A Job Well Done

News has been shared that Canadian Tire Innovations (CTi) had run its course and is shutting down for good at some point in the near future. I feel very fortunate to have had a small part in creation and execution of CTi, and I am going to take this opportunity to share some of the lessons and outcomes, at least from my perspective.

I had the opportunity to run CTi from Day 1, December 3, 2012. CTi was the brainchild of Canadian Tire CTO at the time, Eugene Roman. Eugene was a big thinker, someone who didn't see things the way most people saw things. It's one of those things that made him unique, and great. Eugene hired me to run CTi out of the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, ON. This was the first of it's kind in Canada...a big 'non-tech' company looking to work with a startup ecosystem so they can learn what startups do well, and bring that secret sauce, back to the larger organization. In the process the startup community would benefit greatly from Canadian Tire's influence, their national scale, and the opportunity to work with Canada's largest retailer.

CTi was also created to be a builder. Large organizations rarely have developers, they have project managers, integrators, and connectors, but not builders. We were lucky to have some great developers & designers, co-op students and partners like University of Waterloo, WLU, and Conestoga College.

For the next few years, CTi grew quickly in a number of areas. We grew the team from an army of 1 in December, 2012, to a team of 12 in Kitchener, and another matching group in Winnipeg. We grew in knowledge of how to work inside a large organization, and how to work with startups in a tight knit community. We grew in influence. Dozens of other large organizations from all over the world came through Communitech and asked great questions, copied the things we did well, and did knew things that we learned form.

We also grew our influence inside Canadian Tire. At the beginning, people didn't know what to do with this group of "cowboys & cowgirls" in Kitchener. Slowly through hundreds of meetings, presentations, workshops, and coffees, people inside the organization learned how to work with us, and we learned how to work with them. As a group of people who knew the startup world better than the corporate world, we had lots to learn about how to work inside the Mothership, instead of against it. Sometimes it was required to ruffle feathers and step on toes, but we needed to follow those up with solid execution, strong arguments for change, and trust and respect throughout the organization.

One of the unique aspects of Canadian Tire was the relationship with the Dealers, the men and women who owned and ran the stores. I learned so much from working with many great dealers. They loved their stores. They loved their customers. They also loved how retail was, and not necessarily how it was changing. We had the opportunity to interact with almost every dealer in the country and they taught me some of the most valuable lessons that I still use today. In particular, my friend Justin Young taught me so much about how to think about analytics, behavioural psychology, and storytelling.

I left Canadian Tire in 2016 to work with Communitech to help build and grow their overall Corporate Innovation program. I still had the opportunity to work with Canadian Tire, their new lab director, and the people that continued to support innovation in Toronto and Calgary. I was excited to see how much influence the work that a 95+ year old retailer had on this startup ecosystem in Kitchener-Waterloo, and across the country.

Ultimately CTi was shut down because more parts of the organization had drank the Kool-Aid and had developed their own capabilities in house. This means that the team at CTi had done its job. Innovation teams shouldn't live forever. McKinsey says that each group in organizations should have activities in each Horizon, and not rely on a single entity to do the Horizon 3 work. Geoffrey Moore would be happy to see more Incubation activity happening across the organization, and not just concentrated in a small group in IT.

For those that are interested in the lessons, I've assembled a number of them. This is a list that is combined from my work inside a large organization, as well as working as a consultant from the outside. I'd love to hear my network debate these lessons and see if they are as relevant today as they were 7 years ago when this journey started. These are also in no particular order. Each of these lessons change in importance depending on the context they are presented in.

Lesson 1 - Everyone has a job to do, and some of them are in direct opposition to your job. In the context of innovation, it's not everyone's job to be innovative. In fact, most people's job in large organizations are to execute tasks that are not up for debate, improvements, or disruption. Be empathetic to this fact and learn to work with them to find common ground, or work-arounds. I had the chance to work closely with the RCAF, and many of the debates we had was how most of their organization was built around execution excellence. We don't want to 'test and learn' as you fly a multi-billion dollar plane and people's lives are on the line, but we can ask the question whether it's appropriate to fly the plane in that context in the first place. Find the opportunity to learn from that execution excellence and apply it to parts of the organization that need some help to be a little more creative, and still execute at a high level.

