Understanding Innovation: A Conversation on Frameworks, KPIs, and Success Stories

I would always start with strategy, right? Because strategy makes you think about the process. Strategy is about thinking what you need to do to get somewhere.

So strategy comes first.

I think starting with the strategy, then it allows you to start to think, well, who would know how to solve this? Audience. We could have a really good process, but if that really good process isn't in front of the right audience, then it's not going to be there. So the strategy makes you think about the audience. The strategy might make you think about, okay, what's the skills, knowledge, and experience within that audience. Like, do we have the right talent and composition in order to do this really big thing that we want to do?

Thanks for doing this, Charlie.

No worries. Good to see you, mate.

How are you feeling?

Good.

Good.

Yeah.

Any goals for the new year?

To probably be more patient, but then I say that every year.

Yep.

Um, I think I'm more and more conscious of my health every year, but I'm also more conscious that you set these big ambitious goals in January and then it never happens. And so trying to be more, a, kind when it's not happening so you can get back into what you should be doing, kind to myself, uh, and also more realistic.

Yeah, that comes with age, isn't it? So Introduce yourself, Charlie. Let us know who Charlie is.

Who Charlie is? Well, I'm Charlie D'Urso. Um, we know each other because we work together, uh, and had a lot of fun building exciting stuff on this topic today. Um, but I'm a 3 times founder. Um, I founded a company in the publishing sector, sold that to DMGT in 2013. I've got a digital agency with a management team in place. And early in 2023, I sold my innovation management software company to Wazoku, where I'm now their Chief Innovation Officer.

Nice. That was interesting journey, rightly mentioning idea drop. I love that. 4 years trying to figure out what innovation is on a big scale, isn't it? So with all the guests in the show, we kick off with with this question. What do you think, in your mind, is the main thing or the most important thing towards the tech growth?

The most important thing to a tech company's growth probably is the, the lowest common denominator are the brains within it.

So that's a mouthful. A little bit more explanation.

Let's think about it. So What, what's the thing that you must have to make something work? That's the right composition of brains, complementary skills. Um, and then what, what do those skills look like in a, in a startup? Let's say, let's put it like this way: what's the formula to success? I definitely think hard work. Like, I don't think that you can remove hard work. People that go work smart, 4-hour week, I'd love to know how they did it, because in all 3 situations with me, it was hard slogging, staying out in the extra mile lane. When people were in bed, I was working.

You get out what you put in, isn't it?

Mm-hmm. So I think hard work's a hugely important thing. And then I think you need to know that revenue is the beating heart of any business.

100%.

So leaders need to understand how to sell. And selling might not be, hey, I'm selling you this carton of crayons, or I'm selling you a meal. Selling in your job is a direction, um, and I think often we forget that. Like, teachers sell education and nurses sell health, um, and so business leaders are ultimately either doing internal sales or external sales. So being gifted at sales, I think, is important for any companies' growth and having that across the leadership?

Internally, selling in effect is influencing. It's like you have an idea, how do you, how are you going to influence people to buy into your vision and just sort of get on your train? So for me, that leads nicely to innovation, which is in all of these, you have to be creative in a way and come up with something, innovate in all these sectors, selling, tech, in any department within the business, isn't it? You have a deep, deep knowledge around innovation. So how does Charlie define innovation? Like what, what is in your mind?

I think you stitched me up there with, I have a deep, deep knowledge and now I'm going to have a really bad definition from it. Well, listen, I think it's allowed to be different for different organizations. First of all, what I would say is that it's really important that you do have a definition for it. Because you need everyone knowing what it is in order to be able to do it in your organization. So I like to define it as something quite simple and inclusive. Now that doesn't work for all organizations, so that's my caveat, but something along the lines of it's doing something better and delivering value from it, or it's doing something totally new and delivering value from it. But in both those situations, the operative is it's delivering value from it. Um, so, um, I like a broad definition because it's accessible and inclusive. And so let me give you a, an anecdote. Um, if I'm a big organization and I want to harness the collective brainpower of that organization to discover the latent ideas that exist within it. If I tell my organization I only want big, radical, disruptive ideas, there's a huge barrier. There's like, "Gosh, is my idea radical? Is it disruptive? Am I smart enough? Am I intelligent enough?" So you suddenly, you're narrowing your pool of what could be fabulous. Disruptive and radical innovations by not making the barrier to entry much lower and remembering that there's tremendous value in, hey, this process could be X times many— X times more efficient if it was this. And if you get people comfortable with much easier ideas that deliver value— where do I put them? What happens with them? Pay my leaders invest and they support them, then you're building confidence for them to have those more aha moments that might change the game, might find you a new market or a new product application, etc., etc.

Okay, so I picked up on a couple of things here. Um, the types of innovation. So you mentioned disruptive innovation and a couple of them. Is there like a real definition of types of innovation, continuous innovation? That's what we did with Idea Drop, isn't it?

Yeah, I think that, um, yes, there is. I think that continuous improvement is— a lot of innovation teams will say that's not innovation, and strictly speaking, they're right. Strictly speaking, in an innovation team It's something totally new and radical that doesn't exist before, isn't it?

Okay.

And, and so what we were trying to do, as you know, at Idea Drop, is be broader than that and be interested in any idea that could deliver value. And that by creating an ecosystem of trust, that ideas that delivered value would go to people with budget and resource and something strategic to deliver and invest in those ideas if they were strategic and there was a need there.

Okay.

And then we would fish out from creating that ecosystem the more disruptive and radical ideas. So I think that— I think again, like, I don't like my— as you know, to get caught into definitions.

Yeah.

