Innovation Programs for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs)

We're excited to see that more and more small and medium sized companies (SMEs) are reaching out to us. For a long time we only had a limited offer for this segment. In particular our innovation team coaching was just not affordable to SMEs.

With our new innovation program licenses that all changes. With this new offer we are able to further democratize innovation. Now our secrete (innovation) sauce is available not just to large global players, but also to SMEs. The demand in this segment is generally driven by a new innovation leader. This is a person who has the task to implement innovation, but without a large team and often without deep innovation experience. With our program licenses we can accompany SMEs in an affordable way. I'm personally pumped about this, because making our tools accessible to anybody on the planet drives me. With our innovation programs we can now bring world-class innovation and all our experience accumulated over two decades to a broader range of companies.

In the last months we learned what really matters to SME innovation leaders. It's more or less three main things: access to process, knowledge, and continuous learning.

A) A turnkey Process: How to Select Ideas to Invest In

Innovation is all about creating value for customers and value for the business. Unfortunately, it's never obvious which ideas are likely to succeed... and if you know it's going to work, it's probably not innovation. SMEs need a strong process to generate, shape, and test ideas, in order to invest into the right ones.

Now as an innovation leader you could do one of three things. You could train yourself and then design and implement such a process. You could hire consultants to help you. You could hire a person to do the work for you. The first option is slow and time consuming. The second and third option is expensive.

With program licenses we now offer a new option to directly address the speed & cost challenge. We combined all our intellectual property IP into a turnkey program that is ready to use immediately. We packaged process, slides, workshops, and workspaces in a way to get users started right away. SME leaders now can immediately shape and test ideas by themselves or with a team.

We even went as far as creating a guided customer discovery interview process with pre-structured workspaces. This allows innovators to conduct world-class customer interviews with 0 prep after shaping their ideas. Even more importantly, it takes away the steep learning curve of conducting great customer discovery interviews. Everything is pre-structured and trimmed to be simple and applicable.

When we realized how powerful the scripted process was, we started to simplify things down a lot and make them bite-size. At the beginning SME innovation leaders felt overwhelmed by getting started. So we learned and broke things down into smaller chunks thanks to our amazing customer success team and product management.

B) Knowledge Access: Get Answers to Most Pressing Innovation Management Challenges

Access to knowledge & advice was the other big "want" from SME innovators, besides access to a turnkey process. Innovators need answers to very concrete questions. Because they are launching an innovation practice for the very first time, they have tons of questions.

Questions span a wide area of unknowns. How do we convince functions like marketing or legal to collaborate? How do we get senior executives to support the innovation process? How do protect people's time so they can work on innovation projects, while they're tasked with execution? To provide answers, we have weekly office hours with our senior advisors. These are group sessions that allow any program license buyer to participate and ask their very specific questions. I even used to run these sessions personally, to learn what clients are struggling with.

When people need deeper advice they may hire our senior advisors for a full session. A common topic is the design of an innovation strategy with their leadership team. Another topic is innovation insights for leaders to educate their senior leadership.

C) Continuous Improvement: Expand and Evolve Innovation Practice

The last aspect that I'm personally most excited about is the continuous improvement of our innovation programs. Today we productized certain aspects of the innovation process, but not all by far. When clients subscribe to our programs the constantly get access to our latest versions and latest improvements.

As I mentioned, we productized the customer discovery interviews to bring the learning curve down to 0. We intend to do the same for other experiments and that even includes ai features. It's like Software as a Service, but it's actually Programs as a Service. You benefit from every single update we add without paying a single sent more. And since we're always learning from working with some of the most advanced innovators around the planet we can bring that right back into our programs.

Buying program licenses is basically like buying access to Strategyzer's contionuous IP evolution. And contrary to books, programs constantly update and package all our IP into the most practical applicable way. Contrary to a pure software platform, program licenses contain everything you need. You get our latest process, our newest slides, our best insights, and our most relevant experiments in a productized way.

Surprise Insight

I'll admit that at the beginning I didn't believe SMEs could become a viable customer segment. Now I'm amazed how great SME innovation leaders are doing with our programs. It's exciting to watch. Some of them are now as good as the Strategyzer team at applying our tools in only a couple of months.

This segment came out of countless conversations of our own internal explorer team who do customer discovery. They unearthed that our programs are a perfect fit for SME leaders. Programs are affordable and allow them to operate like a large company innovation leader who has an entire team. Now our challenge is to learn how to acquire SME innovation leaders globally. Quite an exciting challenge, because I'm so into democratizing innovation for smaller organizations.

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Contact [email protected] to learn more or read up on Guided Programs on our website.