Lesson 2 - It's almost always cheaper to buy vs build, but being able to build is vital. I'm not a technical leader, and I had the opportunity to hire and work with great technical leaders. Large corporates don't often have software developers, and if they do, they are probably working on older languages that aren't as popular in the startup community. If we wanted to work with a startup that has been built with the latest techstack, leveraging the newest javascript libraries, but our entire corporate system is built on SQL servers and .NET architecture, it makes it difficult to talk to one another. The large organization needs to be able to speak all languages, and for that part, so do startups. If you are a startup selling to large enterprise and can't easily integrate with older infrastructure, you face an uphill battle to integrate the 2 systems.

Lesson 3 - There is a lot of value in speed. The world is moving so fast these days that companies that have long technical roadmaps and software licenses will be left behind. The world will no longer wait for you. There are too many options for customers/partners and they will choose someone else. Corporates need to learn to be good partners, but not at the expense of scalability and security. Be fast AND be prudent.

Lesson 4 - Corporates aren't dumb and slow, they just have to play by different rules. I heard this all the time, a young startup would tell me that they are going to take us down and we are just making stupid decisions. Corporates have constraints that startups don't have...like thousands/millions of customers that won't be OK with a data breach, server down time, or slow response time, like a startup customer is. Corporates have a lot to teach startups about scaling software, due process to mitigate risk, and management practices to enable communication. As a startup grows, there are a number of lessons that can be learned from big companies. Become a student of all the things they do well, then change the ones that suck.

Lesson 5 - There are tools out there to help. When we started, we didn't know very much. Design Thinking was not well known, the Lean Startup had just been published, and McKinsey's 3 Horizon Model was only a few years old and not widely adopted. New javascript libraries were popping up every week. We tried new frameworks every project. We were early days and had to make many of the mistakes that others hadn't thought of yet. As a group, we were constantly learning and sharing these lessons within our team, but also to other corporate innovation leaders that would listen. Today Innovation Lab Directors are smarter, faster, and better at doing what we were trying to do 7 years ago. Maybe our legacy is making those mistakes so the entire industry of corporate innovation got smarter faster.

Lesson 6 - Corporate Innovation doesn't have to be theatre. We were accused of trying to tell stories instead of just building new products or services. The truth is that the Lab was moving faster than the mothership ever could. This is by design. Because many of our innovations weren't ready for prime time, or the organization wasn't able to scale them yet, we only could tell stories. These stories influenced people inside the organization, and they took those stories and looked to apply the things that made sense in the Corporate context. Theatre isn't all bad, because you have to be able to tell a story that resonates across many stakeholders. But ultimately, these stories have to lead to meaningful change in the organization for innovation to be successful.

Lesson 7 - It was the most fun I've ever had in my career. Personally I look back at my time at CTi and feel so fortunate that I had a chance to lead and build something meaningful. We weren't perfect, but we were good enough that others built on what we did. I also think that Canadian Tire benefitted from CTi in ways they never thought they would. We created a new language inside the company. Whiteboards popped up. People collaborated more. We challenged the status quo more. Everyone asked better questions. All of this leads innovation to be the virus. To be successful, it must spread beyond the innovation team, and into the broader organization.

This leads me to the final lesson. Innovation teams must look to make themselves irrelevant. Not that innovation will cease to be important, but that it won't need a dedicated team to catalyze the innovation activity anymore. Now, I say this knowing that it's a slippery slope once it's no one's job to innovate, metrics get missed, ideas get shelved and corporations go back to business as usual. So it's up to the management of the organization that when the innovation team has done it's job well, there's continued management of the innovation process, the teams that are participating, and measurement of the success/failure of the dispersed activities. Perhaps the old team becomes coaches for the new team. Perhaps they are set up for success inside delivery teams to help them execute differently. Whatever that next role is, ensure that it doesn't go back to business as usual.

Here's to a job well done. Thanks to everyone who played a part in this exciting time in Canadian Tire's history, but also that of Communitech and Kitchener-Waterloo. Andrew Gorzny Danny Ho Dustin Duffy Brandon Riddell Adam Merrifield