Because I think it's important that an organization defines language that's right for them. Hey, innovation for us is purely like technology, and that technology has parameters as well. It needs to be SaaS or needs to be hardware. Um, or it's a science, you know. Hey, it's got, it's got to be a drug of some kind.

Okay. Um, so if everybody defines their own way of innovating, which is fair, all businesses have different contexts, you know, for some, if I'm a huge business, I want some radical ideas because, you know, I'm competing at the level of the whole global market. If I'm small, I know, 10-people business, you know, innovation for me is probably going to be just improving my processes or, you know, some hiring processes. Is there an element in all of these which undoubtedly applies to everybody? When it comes to innovation? So one thing you said is delivery, right? Like first you come up with idea, then how do you make that happen? So I feel like it doesn't matter how you define innovation, delivery will be part of everyone's lives. Is there anything else which is like fundamental, you know, elements to that innovation recipe?

I think the common thread across all our clients at Idea Drop and now Wazuki is that a good idea, which in many organizations would be defined as a good innovation, that the common thread between them all is that they must deliver strategic value.

Okay, so the value.

And, and Mature organizations will go a step further and go measurable strategic value, that it's not loose, that we can quantify that value in some way.

Well, let's talk about KPIs then, or innovation. It's like, give us some examples which you can disclose, you know, in the Zoco Idea Drop times. How did, you know, maybe big organizations, like we're talking enterprise, you know, I have offices across the globe, maybe smaller ones, like just local to UK and startups, like are the KPIs different or do they, the same for everybody? And what in general, what do the business leaders care when they look at innovation departments? Like what are their KPIs?

Well, something that I think is certainly a concern is the metrics aren't as common as you'd think they would be. And you know this, right?

Okay. Is it because it's hard to measure?

No, I, I don't think it is. I think that there are lots of barriers as to why. Often it's, hey, we don't have that resource, um, or hey, we think it— we should be doing this and then the data will just work itself out. Maybe at some point in time we can analyze it. But going back to your question, like, that's not to say there are no KPIs there. The question is, is that could we help enterprises and could leaders of innovation programs think more about how they measure? So it'd be interesting, like, when this podcast goes out, I hope that innovation leaders listen to it and correct me and go, oh, actually we are measuring it. We're more mature than Charlie Field's innovation leaders are. And here are some examples of how we measure it. But listen, I think the first stage to any program— and let's put it this way, like I used to call it innovation, then we used to make it a bit broader with ideas, but I think really it's like collective intelligence, right? Collective intelligence has knowledge, skills, and experience, and with that knowledge, skills, and experience, they can solve problems that, um, fix existing things or make them better, or that collective intelligence can find new things for problems that we face.

I just thought of one example and I want to ask you, um, so big businesses which failed because they failed to innovate, just random examples. I have one which I—

well, there's the obvious and there's Blockbuster, isn't it? Yeah. Blockbuster's great.

But that's such a—

do you remember what we used to do? Do you remember that we used to get video cassettes and we used to go into meetings C-suite, put the video cassette on the desk and whip out a hammer. Everyone's looking at us like, what are they about to do? Bang! We'd smash the cassette. Hey, if you're not innovating, this could be you.

This could be you.

Who is this? It was Blockbuster.

But Blockbuster story, it's like, um, for me it's like, you know, sometimes you look at Discovery Channel. I don't know if you look, but you know, nature discovery channels, and you see a situation where like a young gazelle just get eaten by lions, and it's just the nature, right? It's just how things happen. And for me, like Blockbuster story is just like that. It's just so, so hard to listen of how just pure decisions and just failing innovate just leads to such a big business where probably people were thinking it's too big to fail. And just going nowhere. You know, there's still one store open.

Is there really?

Yeah.

Just someone thought it'd be fun.

It's just like a 4G set.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's just like, yeah, you can still rent it.

I'm sure at some point it will come back, a retro. Yeah, there'll be a retro. I think it's a 5-year trend. And, but it's interesting because they had the opportunity to buy Netflix for $50 million. Yeah. Right at the beginning of Netflix.

What's— how would you— and this is, this is where my follow-up question is, which is in a way, you know, defines like a decision, maybe matrix or some filtering element, or maybe some innovation framework where when you're presented with these situations which don't, you know, they were disruptive like Netflix, right? They were offering something which didn't exist. In the Blockbuster situation, let's say you are, you know, one of the executives, how do you look at this? And you go like, yes, that's a disruptive innovation. And I can absolutely see that being successful. I'm gonna you know, buy into it? Or do you go like, yeah, that's just, just nonsense. Like there's no point.

