Future Foundry LIVE: How to think like a VC and win at Corporate Innovation

Hello and welcome to our second installment of Future Foundry Live for 2023. Hard to believe that it's been, what, 8 weeks since we were last together? Really pleased to see that so many of you managed to survive the Easter break, the deluge of chocolate, to join us today. Feedback from the last episode was great. Thanks loads to those of you that got in touch to tell us what you enjoyed, what you wanted to hear about next. If you have been with us for the last few episodes, you'll know that we've been super focused on helping you to grasp some of our methodologies for getting innovation done with more speed, more focus, more impact from the very, very early stages of building and calibrating your innovation capability, all the way through to opportunity navigation, idea validation, market acceleration. And you told us that in today's episode of Future Foundry Live, you really wanted us to zoom out of the methodology a bit and take an in-depth look at what it takes to get innovation efforts funded. And this is really important, right? Especially right now where there's more and more focus on budgeting, on efficiency, on returns within your organizations, it's easier than ever for them to say no to getting successfully validated ideas into the hands of customers. So super excited to focus on that today. The other thing you told us that you really enjoyed was our Office Hours segment. So we were joined by Nicola Roche last time out from London Stock Exchange Group, and I'm super excited today that we're joined by Chris Carmichael, who's Head of Corporate Innovation at TUI Amusement. And Chris is going to join us later on for a Q&A. But what are we looking at today? Well, as innovators, we're constantly told that in order to succeed in getting new ventures, products, and services to market, that we need to be more startup. And I thought this is a photo that might wake you up. And I think that that's pretty well-intentioned advice, right? You know, the people espousing it want us to move faster, to bake in more flexibility to what we're doing, to have a really relentless focus on the customer. But It's also 2023, and for the most part, I think we're already doing that. You know, InnerLead, who are a really great resource, by the way, particularly if you're a corporate innovator in the US, they ran a survey recently with 170 companies with over $1 billion in revenue, and they found that more than 80% are using Lean Startup in their corporate innovation efforts. And I'm sure that, you know, the vast majority of you here today or kind of watching back will be using Lean to navigate new opportunities, to incubate different ideas, and to accelerate new propositions to market. And this lean approach of your innovation team, coupled with the brand reputation, the access to customers and capital that the core business provides, is making you all unstoppable, right? Well, not quite. And time and time again, and particularly right now when there's, you know, so much focus on budgeting, on cost cutting, and on headcount, We keep hearing about how many of your ideas are getting stuck in the pipeline because they're not getting funded. You know, in other words, they're not reaching what we'd describe as escape velocity, where the business is ready to launch them. And there's nothing more gut-wrenching, I think, for corporate innovators than to work on a ton of propositions that we know that customers want. You know, they've told us that they'll pay for, that we've figured out how to build, only for the business to say, No, not right now. We're not investing. And perhaps you're at the incubation stage and you want the business to invest in acceleration and getting an MVP built. And you show them an opportunity case and you cover the market or the problem size that you're going after and how compelling that is. You talk through the customer pain that you've uncovered or maybe the unmet or underserved needs that you've discovered. You walk them through the amazing solution that you've been working on and iterating on. You've even shared with them perhaps a long-term product vision, you know, a plan for what the MVP will do, maybe a tech roadmap. You've perhaps gone as far as, you know, potential go-to-market monetization strategies. You may have built, you know, a really great operational and executional plan and perhaps even gone into, you know, really great detail around governance only for your sponsor perhaps your CFO or maybe your finance team to say no, because they either aren't convinced by the numbers that you're presenting here, or maybe they don't meet your company's internal hurdles for return on investment. And that is just crushing, right? And it's maddening too, because how can you build a predictable forecast for ROI on a proposition that hasn't been created yet? Uh, that's just not how things work in corporate innovation. And in most cases, you know, you're not even going to know whether it is going to work until quite a significant amount of time has passed. So how do we overcome this paradoxical death spiral in which we need funding to prove the forecast, but we also need the forecast to get the funding? Pretty head-spinning. So that's what we're going to focus on today. And I think the answer lies not in being more startup. You know, I think we're a startup probably as we need to be, or at least, you know, the vast majority of us are. If we're going to get these ideas out into the world, and let's face it, you know, what's the point of what we're doing unless we do that, then we can't just have the startup side of corporate innovation taken care of. We also need to work to build our muscle on the investment side, because when the level of uncertainty in an idea is high, as it is in any kind of innovation, particularly in comparison to BAU projects, then your organization's financial philosophy should really be about venture capital style risk-taking. And what I've learned over the last 15 years is that for 99% of teams who are struggling to make an impact, that this is the missing part of the puzzle. You have to get your sponsors to act as VCs and to get them comfortable with accepting failure while at the same time expecting a few outsized winners. to come and ultimately pay for those failures 10 times over. You know, it's worth remembering that companies