Innovation exchange - key learnings

SAS has been helping customers innovate for a few decades. Our help comes in several forms. The most obvious is perhaps tools to help companies make better data-driven decisions. However, the knowledge of our many experts also helps customers to engage and reflect more deeply on what they want to achieve and how.

Most recently, we have also been facilitating peer discussions on common challenges around innovation, and especially digital transformation. We have found over several years that there is a real appetite among c-level executives for sharing information and experience with their peers. However, how can we make sure that these discussions bring real value for all those involved? After all, these are senior executives—and they don’t want to waste their time.

Three elements of successful innovation

There are three core elements that need to come together for innovation to be successful. These are:

·???????Desirability, or whether your innovation is solving the right customer problem or ‘pain point’

Fundamentally, desirability is about whether your innovation is addressing a real issue for your customers. It needs to be an essential, not just a ‘nice to have’, so that customers ‘need’ it, rather than just think it might be quite good. To see whether your innovation passes this test, ask yourself what task you are helping your customers to achieve, and then how well your innovation solves the pain points within that task. If it doesn’t solve the main pain points, then you may need to pivot slightly to address more of them.

·???????Feasibility, or whether you are building on your key organisational strengths

The Ansoff Matrix analyses innovation by looking at whether you are expanding into new products or new markets. In effect, it looks at your existing strengths. Expanding into either new products or new markets plays on your existing strengths, even if it requires you to develop some new ones too. Expanding into both new markets and products at the same time—a process known as diversification—requires you to develop a whole new set of skills, and is unlikely to be very successful. A feasible innovation uses about 80% of your company’s key (existing) operational capabilities and strengths, and ideally only requires new capabilities that can be built on existing strengths.

·???????Viability, or whether your innovation contributes to long-term growth

Viability looks ahead, to see how your customers will want to use your innovation both now and in the future. It looks at profit, but also at sustainability of both supply and demand across the entire value chain. To pass the viability test, you have to look beyond short-term profit and into the longer term, to assess how your customers will judge value in the future.

In building our first peer group of senior executives, we therefore focused on these three elements. We invited executives who we felt represented each of these areas and would be prepared to share their knowledge, and learn from others.

Building trust and relationships

This was the starting point, and enabled us to invite people who we felt would be interested, engaging and engaged. In the first meeting, we focused on building trust and relationships, and establishing a core ‘wish list’ of topics for meetings. We also established the use of Chatham House rules (that participants can use the information revealed during meetings, but nobody may share the identity or affiliation of any participants). Once trust had started to develop, two of the group volunteered to talk about their own innovation and digital transformation projects, and share their learning. This sparked a huge amount of interest, and others have volunteered to follow in future meetings.

Co-creating value

What have we learned? First, that our executive customers are interested in discussing innovation and digital transformation among their peers. They want to hear about others’ experience. They also value the different perspectives brought by having attendees from different industries and in different roles. However, the environment is crucial to building trust and sharing information openly. There are also geographical constraints: many people are not prepared to travel far for this kind of event, so small and relatively local groups works best.

Second, we now know that this kind of curated exchange of knowledge on transformation and innovation has value to both SAS and its customers. It is valuable to us to hear how our customers are managing their problems and using SAS products to innovate. This helps us to target innovations more effectively, and therefore serve customers better.

?Check out https://www.sas.com/en_us/explore/analytics-in-action/innovation.html