It's a really good question. And I think that I should answer your last question much more succinctly, which will lead me into that. So if we go back to your KPIs, right? Listen, first of all, like engagement with a program. So are people if we tell them where they can put their ideas and what happens with them, and we communicate that, um, really clearly at the start of the program and then consistently throughout its life— and it should be an ongoing, um— then are we getting engagement with the organization? Predominantly, you'd think it would be ideas, but as we learn not everyone's an ideator. It's like, ah, actually, um, you, you have a lot of ideas, and often you'd say, hey, I've got this idea, and that would stimulate in me, yes, I love that, and have you thought if we could do this? And suddenly you have this ecosystem of collaborators that are enriching that idea so that when it comes to evaluating, for someone with knowledge, skills, experience, that an analyst that reports to someone with budget and strategy and that needs to invest in these ideas, qualifying it, um, it's in a lot more, um, finished format for that analysis in order to be assessed correctly. So I think that's really important. And then if you think about it as well, I think that more advanced programs are aware that having an idea is not just an art, it's not just in a creative moment. Actually, like, if you're an enterprise, you need to learn how to make that science. So again, we talked about, hey, actually an innovation funnel has a lot of the same character traits as a sales funnel. So it's got different stages to it. At each of those stages, it needs to qualify against a certain set of criteria in order to advance through it. Now, like in a sales funnel, you're trying to predict the value of the opportunity as early as possible. A more mature program will ask the ideator, Mike, hey, Is this idea going to save us money? Yes. How? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And how much? Ah, right, I'm going to actually have to think about this. And so that being captured right at the top of the funnel is useful. Then if you think about an innovation funnel, somewhere in it you're going to have like an MVP or a prototype, and that's going to be your first proof of point on this is what the person forecasted the impact to be. Let's call it a cost saving or a revenue generating opportunity. Although if you're in healthcare, it might be a reduction in outpatients or so on and so forth. So now we can go, hey, actual, first actual versus first forecast, what's the variance? Then we go, ah, it's met our criteria in order to go further down to go to market. Okay, we go to market in this example. Maybe a quarter later, we can see how much revenue this idea has generated. Is this in line with what the forecast was at the beginning? What's the variance of it? So now we can start to see, "Hey, as a leader, have I got enough at the top of my innovation funnel in order to deliver what I'm strategically aiming to do?" So we like to think of it as a really good way, like innovation management, idea management, a really good way of finding what the backlog of your project management systems are going to be. Like what's the next program or project that you're going to embark on that's been qualified to deliver strategy?

So KPI maybe was a wrong term from my end, isn't it? Because KPI being key performance indicator. Somehow says that that innovation has to perform, where it's a lot more about that end result, which is that, that value. And then when you have your innovation funnel, every step has some type of key results for that step, like qualifying, providing data, finding budget or whatnot. And that's contextual for every business, as in it's different for, for, for every business, isn't it?

And I think it's about what were some of your KPIs at Idea Drop, or what are some of your KPIs now? Well, they remain the same. What we're trying to measure is how good people's ideas are at helping you hit your KPIs. Yeah. And finding a correlation like, ah, has engagement got a correlation with finding ideas that might can put into practice that deliver his strategic KPI? Yes. Right, do we need to crank up engagement then because we're falling short on that, that KPI? Yes. Okay, how do we do that? Well, our communications are quite narrow at the minute. We're only using one channel, email. We can see that there's serious adoption on Teams. Why aren't we broadcasting out, you know, challenges on my strategic topic on Teams?

Okay, so I mean, that's at the very high level really reminds any like development process. Like it's almost like Agile, right? You have funnels, Kanban lanes, you know, you have your ideas, tickets. But the difference is that, you know, with development you have a very real definition of what that's gonna be, you know, how that's gonna look like. It's a feature, it's a bug fix or whatnot. And with innovation, you kick off with this very broad definition, which is basically an idea, and then you just funnel it down. Until it becomes something more actionable, right? Because you still need to deliver that idea. So when it becomes a lot more actionable, is it still in the scope of innovation? Does that go into another scope, more like a, like delivery management? Or does that still sit with, you know, sort of innovation until it's done done?

I think again, those parameters change from company to company. So there is a handover at some point. Hey, this baby, an idea, was nurtured to an infant. It's now an MVP. And now it's an adolescent. And it's pretty good at certain things, a.k.a., it's making money or solving a problem, to actually, it's a fully grown adult. It's a business unit. It's no longer an innovation. We've got the data. To measure what the actuals are of this program that's now a real-life thing. And we've got that data and we can go, hey, how accurate was the ideator right at the beginning at predicting the value of this?

Would that be a key result which you can track? Can, can, can, like, that would be almost, maybe not KPI, but in some ways it's like a KPI.

So you can make it a KPI. You've just got to think, hey, I need to get some data in order to create a benchmark from it.

Yeah.

So over time, if you've got— if you're, I don't know, a product team or you're the chief financial office and you've got a budget to do certain things with each year in order to deliver strategy, Sadly, more businesses than not are solving problems at the top of the hierarchy. They're bright people, they've earned the right to have ideas and solutions, and they invest in a, in a small population of people's ideas. Now, what's the danger of that? Well, this small population of people or are often far from the customer. They're far from the pain point. They're far from the opportunity point. And so what we believe— and at Mizuku, we have a challenge-driven methodology. So it's like, actually, as leaders, we want you to be really thoughtful at designing a problem in a really accessible and thoughtful way. Give context, give any data that you can in that context, and now broadcast this out to pay perhaps not just your employees, perhaps it's your suppliers, perhaps it's your customers, perhaps it's all three. And, and then now you're going to really see a reservoir of opportunities that might deliver your strategy and probably will deliver your strategy much better than your normal way of doing it with just a few, a population of a few.

So that, that for me is almost like innovation strategy, innovation process, or innovation framework, which let's talk about this, but let's go back to the Blockbuster. What would be your way of coming in the morning? Right. So that would be data.

You would say, I think that if you start to do some of these things, right. So if you start to measure, uh, your effectiveness at funneling a lot of ideas down into a few that deliver strategic value, and you do this continuously, you're going to start to have data. And that data is going to create—

sorry, I mean, you don't know that data because this is like, it doesn't exist. So you are Blockbuster exec, you come in in the morning, you know, you have all this enterprise spread across the whole, you know, America. I don't know how many shops they had, but it's in hundreds. Like, you don't even think of threats of disruptive innovation in that sense. And someone comes in and goes like, here's a Netflix. They're going to rent movies online. How do you know that that's a proper innovation? Like, how would you assess that opportunity in such a—

Do you not— So I—

Because you don't have any data at that point. They likely maybe have like 10 customers, you know, or whatnot.

I've really missed these conversations, by the way. Yeah, so I, I'm gonna politely disagree with you. I think they did have the data. Okay, okay.

