Building a Corporate Innovation Engine - Component 10: Top Technology

If you can't build a sandbox environment to do things like customer research, to ingest external research, to capture knowledge, build prototypes, MVPs, to ship experiments, to build business cases, then you have a really fundamental challenge. Look, I'm not saying that information security isn't important. It's absolutely essential, you know, but startups move with speed and agility, right? So our innovation engine needs to be able to do so. As well. When you're in exploration mode, you need the freedom and a different set of digital tools. There are kids in their bedrooms today who I'm pretty sure have better access to the technology and comms tools that they need to build new businesses than most corporate innovators do in gigantic companies. Um, IT's job should be about removing the friction, making sure that your engine can move with the same speed as the startups with which you're competing. Our philosophy at Future Foundry is to learn and to be iterative, and I wanted to share our current recommendations for what that stack should look like. So, imagine if this was kind of, I don't know, Maslow's hierarchy of corporate innovation needs, right? So, first thing you need to be able to do is communicate with one another, with stakeholders, with customers. So, get Slack set up. You really don't need Teams, does way too much. Get Zoom for stakeholders outside your innovation team and use that for customer interviews as well. And if you're fully remote, I'd suggest maybe considering using something like Tandem to build like a virtual drop-in office environment. Then you also need to be able to schedule and book meetings aligned on availability. I would use like Google Calendar, way easier to share availability. Um, I would integrate that with Calendly for scheduling. Not just your internal meetings but also your external customer research get-togethers. And then use Miro as like a virtual, virtual whiteboard. The next thing you need to be able to do is obviously to prototype things at varying levels of fidelity. So the lo-fi prototyping, Balsamiq is a really great subscription, does everything that you need it to do, nothing that you don't. Then I'd consider something like InVision for medium fidelity mockups and probably Sketch for high-fidelity prototyping. You also need to be able to capture and store everything that you're learning along the way. Um, I would use Notion or Airtable at push to store everything from like, you know, project cadence through to your customer database, interviews, transcripts, um, feedback, you know, business cases. Keep them in one searchable database centrally so that you make sure you're not covering old ground all the time. I would use Google Drive to avoid, you know, having local versions of documentation saved on individual machines. And also a really great tool called Otter that we use to transcribe video meetings. Really, really helpful, particularly when you're running customer research. That's going to save you weeks, if not months, every year and give you this searchable sort of database of insight and feedback. Uh, we mentioned Google Canva, Drive, but I'd probably suggest switching your whole team to G Suite and just creating a separation from the core that way. That's particularly useful when you're working on new propositions and you want to spin up new URLs, you know, venture-specific email addresses, that sort of thing. And the other thing that you should consider is creating an API layer that connects all of these tools into one central dashboard, something that we're doing more and more of with, with clients. So you've got to create space where you can validate and scale new ventures, products, and services that exist off the technology stack of the wider organization. That's going to enable you to establish problem-solution fit, product-market fit, um, really, really quickly.