Innovation Transformation at Siemens - phew, an amazing and exhausting week in Germany!!!

Well, it is Friday, and while I am enjoying some much-needed downtime before my loooooong flight back to Singapore, I finally have a chance to take a breath and reflect after an incredible week of Innovation Transformation with Siemens in Germany.

This week I had the pleasure to have my first partner engagement alongside AWS (with me being the partner instead of being at AWS). Working with a fabulous team of AWS innovation coaches from all over Europe, we led ~70 of Siemens’ most innovative minds through the practical, hands-on Innovation Workshop - “Using Working Backwards to Innovate with Customers”.

The workshop is a 4-day journey that exposes the Mechanisms and underlying tools that any enterprise can leverage to adopt the Amazon Working Backwards mindset and practices. As we know from all the engagements over the last 8 years, enterprises that take the step to rollout these tools out broadly, increase the rate of successful product launches leading to disruptively higher new revenue streams, reduce the cost and time required to innovate, reinvigorate frustrated internal builders, and ensure that they leverage the massive innovative potential previously hidden deep within the org.

On Day One, we went through the 4 tools of Customer Validation. My key takeaway was a reminder of how powerful the tools and processes really are. On the one hand, once you support the ideas and theories of innovation with practical, point-and-click tools, pretty much anyone can be an intrapreneur. As with all good Mechanisms, the process removes the need for “special” people (innovators) or “special” allocated time to innovate. When Innovation is reframed as tools and mechanisms, they can be “engineered into” our day-to-day activities. Innovation simply becomes part of the standard day-to-day way that we build. Nobody needs to come “off the line” on nights or weekends to innovate, and anyone in the org can be a builder.?Also, because we do not tie the act of innovation to a special set of “innovators”, the whole process scales infinitely over time, number of employees, or global spread.

On Day Two we covered Solution Validation. My key takeaway on Day 2 was the reminder that the Scientific Method is freakin’ awesome. As a way to discover truths, it can be applied to building an understanding of nature, but it works equally well at understanding markets, and frankly, as one participant noted, you can use the same tools of Working Backwards to even build a better marriage! Breaking everything down into hypotheses-driven experiments and continual learning actually causes people to be more humble about what they think they know. And this is an outcome the whole world really needs right now!

On Day Three and Four, we covered the final Mechanism: Business Validation.?My key takeaway here was the reminder of how powerful of the 7V framework is.?Basically, anyone, whether they are business minded, technically minded, have experience with business administration, or not, can use this simple set of activities to build out every section of what an internal investor would expect in an enterprise, board-grade business plan.?Because we break the process of writing an Internal FAQ into a set of small, but integrated, team activities, by the time we are at the end of the last day, everyone in the room can speak comfortably about business topics from competitive positioning, segmentation and pricing, to operational risk sales execution, and marketing as if they were formidable, experienced business executives. Most importantly, participants complete the transition from Builder to Intrapreneur, or Inventor to Innovator.

At the end of the day, I cannot speak highly enough about the team at Siemens.?There is clear commitment and strong momentum to use this approach to become even more customer obsessed than they already are, and there is now a core team of change makers who are, as I type this, already propagating the tools out to the wider enterprise (thanks for keeping me cc’d, team). I can’t wait until we can progress on to Phase 2 where we focus on change at an enterprise-wide scale, and I look forward to a career-long relationship with many of this week’s participants.

Thanks also to the AWS Siemens account team in Europe that came together on short notice, made it through the demanding coach-certification process, insisted on highest standards throughout this whole week, and demonstrated, yet again, what it really means to work with Amazon, not as a vendor, but as a true partner.

Last, but not least, thanks to the leaders of Siemens Transformation Club (TClub). Despite, having had the good fortune of being able to work with dozens of global enterprises on their own Innovation journeys, and having seen many versions of the TClub idea, I can now state unequivocally that I was wrong. Grass-roots special interest groups CAN in fact be MORE than Innovation Theatre. I guess they just need leadership that is really committed to action and change. Happy to have been wrong, and I will continue to watch (and steal great practices from) TClub! You are a competitive core competency for Siemens.

#Innovation #TClub #Siemens #HappyAPNPartner #AWS #WorkingBackwards Marc Schlichtner ?Silke Sasano ?Ute Mohr Holger Wild Peter Gratzke Sabine Wein ?Judit Peter Schardt Bruno Quintas Christelle El Helou Max Clements Michael Ingram Nils Brandes Antonela E. Hadad Rishi Kumar T. @ekta bhullar Seb Fox