Otherwise they wouldn't be looking to raise the money or sell the business.

Well, I, I think that, I think that Blockbuster, um, if they didn't have analysts looking at what the internet would mean to their business, that's a catastrophic management failure. And I think probably too unlikely for a business this their sites. So we've got to assume that they started to understand, hey, content such as film is able to go on online. Yeah. The volume of people using the internet is rising exponentially. The speed of the internet's getting faster and faster. Look at how it's growing. And so for me, I think it was probably arrogance Probably like we saw big, you saw too big to fail mindset. Yeah, we're too big, we're too big to fail. But we've got, we've got everyone's a member. And so it's like the, the, the, that, that kind of arrogance lets them think that, ah, this won't be a problem. I think as well as that, if you're in that analog world, you're at, you might have a few digital experts in a business that size. But in the layers of management, it's like, how good were those layers of management at elevating that voice up? So again, you think about platform, you think about going back to Idea Drop and Wazuku. Yeah. You often in organizations of more than 1,000 people, C-suite need tooling that allows them to have antennas into all the knowledge, skills, and experience of their organization.

Just, just maybe if they would have some type of innovation software at that point in time, they would have launched the challenge, which basically went like, how do we go online instead of looking at buying a Netflix? And some employee from, you know, shop number 25 would have been, here's what I'm thinking. And that would be pretty much like a Netflix business model in theory, right?

Love it. And all, all the challenge might have been you know, instead of one challenge, it could have been 10 challenges on the topic. How do we think the internet's going to affect our, our business in the next 1 year, 3 years, and 5 years? Um, how— what, what companies on the internet do we find interesting to our line of business and why? And how could we partner with them? Um, so it's all this kind of like—

can you launch that Can you launch that to your clients? Because I mean, Blockbuster-wise, they probably had, you know, let's say 500 to 1,000 employees, but the client base was the whole America. Can you go to every single person being the client of Blockbuster and go like, hey guys, do you want to see this online? Today, yes.

Today, yes. Um, back then, how would they have done it?

Email? Letter? Written letters? That's probably expensive, isn't it?

So maybe they would have done it in store. Had some kind of like in-store, but you know, terminal incentive, free rental.

It's good to be retro, isn't it?

But yeah, today that's possible and it's encouraged. It's like the voice of the customer. And again, how do you integrate the voice of the customer with the knowledge, skills, and experience of your own people?

Okay, so let's drill into that. We got innovation strategy and we got innovation process. Which comes first? So let me give you context. So I'm sitting and I'm like, do I create my business strategy first and I go then, you know, let's, you know, put some innovation into that strategy, which just becomes like some type of definition that we need to have innovation, or do I think about innovation first and I go like, this is how we're gonna do innovation and then I sort of spin the strategy around. It's like, is it the chicken and egg or I'm just misunderstanding?

No, I think that I would always start with strategy, right? Because strategy makes you think about the process. Let me give you an example.

Yep.

Like strategy's about thinking what you need to do to get somewhere. So first of all, like, what is it that we want to do? We want to discover a ton of new products that we could spin off from this core technology or this core drug. How could we repurpose this drug to deal with other illnesses? In the world, right? So I think starting with the strategy, then it allows you to start to think, well, who would know how to solve this? Audience. You know, we could have a really good process, but if that really good process isn't in front of the right audience, then it's not going to be there. So, so strategy makes you think about the audience. The strategy might make you think about, OK, well, what's the skills, knowledge, and experience within that audience like? Do we have the right talent and composition in order to do this really big thing that we want to do? Not in our employee base, but interestingly, because none of us are a technologist. But we've got a software stack with 50 different software vendors in it who have got tons of technologists in it and they want to retain us for another contract period. So why don't we see if there are a vendor or a partner and broadcast out and, and harness their intellect?

Okay, so strategy comes first.

I think so. Yeah.

You strategize.

What do you think though?

I don't know, it felt like a chicken egg to me. It's like, uh, maybe just—

why would you do process first?

Because I feel like if you don't have a process, everything is getting ad hoc. And, uh, how I think in the nature, and I feel like innovation has steps to be taken. It's the same like, you know, um, like Agile. That, that's how I would think. It's like the development process and why Agile is so important, because it gives you that process. It has its flavors depending on the business size, team size, but it's a process which you can take and sort of run with it and you can expect some predictable outcomes of it. It comes with the measurables and all that stuff. So I feel like when I think about innovation, I would like to have innovation process and I would know that's my process to some extent, right? And then I would go like, I'm gonna do this. Cause it has predictable measurements. I can go like, that's how I'm going to influence my strategy. And then it's, or maybe it is a strategy, like you said, maybe I go like, I'm going to go after this.

And like, I'm like, I think that it's a component of your strategy.

Okay.

So it's still in the strategic framework. You've got to think about the process in which something's going to find a, a light bulb moment. And turn it into something that you can ship that delivers strategic value.

Okay, so let me maybe rephrase this. Is there an innovation framework? Like how you think about this, maybe how Wazoku does it for different businesses. Is there like an actual framework where you give to businesses and go like, you do these steps and that's how we run innovation. We know that because maybe we academic about it, maybe we've wrote some books, you know, maybe, maybe blog posts. Maybe we did that for like many, many years. And we know that works. Like, is there a defined framework or is it just literally different to every business?

There are loads of frameworks, good frameworks out there that a good software can be configured to deliver. So, so by configured, I'm talking about, hey, rather than just being a free text field when I ask someone to give me their idea, let's think about a numerical field to predict the value of something so we can report on that. Let's think about radio buttons because it's an either/or, you know, option, but we want to collect data on that.

