Make your idea succeed!

Bruno Schenk, June 2022

Practical magic: How to drive innovation into your organization

It’s a bit like a magician performing in a packed theatre. We know that something wonderful is happening, and behind the scenes there has been a great deal of skill and technical engineering to create the illusion – but it’s still amazing. Yet unlike a stage act, innovation can’t be conjured up on demand. It’s a blend of science, insight, trial and error and even luck that turns a spark of an idea into something tangible that can drive business success.

Innovation we can’t ignore

In June 2007 Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, a phone with no keyboard. This truly disrupted the experience and value (much more functionality in on device) from traditional mobile phone manufacturer. The music industry also has something to say here, vinyl, tapes, CDs, datafiles… and now streaming. It’s not only a shift in the way we hear music, it’s also a massive shift in getting access to music you would never have had a chance in a shop to discover. Also, the link directly to the artist, can be a wonderful addition and value. I could go on with examples but you get my point. However, we should also keep in mind that there were many innovations that failed, were too early on the market or the competition simply overtook by mirroring or enhancing features.

Customer experience matters

Innovation is often touted as a key ingredient in overcoming the challenges faced by companies and even nations. These challenges can be broadly placed into two buckets, namely the demand and supply side. Let’s look at demand first and recognize that we live in a world where consumer expectations are at an all-time high. To give one example, ecommerce websites clearly offer a convenient way for people to buy goods and services, saving time and money. Yet now, just being online is not enough, as a survey last year by Digital.com found that 1 in 2 visitors abandon a website that takes more than 6 seconds to load.

The modern consumer in the smartphone and app age expects not just rapid service but also new features. Snapchat, for example, grew its business from the innovation of letting users instantly exchange pictures and videos (i.e. “snaps”) that disappear once viewed. It grew massively and quickly until rival social platforms started offering similar capabilities. Today, key business apps - like Microsoft Office that in earlier decades had a 3-to-5-year product refresh cycle - are now delivered as SaaS products with feature updates measured in just a few weeks or months. Once the genie of delivering fast and constant updates to products and services is out of the bottle, it is impossible to get it back in again!

Supply side conundrum

So, on one hand, we are in a constant surge to meet and exceed customer expectations. And on the other hand, the supply side of any business is innovating. In simple terms, how do I make my products better or less expensive without sacrificing brand quality? How can they become more durable (or, if you believe the conspiracy stories about lightbulbs) – less durable? How do we operate in a way that makes us more profitable or less susceptible to market shocks? Innovating on the supply side is just as important as demand – and in an ideal world, should work together to deliver success.

For example, delivering a service with a 99.9999% (six nines!) uptime equates to 30 seconds of downtime a year. Yet, if you can offer a service for half the cost that delivers 99.99% (four nines) – is the 52 minutes a year of downtime acceptable? This idea can be mapped to product lines. Is it worth investing in expensive precision engineering and robotics to reduce a product’s failure rates, or do you just accept them to be able to produce lower-cost products? It’s a tough call, but some customers might well prefer this seemingly counter-intuitive innovation to gain more value. Developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) service or product is here often the answer - if for being faster on the market, but also getting faster feedback on features, quality and functionalities. There is room in the market for both a beautifully engineered Montblanc Meisterstück and a disposable Bic pen!

Keep the fire burning

In many ways, supply and demand are the wood for the fire. People and culture are the sparks that light the flame. There are so many inspirational origin stories for businesses that started with a few people in a garage. From Cupertino to Mumbai, great ideas often revolve around the combination of technical insight, deep understanding of a particular market and either a new or dramatically improved idea. The world has always had start-ups. Look at the automotive industry as the combustion engine emerged at the turn of the century. By the 1920s, there were several hundred car manufacturers around the world. Innovative ideas were rife and some stuck, like the seat belt, while others, like a steering tiller similar to that of a sailing ship, were quickly discarded. Innovation is often trial and error and for every success, there will be failures. The key is making sure that ideas are scrutinized and challenged in a respectful but constructive way by a diverse set of people. Some ideas that sound unfeasible to a salesperson might be perfectly viable to a software engineer – and vice-versa. It is also a myth that only start-ups can build a culture of innovation.

Using Atos as an example, we are creating so-called innovation boards as part of our customer contract governance, where we look at new features or capabilities that have emerged within the market during the life of a contract. So, we go back to customers (1-2 times a year) and drive the discussion around how this new capability can offer potential benefits and explore ways to adapt the contract for the here and now. This means speaking to customers more often, as well as with a mindset of continual and immediate improvement – rather than just waiting for the clock to reset. Here we often see the shift, that the traditional IT business is finally really on almost every body, or at least the business agenda. Radical ‘outside in’ views can help, looking end to end at you current and future ecosystems and bridging the gap between them in order to provide continuous value to your customers.

Innovation as a cultural mindset

Maturing innovation within the organization requires leadership support, proper organizational design and good innovation practices. I am sometimes asked, “But where does innovation start?” – Monday morning at 8. I don’t mean to be glib, but the truth is that innovation is not a stop-start activity; it is constant and immediate and, for it to be baked into organizational culture, needs constant cultivation like a garden. And that does not just mean the office of the CTO or structured innovation teams, but also down to the staff that meet clients, design and create products and operational teams that deliver products to the market. Instilling culture can start with very practical steps, such as having a mechanism for ideas to be submitted from anywhere in the company. These submissions are collated and assessed by multi-departmental teams on a quarterly basis, with the best ideas given a budget to run as proof-of-concept and evaluated. This bottom-up approach is incredibly valuable.

Another key point to make is to look beyond your own walls. Sometimes, being so close to an organization as a leader can make it difficult to think from an outsider’s perspective. Whether that external viewpoint is from a customer, analyst or even the opinion of a rival, having the humility to listen to and evaluate unfamiliar perspectives about how you can do things differently or more innovatively can be invaluable.

The last thing to say is that not every innovation will be feasible or deliver the expected benefit. However, as leaders, we need to be brave enough to have the courage to sometimes fail. That means committing an investment in time, people, research and development that we must accept may not always pay off. If we don’t, we may become out of touch with our supply and demand led challenges and ultimately become consumed by a race to the bottom as a mere commodity.

Go, try, fail, repeat, succeed and create & capture value!

Innovation is not easy. It’s not magic. But it is something that any business can achieve if you are prepared to commit to the task, empower the culture within the organization and, of course, take a few risks. The higher the willingness to pay for your services or products, the lower the resource costs to produce them, the more margin you have, exploring future products.

Disclaimer; Content Bruno Schenk and pictures Gettyimages, licensed via Atos