really convert to long term business outcomes.

I write this looking out over the incredible theater of dreams at Manchester United, where we are just announced our global partnership with the Red Devils. HCL’s role as the Official Digital Transformation Partner to Manchester United gives us the significant opportunity to create an Innovation Marathon, engaging the Clubs 650 million followers, an entire ecosystem of sponsors and contributors to the club’s success. We actually refer to this ecosystem as the User Value Chain. A concept HCL uses significantly in creating the Innovation Marathon.

In effect – we run a continuous innovation process in a methodology we call the UnitedXperience Lab, enabling a multitude of “beyond digital” concepts to go to prototype and finally business value, with minimum risk and maximum speed. HCL has perfected this model through a network of 6 labs already running across the world – but what is most exciting is the 7th. The one we are building inside Old Trafford at their Old Boardroom. While I will explain this methodology – I first wanted to touch upon the location of the UnitedXperience lab – the old boardroom in the stadium. A room which has witnessed some amazing sights – from the entry of a young David Beckham to the team to the selection of Sir Alex Ferguson. In effect, HCL has the privilege of imagining the future in the location most steeped in history.

So what exactly is the UnitedXperience Lab?

To begin, let’s dispel some myths. I want you to create a picture in your mind. If you search for images of innovation labs you will be exposed to spaces with lots of cool technology and hi-tech gadgets. To us this merely means lots of Capex and low speed to market. In order to innovate around human experience, gadgets are merely tactical enablers and need to be treated as such. In your mind – please think garage, not NASA.

However, it is important to note that the Lab is a physical space, and needs to be designed and understood as such. However, it could be ANY physical space – a conference room in New York city is an expensive piece of real estate. The Lab methodology needs to be such that a team could move into this space – drive it (even for a limited time) for multiple innovation projects. And possibly walk out.

The model looks at the Lab as 3 zones. The Brainstorming Zone, the Protyping Zone and the Presentation Zone.  All 3 zones are based on the creation of the User Value Chain for the business – where customers, consumers, employees, partners, etc. are all recognized as User Nodes participating in the creation of value in the business model.  Without going into too much boring detail, let me quickly cover each zone and the specialty that it contains:

1. The Brainstorm: This space uses a concept called the User Pod. The User Pod is at the most basic a table around which the team focused on the business problem at hand can create the problem definition and brainstorm solutions. What makes the User Pod model unique is the use of sociologists, anthropologists and relevant research profiles to create a model that can onboard the psychographic of the target user node onto the pod. In effect, the Pod is designed around one specific user node – say a farmer in a food company user value chain – and all participants at the pod will be able to enter the mind space of the user. In design thinking this is called the empathy stage – we take it to new levels in the User Pod.
2. The Prototype: This space is actually centered on the User Value Chain concept, capturing the relevant user node in the context of its entire ecosystem. All the protos that get built by the team in this zone need to be contextual to the value chain and all ecosystem dependencies (including from an applications and data perspective) so that the team can sign off that the proto truly represents a United Experience.
3. The Presentation: What we like to do in this zone is to ensure that there are no big screens – and no temptation to use power point! A number of techniques are used here to present the proto through the eyes of the user – the simplest being, getting in a sample of users and handing over the prototype in their hands to enable the group to carefully observe the interaction and the challenges.

While the sections above, and the techniques built for each zone are extremely important, the critical success factors lie outside of these in many ways. From our experiences we have found 3 absolutely critical factors in success or failure.

1. Demand Management: It is very easy to set up an Innovation lab, and not really have a definite way of generating a pipeline for it. There are many techniques to create and manage demand effectively – one or more of these need to be deployed for success.
2. Purpose: The true governance challenge in digital innovation is bringing a cross functional business team together to drive both governance and utilization. This can only happen if there is clarity of purpose in why it was set up in the first place – with allegiance across the board to this purpose.
3. Measurement: The Lab needs to be measured both from a business impact as well as a throughput perspective in order to answer the ever present ROI question. The model for this needs to be in place in advance of making the investment itself.

While the above “How” model should address how many “What” projects can be considered as throughput; the last question to answer is “Why”.

Why would a successful global enterprise work with a firm like HCL to create a solution for Innovation? This is where we have found an extremely simple answer from customers (like Deutsche Bank) with whom we have a long running lab setup.

The answer lies in the concept of Co-Innovation. In order to truly drive UnitedXperiences – an enterprise requires co-innovation between multiple entities; both internal (across functional silos) and external (partners and such like). An independent 3rd party environment created outside the enterprise firewall somehow allows this to happen independent of internal compulsions, which many a time throw a cultural bottleneck at the innovation process.

The fact is that the future lies “beyond digital” – a world that will unite the physical and virtual, unite the old with the new, unite ecosystems of symbiotic partners, weaving together one comprehensive experience. Let’s create these “UnitedXperiences”. Together.