So the funnels as well, I would imagine, like the, the configuration of the funnels and how you how you just sort of push the idea from left to right and, you know, what do you need in every single stage, isn't it?

That's actually the, the criteria.

Okay, so is that what Wozoku does right now? It's like when you talk, when you think, you know, whatever is your product, is that where you're coming from? Is that you give that flexibility with the tech, and then when it comes to setting the framework, it's more about talking with that every business and, and going like How do you—

we have a, we have a standardized framework which I'll talk a little bit about, but often we're speaking to organizations that have already adopted a framework. So the first thing to acknowledge is that there's lots of good frameworks out there and frameworks need technology in order to harness all the data that comes in, in from it. To be able to systematically do something with it. And they're also useful for doing things like clever engagement, right? Software can engage with, you know, a software can integrate with Microsoft Teams or Atlassian Jira and so on and so forth, save time. You know all this, but it's important. Now our framework, we call challenge-driven, a challenge-driven methodology. And so, We say to people, hey, if you're new to this, quite often they'll be like, oh, we just want— we know there's loads of good ideas lurking in our organization and we want this to be the home for ideas. Okay, there's not enough why, there's not enough what's in it for me, there's not enough how is my idea right for this? Am I going to embarrass myself? And so challenge-driven methodology goes, okay, right now across the C-suite, you've got a strategy to deliver and each of you within your own division of the C-suite have very specific parts of the strategy to deliver and you're given budget and resource to hopefully overachieve on that at the end of the year. So then it becomes a case of questioning, what's stopping you doing that today? What opportunities do you think there are to do it better? And so you start to have a discussion, you start to go into what's the problem or opportunity. And let's not think about solutions like clever people often do. Let's solve this. Instead, let's really frame what the problem or opportunity is in a way that we can broadcast out in a meaningful way that gets Mike to go, ah, this is a, this is a, this is a question based around Laravel and efficiencies. And, you know, I love the Laravel framework and, um, I'm constantly finding efficiencies in the way I work every day. Like, this challenge resonates with me. Oh, and I know that it's strategically important because this is being incentivized. You know, the leader, the CTO, is actually offering a £1,000 prize or some tech, or it goes to a certain number of points to my performance appraisal. I know this is important to them. And also, not only have they put the challenge on the platform about this, I have heard in all my stand-ups for the last 6 weeks being pointed to this. Um, there was, uh, uh, screensavers for a week that were pointing them to this. So it's like, okay, how important are these things? So our framework's all about what's really important to you. How do we make that accessible and broadcast it to an audience that can give you solutions to it?

So the channel-driven framework— is that challenge-driven Sorry, challenge-driven framework. Is that— it came to be from experience? Like, you know, trying different frameworks? Because you mentioned in the beginning, let's acknowledge that there's multiple frameworks how you can drive the innovation. So the challenge-driven one, is it because it's easy to implement and it delivers the value? Like, why became the framework, you know, Vuzoku got built around?

I think that It's like we talked about earlier, like I like a broad term for innovation because actually sometimes something starts off as an idea. Okay. Hey, what do we do in our life? What's intrinsically human? Hey Mike, I'm at the pub with you. Hey Mike, I'm trying to build a garden shed. I got it from B&Q. This is missing from the box. This is missing from the box. I've been struggling all afternoon with it. And, you know, I'm going to be in trouble if it's not built by the date. So what do you do? I've just given you a problem. You sit there and you go, do you have this tool? Yeah. Have you thought about this? So it's intrinsically human, isn't it? To kind of like If we go, hey, there's this problem, or equally, if I go to you, hey, there's this opportunity, it's within sustainability and it's this, you go, oh, I see that too. What about if you did it? What about if you did this as well?

And I go, yeah. So it's a framework which basically naturally plugs in everyone's minds because it's just how human mind thinks about progressing things forward and innovating around problem space.

Exactly. And then I— so, so I think it's, um, I think it's something that you'll see in a lot of good frameworks. Um, you know, people like IDEO do design thinking, right? So design thinking again is to really, really, really think about what the problem or opportunity is, and you're, you're going a layer deeper. So you're asking, starting with your level 1 questions, then you're going to your level 2 questions, then you're going to your level 3 questions. The cascading, right? What you discover at level 1 opens up the opportunity to ask a load of questions that had you not have done your level 1 questions, you wouldn't have known what to ask at level 2, and so on.

Okay, so let's talk a little bit about innovation management. So let's say You know, I got a few ideas in the pipeline. I'm a stakeholder of these ideas. You know, I worked hard. I created some challenges. You know, I got some ideas. I like them. So I want to get them done, right?

Yeah.

So that's likely not going to be a process of like, you know, 2-week sprints or like 4 weeks and it's done. It might be that it's going to be running for like half a year to a year. How do you I manage that process and as well from experience, where does ideas often fall through and just not happen at all?

I think it's like composition. So like if I'm a leader and I've sponsored a challenge on the platform and I'm genuinely excited to hear what a collective intelligence has to offer me. Then I'll resource the communications of that properly. In other words, I will, um, I'll spend some money on marketing. Like, I want a conversion on my marketing. I want to broadcast this challenge out, and my ultimate conversion are some solutions. So I probably need a marketing expert in the team. Someone that's in marketing and does internal marketing, someone in comms that's good at actually understanding, "Hey, I want metrics, I want conversions." You know, if I put screensavers out there, then I want this. If I put the Wazoku app on all the work phones, I want to know how many people are converting it and pushing an idea through it. Okay, and ultimately I want to be able to measure the impact of the solutions I decide were worthy of strategically implementing, right?

So, so what you're saying is if we— if, if the idea doesn't happen, it's going to be because it doesn't have enough stakeholders around, like money-wise?