like Uber, Netflix, you know, maybe Airbnb, they couldn't give a predictable 5-year forecast early on in their journey. It would be impossible, right? So they needed that venture capital investing to make that progress and to get to that point where there's more certainty around the model. And just to be really clear, what I'm not talking about here is corporate venture capital or CVC, where you are asking your company to invest in other people's startups. I think at Future Foundry, we've grown pretty skeptical around CVC, mainly because the valuations of most of today's startups are pretty wild. You know, on average, they're around 30 times revenue multiples, which means that most companies who are running CVC only realize a pretty modest return, certainly compared to the founders of those startups or their eventual acquirers. Instead, what I'm talking about is using a venture capital mindset to invest in your own internal portfolio of ideas, which is going to lead to much higher returns, not just strategically but financially too, versus investing in other people's ideas. Now, venture capital is probably a little older than you realize. I think most people think back to the dot-com boom and bust of the '90s and the early 2000s, but in reality, You can trace its roots back to the creation of the American Research and Development Corporation in 1946. Now, ARDC is pretty much considered the world's first VC firm, and they wrote checks for funding very early-stage, quite high-risk companies like DEC, which became wildly successful. And then in the '50s and '60s, what we saw is that the industry really began to congregate around the Silicon Valley area, and that's mainly because there was a ton of government-funded research going on during that post-war period in sectors like defense and in aerospace. And that was all happening at nearby colleges like Stanford. And then in the '70s and '80s, what we see is that the number of VC firms really explodes because they started to realize some of the returns that they'd made in very early-stage companies like Apple and Intel. And it's also around that time that we see VC companies become more institutionalized in that they're bringing on limited partners like pension funds, like endowments to provide that capital. And we all know what happened in the '90s and certainly the early part of the 2000s. You know, the industry got fat on this new World Wide Web thing before the dot-com bubble burst. And that led to the collapse not only of countless new companies, but also the number of investments that were being made at that time. But So far, you know, throughout the 2000s, we've seen a huge recovery as money started to pour firstly into companies that were designed around social media, mobile, SaaS companies, and latterly, you know, companies that are focused on clean technology, artificial intelligence, fintech. And we've also seen in this period VC give rise to the unicorn, right? Private companies with valuations of over $1 billion, and there are around 1,200 of those right now. So you can see that for the past, what, 80 years, you know, venture capital has played just this huge role in financing and supporting the growth of disruptive new ideas that have, yes, transformed industries, but also to a large extent just completely transformed the global economy. And VC is an inherently good thing, right? You know, without it, none of these ideas would get funded by traditional investors because none of them could have presented a business case that would've given them this 5-year sort of ROI forecast. Now, throughout its history and the history that we've just looked at, the financial philosophy of venture capital has pretty much remained the same. It's very, very different from traditional investment strategies. It's all about high risk, high reward. VCs know that most of their investments will likely fail, but they also know that the outsized returns from those that don't fail more than offset the losses. They also take a much longer-term view in terms of time horizon. So they know that startups can take years sometimes to develop, to grow, to mature before getting to profitability. And so they place very long-term bets. And because of this, they'll often have very diversified portfolios. So they'll spread that risk. You know, they're not just interested in ideas that solve one problem or one problem area. They're interested in lots of different ideas that solve lots of different problem areas. And this is really the philosophy that we need to internalize within our own companies if we're going to succeed in getting our own disruptive, high-growth, high-value ideas to market. I think the challenge for most corporate innovators is that when they talk about venture capital, especially, you know, in an enterprise, setting, most execs greet it with a bit of an eye roll and talk about how, you know, that style of investing just doesn't work for corporates. But, you know, we've already seen the critical role that VC plays in helping early-stage new ideas to transform markets. And it's the continual interplay between the startup side and the capital side that effectively drives all of this growth. And great ideas don't get to market without VC. VC doesn't make money without great ideas getting to market. And so in short, without venture capital, the whole innovation system collapses. And in corporate innovation, if you don't have a team playing the role of investor, then unfortunately you're destined for failure. And for clients that haven't figured this out and are still fighting for funding in the traditional way, you know, idea by idea, business case by business case, what we tend to see is that there are 3 things going on. So you tend to see extremely large variations in terms of outcomes. You know, more innovation projects fail than succeed, right? You know, that is the nature of what we do. Our job as corporate innovators is to decrease the amount of risk that's involved in searching for those maybe 1 in 10, 1 in 100 winners. But it's exactly this variability that makes our outcomes just really difficult to predict. And what we see is that without venture-style investing, too few projects are funded to smooth that volatility. We also see quite poor average results in these companies. So we hear time and time again about clients who, in their words, have had their fingers burned by an innovation