I think normally where the head goes, the tail follows. Yeah. So like, without a doubt The most mature organizations at Wazuku have challenges where there is a clear sponsor that sees themself as an investment manager. So I always like this analogy when I'm speaking to leaders about innovation or ideas that could make a change. I say you're not really that dissimilar to a hedge fund manager, right? You've got your criteria of what you can invest in, what's relevant, what's not, and you've got a budget that you're expected to get a return on in order to be a good leader. Well, that's the same as an investment manager. And so what does an investment manager need? A good deal flow. They need people out there going, have you seen this? Have you seen this? It meets the criteria that this, this is doing something really interesting here. And the investment manager goes, yeah, I like that, I'll have some of that, I'll invest in that.

It's good analogy. I mean, all, all the investment decision— or not investment, all the hedge fund managers, I would imagine, needs ideas to actually go in and chase, you know, and it's all data, isn't it? It's like, how's the unemployment looking? How much liquidity in the market? You know, what was the disruptive— we have semiconductors right now, right? NVIDIA, AMD, all of these companies doing so well. That's came from somewhere, but someone should have likely predicted that. So you want to have people—

And they have parameters too, right?

Exactly, yeah.

So, hey, I'm a fund that can only invest in companies over a billion in market cap and they have to be in new energy, right? I'm a CHRO. I can only invest in ideas that improve culture, improve retention, so on. And so, so now I'm narrowing what I'm looking for. I've been given this amount of money. All right, I've got this much money in the fund. Um, my fund needs to grow this much by next year. I've got to, I've got to improve my metric from here to here in the next year. They're similar time periods.

Uh, bringing back, back to the management. So effectively, it's going to be your challenge, it's going to be your ideas, and you're going to be the driving force behind it as long as you have a backing from C-suite and you have some budget, likely the ideas, you know, goes forward. So there's no, uh, rule of thumb when it comes to idea management to make, you know, see them happen. So like a common mistakes people could do in the most—

so I think it starts with that, where the head goes, the tail follows. So let's find a good challenge sponsor, because if you have a good challenge sponsor they're gonna resource that team properly. And the team that's needed is, first of all, how big's the audience? 'Cause if the audience is 500 people, it requires less resource than an audience that's 50,000 people. If the importance of the challenge is life and death, the resourcing of it needs to be different to if it's, ah, actually, this could make a meaningful contribution, but I'm going to lead lots of meaningful contributions, right? Okay. So, but then that team is, that team is a communications expert. Um, it's normally someone, um, there's normally a technical person. We tend to find technical persons about integrations, like they're, they know the governance that sits around the, the technology stack. Um, and they work with us to understand where would it be good to integrate Wazuku. So two obviously good integrations are something like Microsoft Teams because there's a lot of employee eye time already in that platform, and so let's make entry into the platform as frictionless as possible. And another example of a good integration for an IT stakeholder would be Jira. Hey, we've now qualified this idea In order to get it up and running, it's now a project that involves a different bunch of people. We're building it now, right? We're delivering it.

Okay, it goes to the delivery team.

And then you've got— and then you've got another group of people which are evaluators. So hey, if I'm a leader, it's unlike— of even 500 people, it's very unlikely that I'm going to be able to analyze a volume of ideas. So there's a few ways to do it. One, you can pass part of the evaluation to that collective intelligence. You can do things like up-down voting to get to give a first stage evaluator an idea of what the collective intelligence thinks.

I like it, I don't like it.

I like it, I don't like it. Pairwise. Hey, show me lots of ideas. Which do I like more? You know, swipe left, swipe right, swipe left, right, swipe right. Okay. Then you've got things like token voting. So Wazoku again will go, hey mate, here's 100 tokens. You want to gamble them all on one idea or you want to hedge your bets?

Gamification element. So that would be like investment example, isn't it? Because you're effectively taking your tokens and you're going like, here's an idea, I'm going to invest all of them because I know it's going to give me back. I imagine you get something back if idea is successful.

Well, you absolutely can. But again, like the beauty of Wazoku is it's configurable, right? So, so when— so I do— the tokens equal kudos or the tokens equal prizes? Well, it depends on the type of organization. If you're public sector, it's much harder to give prizes than a corporate. But kudos is very important. It could be— kudos could lead to career growth.

Why do businesses come to Wazoku or similar innovation companies? Is it because they think about sustainability and they go like innovation for sustainability? It's like, what's the driving force for businesses to basically go like, oh, I think I need innovation management platform?

That's a really good question, right? It goes back to, I said earlier on, I said to you, um, I think your question was something like, what makes a successful tech company? I said the lowest common denominator, people. Okay, but probably after people, it's their ideas. So normally why people come to us is that they're a leader within the business that's aware that they don't have good antennas into the intelligence of not just their— sometimes it's just their employees. Sometimes there's really bright leaders that go, I'm not listening to my employees well enough. I'm not listening to my customers well enough. I'm not listening to some of my suppliers well enough. And here's a really cool thing. At Wazoku, we've built a crowd of 750,000 750,000 problem solvers, Mike. So we have relationships with all the world's top universities. So a lot of those 750,000 people are PhDs. Then we went through a wave of creating relationships with incubators and accelerators. So there's some of the most dynamic, forward-thinking, radical, disruptive thinkers on the planet on this platform. So then there's also people wanting to do open innovation. Hey, We want to hear beyond the skills, knowledge, and experience that our biased, potentially biased population have. They're very zoomed in on this. Maybe if we took it outside, we get a whole different view on this problem or solution. So it's normally people that know that they're not harvesting ideas well enough, and they're like, ah, okay, Wazuki is really cool. Like, we can harvest ideas to deliver strategic value.

Definitely see that. So how is, how is it important for an entrepreneur to have that spark of being an innovator at the same time? Is it almost like you have to think like that or have that somehow baked into your mind, or it's just not necessary?

I think that it has something to do with your first question, which is define what innovation is. So by my more broad term and more accessible term, It's very important. But if you had someone who said innovation must be radical and/or disruptive, then we'd lose a lot of the entrepreneurs that are out there. Because a huge— the majority of entrepreneurs out there are going, hey, turn the screw on that a little bit. I can make it better. That there's not a lot of players in that market. There's definitely room for, for a few more. Um, you know, most businesses that start up are not the first in that market, right? So again, by my definition, they need to be looking at things and going, hey, if they did that, then they could get that, but they're not doing that. What do they need to do to do that? Okay. That, right? I'm going to go and build that and try that.

That's what I mean. It's like, it's almost, you know, it's baked into it. And creativity is like, like, let's say innovation and creativity is like, is it like one and the same thing? Or is it? Yeah, that's like one and the same thing. But you see what I mean? Like, it's very hard to be an innovator if you're not really creative, isn't it?

I think so. Do you remember we used to say this? We used to say creativity over conformity.

So I think you used to say that.

So I used to mean my thing, didn't it? Creativity over conformity. So hey, um, if we conform, it's very likely that we're going to be an entrepreneur. It's very unlikely that we're going to be a business owner. But there's a second part to it. How many people, how many friends do we have who go, "Hey, I've got an idea. I've got the next big thing." That's great. So the next part of it is action over inaction. So creativity over conformity. I get the creativity piece right, but then if I don't do the action, nothing.

Innovation board game.

Okay.

Yeah. So it came to my mind when I was preparing for the show. So if you have a framework and you have a way you're doing innovation, and that framework really applies at the broad, you know, scale framework or process, in theory, right, you could gamify it, especially if you have some, you know, KPIs or key results around that framework, and you could create a board game. Right, let's call it Innovation Board Game, the best name ever. And then you have that board game, you put— you give that to your business, as in, you know, to your employees to just casually play it. You know, you have table tennis, you have pool, you have different activities to people to unwind during lunch. So you, you give that game to them, so effectively you're giving them an ability to learn how the business runs innovation in a very fun way. How bad is that idea?

Why is it a bad idea? Why are you phrasing it like that? I would be—

well, you tell me, like, sell it to me, Mike.

You've, you've insisted it's a bad idea.

Okay, how good is that idea?

How good is that idea? Um, I think it comes down to, do we know our audience?

Your employees?

Exactly. So what, what works in one organization may not work well. Like, I love board games, so I'm excited. I'm like, okay, is it, is it gonna be a grid system? Is it gonna be free flow? What— I'm, I'm— I love the idea.

Well, think about how you do with Zoho from technology perspective. Right? You got the challenge-driven innovation. Like, it's all the same thing, but it's on the board game.

So, so I, I think that there— that what I've seen from a data point of view is that different gamification techniques work totally differently in different organizations. So for instance, you know, I know that going long or going short on an idea was something that was once looked at in innovation teams, like, hey, so like it's that financial, like the markets. I'm going to go long on a stock or I'm going to short the stock. So everyone remembers the film The Big Short with Brad Pitt and Christian Bale.

And so saying short on an idea, you're saying this idea sucks.

This idea sucks, right? Now I love it, right? I come from a hedge fund background. I'm like, this is so cool.

I would play this.

Yeah, you know, I'm going to be able to accumulate loads of credits in this long-short game. I'd probably be terrible at it, right? But, um, so I think, Mike, is there a market for it?

I think board games are awesome. I honestly think, I mean I wasn't, and then I got two kids and now I'm a full board game guru. You know, I got like all shelves of board games. I think they are very good, you know, uh, spend of time.

They're great. They're great for social interaction. Hey, I, I, in, in the short answer is yes, I can see something like that working in lots of organizations, but I think the But I think I would ask you a question, which is, hey, like, how are you going to build out that board game?

That was my question to you, in effect, you know, because I was like, is it replicatable in such a way, you know, the framework of innovation which you, you know, developed with Idea Drop for many years, and then, you know, whatever Wazoku is doing right now, is, is that like Can it be taken from technology and can it be put in the board game? And if so, I feel like it's a cool board game.

Um, yeah, I think, I think you, I think you probably could. I think that probably say tonight I'm lying awake in bed going the innovation board game, Mike's like cracked it. This is amazing. Right. What, what would I do next? Probably go and speak to the data scientists and go, hey, like, how widely used is gamification on our platforms? Who are the clients doing it? And then I try and go and speak to those clients and go and say, hey, you know, how are you using it? Why are you using it? How effective is it? Who's the best at it? What are you doing? Who's the worst at it? What are you doing? Like, what's the chasm between you guys? And then in that, probably say, hey, would you be interested in participating in a challenge? We think we might have something new for you. We think it might bring a physical aspect to a digital platform because we love that. Like, you know that we're not just like, do everything online, like We're like, no, do hackathons, do round tables, just make sure that what's coming out of them is captured digitally.

So, you know, I would probably want to go and do exactly what I'm telling you, which is harness the collective intelligence available to me to help build that out rather than me just design it in a room and go, but, uh, well, if it's possible and, uh Just a simple thought, you know, you have some cards, you pull out some challenge, people need to come up with ideas across the table, maybe you throw a dice, that's your budget, you know, your funnel. I feel like it's doable if there's a framework. If it's doable, would you say that would be an awesome game, Zoku, and just on the shelf everywhere, like PR campaign-wise?