project before where they've probably overinvested, you know, sometimes to the tune of multi-millions of dollars over years and years. And for organizations that have made that mistake, that's usually the only investment that they make, right? And that really negatively impacts the average outcome because they just don't invest in corporate innovation again. And the final thing that we see, which is kind of related, is really poor and quite inefficient resource allocation. So innovation projects have very different risk profiles, very different time horizons, very different success criteria from BAU projects, so they can't and shouldn't be funded in the same way. And if they are, then what we see is that this inefficient resource allocation just further exacerbates both the volatility issue and the outcomes issue. And for all of these reasons, I think that, you know, discarding the skills, the methodologies, the learnings of 80-odd years worth of venture investing is a huge mistake for corporates to make. Venture capital is way more than just a way of investing in other people's companies. It is an approach to asset allocation, to value creation that you need to embrace if you're going to win at corporate innovation. So how do you do it? I think the good news is that the principles of venture-based investing are pretty easy to grasp and internalize within your own companies. So we've boiled them down into 7 that you can take back to work after this episode. And the first thing that you have to do is to assemble a team of investors inside your company. At Future Foundry, when we help clients to do this, We call them the innovation engine board, and it's usually made up of a group of senior execs whose job it is to act as the internal VC to your ideas, right? You know, the ventures, products, and services that you're working on, but they also act as a fiduciary for the company's overall investment in them. You know, these are people who can step out of their traditional managerial roles and adopt the mindset of an investor, you know, advocating for growth, encouraging very strategic risk-taking and guiding you and, you know, the rest of the innovation team on what it is that you need to prove to raise the investment in your ideas at different checkpoints, just in the same way that, you know, a traditional VC would. Now, this might seem like a big change in mindset for some of the leaders within your organizations to make, but it is critical if you're going to drive successful corporate innovation outcomes. I think the real challenge is in keeping this board detached from the day-to-day operations of the individual projects that you're working on. And it's a challenge because corporate execs, by their very nature, are used to managing teams. But when it comes to innovation, they have to let you and your people execute the vision without too much in the way of interference. You know, this board are dealing with what is hopefully or will be a vast portfolio of ideas, and there's just no time for micromanagement. And look, philosophically, they also need to maintain emotional distance from the projects that you're working on. Otherwise, it's going to be really, really difficult for them to make the objective decisions that they need to make about which ideas to kill and which ideas to fund. You know, VCs don't involve themselves in the day-to-day operations of their portfolio companies. You know, if they do, then something has gone very, very wrong. You know, they trust the founding teams, in this case you, to execute the vision and then really step in for, you know, strategic guidance, resource allocation. And this same detachment that I'm talking about is super important if your board is going to be successful. And more than anything else, what they should be focused on is that resource allocation. You know, some projects are bound to fail, so their job is to make sometimes quite tough decisions on when to continue funding ideas versus, you know, understanding when it is that they should pull the plug. So they'll need some really clear evaluation criteria in order to help them to do this. You know, VCs would call them, you know, maybe an investment thesis. And that's what's going to help them to make these sorts of informed decisions and make sure that resources, you know, be that cash, be that talent, you know, maybe their own political capital, are allocated to the most promising projects. And this is good for you as an innovation team or an innovation leader because it fosters this culture of accountability. You know, if the board are tying resource allocation to performance, then as a team, you're way more incentivized to deliver results and demonstrate that really quick progress. And it's this results-driven culture that really helps you to drive the success of the overall portfolio. Now, If you're going to allocate resources in the right way, what they can't do is to use traditional corporate models to evaluate individual initiatives. They've got to adopt the venture capital practice of using milestones and stage gates. You might hear people talking about rounds, you know, A rounds, B rounds, C rounds, and that's going to help them to assess the risk that's involved. It's going to help them to assess potential and ultimately the likely value creation potential of each project. You know, as projects progress, the board have got to ask the right questions essentially. And those questions, depending on what stage an idea is at, might not be traditional questions around EBIT, around profitability. They might, you know, depending on what stage an idea is at, not even be about revenue either. You know, if you're at the opportunity navigation stage and you're asking for, I don't know, $100K to test an idea, it might be about the total addressable market. Or if you've tested an idea and you want to raise funds to build an MVP, it might be about, um, customer willingness to pay. Or if you're trying to get something launched maybe after an MVP pilot, then, you know, it might— and this is depending on the business model— be about customer acquisition cost, you know, lifetime value, churn rates, very non-traditional types of metrics. And, and as an innovation team, what you've got to do is help them to understand Which are the right questions to ask at which juncture? You know, it's these milestones and this stage gate process that gives