Could I play it with my family at Christmas? Hey, sometimes, like, a problem at home might be, hey family, like, we've got a 1,400 square foot house, we've got another kid on the way, our kids are like 8 and 10, so they're starting to be creative and have ideas, right, you know, let's bring the board game out. Let's think about the extension that we're going to spend 100 grand on doing. Let's get the kids involved. Like, so maybe, maybe you could— maybe there could be like a home use for it. But again, it's always action over inaction. So the board game might create the creative— the creative the creative part, but board games normally have a time limit to them, don't they? It's like, hey, you know, I don't know about your kids, but I tend to find that your pop—

if they're only 10 minutes attention span, not 10 minutes, 10 seconds.

So it might just be solving the creativity part of the problem, not the action part. But that's okay because you have to have the creativity to do the action.

All right, I'm going to put it in a maybe column in my ideas.

Come over to the office, come and come and pitch it for them. Come and talk to the customer success about it and say, hey, you know, I want to come and research this.

All right, so how can I apply my creativity, you know, my way of thinking, and Wazoku-driven, challenge-driven framework and get the show better. Let's say my challenge is I just want to get more listeners.

Um, well, firstly, for those that are listening, um, I think you do this very, very well, and I think it just speaks to the theme of this whole, um, recording today. It's about It's about thinking about people who are in your network and the different views and experience and skills they have and positioning that question to them, whipping out the pen and listening more than speaking.

So the challenge should go basically to the current listeners and new listeners or potential new listeners and going like, what do you guys need? 100% tune in, isn't it?

100%. So it's a public— yeah, you've already done that with me, right? So when you were thinking about this, you, you were like, here's what I'm thinking, like, to give you some context, like, to start to, like, immerse you in a space where you can be creative and have ideas, because you're probably just thinking about lunch at the minute, Charlie. I need to snap you out of that. Um, Yeah, we, we want to— we definitely want the viewers to be able to engage. Just to start thinking about it, um, I would probably start by cheating as well.

By cheating?

Cheating, like going and, and looking what's already out there, right?

It's not cheating, it's a market research.

Yeah. But, but there will be a ton of things that blogs not in this category are doing that have done a very good job at acquiring listeners. And going and saying, hey, we're non-compete, like, we don't think, uh, we don't think our viewers are going to be— we're going to be competing for viewers' airtime, or listeners' airtime rather. Um, and I loved reading about this, you know, could you afford me half an hour? Tell me more. How did you do it? Um, and hopefully you're building a relationship there anyway in the space.

Okay. A person you know, uh, either personally or in your network, which you think would be a great guest for the Mastering Tech Growth.

There's loads. You've got— I think mastering tech growth, we should talk about accelerator programs that Idea Drop have been on. I think the people that run those programs are incredibly interesting because for every cohort they're often scouring through a thousand different decks and thinking about big thematic topics that are gonna affect the human civilization over the next 50 years. And so I won't name drop them here.

Drop, name drop. I need to have a name to bug someone.

I won't name drop them here because I think it's worth us speaking about them. But, but, but, but for this, certainly, um, some of the programs that we went on, like I think Swift Scale was incredible. Um, PwC was good. Microsoft program's good. Um, so yeah, someone from those programs. Yes, someone from those programs. And we already know them, so we just, you know, I think they'd be fantastic to have on here. The other thing is, is like, um, some of our venture capital network, right? So again, VCs are at the forefront. They're understanding markets and where there's a need and who's doing something in that market that's exciting and different. And are they the type of people that can figure out complex enterprise sales and from tiny company and scale all the way through?

Like you mentioned, sales. I mean, You know, the blood flow of any business is still cash flow and sales is just, you know, it's what drives everything. So we need to have some salespeople on the show to talk about just organic growth.

Again, you know, if I was to name check one of the best salespeople that I know, that I've gone to speak to, and I will name check this guy because I don't, I don't think he'd mind, is a guy called Jason Crean. Um, my brother works in sales at Gartner. Long story short, um, he won a place on Gartner's Winner's Circle program. It's like the top salespeople go away on a fabulous holiday and they can bring their partner. Um, it was in Australia. My brother didn't have a girlfriend. I said, hey, I'd look good in a wig. Let me, let me come along. He said, scrap the wig, come along. And that's where I met Jason Crean. Jason Crean was on stage, young guy, um, at the time of the Sydney Opera House. So that's where they were doing the presentation, and I got to know him over a few days, and I was like, this, this guy really, really understands sales incredibly well. Anyway, he, he's gone on to do some incredible, like, be a part of some incredible sales organizations and worked his way right up into sales leadership. Um, he sounds awesome. Last time I, last time I caught up with him, he was at Zscaler. Or if you're English, Zscaler.

It's Zscaler. It's a, it's a publicly traded company in cybersecurity, isn't it?

And it's one of the best sales organizations, you know, beat, beat, beat. Um, and you know, he, he would be fantastic to—

I mean, I'm gonna— I'm, I'm not arguing they're good at sales, but cybersecurity as an industry in general I think it's, uh, it's one of that where it's easy to beat, beat and beat expectations because it's just a lot of money flowing in into that sector.

That being said though, there's a lot of cybersecurity companies out there going miss, miss, miss, because companies like Zscaler have got the right composition of team.

Do you know how many quarters in a row they're doing, uh, beat?

I was following them last year. Um, and listen, it was a, it wasn't a great marketplace for tech and they were doing beats.

Okay.

Consistently. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't mind betting that they're still consistently beating.

Well, let me see if I can get him. If, if I will.

Yeah.

It's going to be your referral, which is awesome. All right. Thanks, Charlie, for doing this.

I'll see you soon, Jason.

We'll see you soon. Thanks for doing this, Charlie.

Thanks.

All right. I'm good.

Cheers!