you way more structure to work with. And if you're breaking projects down into these manageable stages and tying resource allocation to the achievement of those specific milestones, then you can build a really disciplined approach to corporate innovation that a really encourages this progress that we're talking about, but b minimizes the chances of. of wasting resources on projects that are doomed to fail. Now, let's expand on this idea of portfolios. You know, innovation is inherently volatile, and the best defense against volatility is volume, right? Innovation is a numbers game, and the more ideas we test, the more likely we are to find those game-changing propositions that will truly transform our organization. And we'll look at a case study later on But you likely need to invest in 100 things to find the one winner that will pay 10 times over for the 99 that didn't make it. So having this portfolio-based approach really helps to smooth out the risks that are associated with investing in individual ideas, and it actually encourages a high failure rate, right? Which is a good thing. You know, it's that high failure rate that helps to drive us forward to finding the winners. And it's this approach too that helps us to learn from a much broader range of experiments. That's how we build the valuable insights that we can apply to other ideas in the future. And on that portfolio theme, the board should really be focused on justifying not the investments that they're making at an idea level, but the success of the investments that they're making in the whole portfolio. So if you think about how venture capitalists operate, they'll go out, secure funding based on expected returns from their entire portfolio, right? They're not Justifying each investment that they're making to limited partners separately. Similarly, your board should be raising a pool of capital, you know, most likely from your finance department or CFO, and allocating it really strategically over time without constantly having to seek approval from finance for individual projects, because that is going to be like wading through treacle ultimately. And again, it's only by focusing on the portfolio as a whole that you can minimize the impact of individual failures. You know, by having this big diverse portfolio, you can absorb those failures and still achieve massive overall success. And the final principle really relates to the fact that the people on your board are probably used to seeing quite clear evidence of success or failure in a relatively short timeframe, right? But in the world of innovation, in the world of venture capital outcomes, you know, be that individual project profitability or portfolio returns, can take much longer to materialize. And I think when you're raising capital for this board to allocate, you have to take a multi-year view, right? Not a quarter-to-quarter view. They've got to get comfortable with the fact that meaningful progress in innovation projects takes time. And it's only really by embracing this long-term perspective that you can make better decisions about which projects to support and allocate resources in the right way. It's also going to help you to build an environment that fosters resilience and persistence over short-term thinking, because success in corporate innovation, as we know, is rarely overnight, right? It's a process of continuous effort, adaptation, and pivoting. Now, I wanted to bring this to life for you in a slide that you can take back into your business to advocate for this shift from traditional corporate investment decision-making into one that's more akin to a VC. At Future Foundry, we've been working with a client in the financial services space for the last couple of years, And we've really helped to master the art of this VC-style investing. So in that time, they've navigated around 200 opportunities using $200K of seed funding. Of this, they've chosen 36 ideas to incubate. Of those, only 14 of them got a follow-on round for acceleration at $300K each, and ultimately 9 of those things launched at a total cost of just over £12 million. 191 ideas didn't make it. But this is a portfolio that's producing over half a billion pounds in annual revenue, which is a 25 times return on the money that was invested in the portfolio as a whole. And interestingly, over half of this revenue is actually generated by only 2 of the 9 projects that were launched, which incidentally is a pretty similar pattern to return that we see in venture capital funds. So as a general rule, if your investment as a company in innovation isn't producing at least 10x returns, then you need to figure out why quickly. You know, it could well be that you're not working on enough ideas. You know, if you only started with 25 opportunities in this navigation stage right here, then you wouldn't have anything to show for it by the end, and your company, you know, particularly in the current climate, is going to be wondering why they keep investing good money after bad in corporate innovation. You can use our corporate innovation checkup to do that and to figure out, you know, where the blockers are. Is it the startup methodology side? You know, perhaps you don't have that quite down yet, or is it the investing side? Is it both? There are around 30 questions in the checkup. I took a client through it the other day, And in like 10 minutes. So I guess you could say that if you're underperforming, then you can 10x your returns in 10 minutes using it, which would actually be quite a catchy headline for this. We'll also send you a pretty comprehensive report off the back of this so that you can pinpoint exactly where the issues are. And yeah, I'll leave that up for a sec so that you can grab it. But ultimately, I think as corporate innovators, there are 3 big learnings that we have to take from today if we're going to get to a place where our ideas careers are funded, and our efforts are having a material impact on the future of our companies. The first is that lean is not enough, right? Most companies have spent the better part of a decade now investing in startup methodologies without reaping any real benefits. But that's not because lean's the wrong approach, it's because it's not enough. To win at corporate innovation, you have to have the innovation engine board in place, acting as an internal VC to power it. The people on this board also need to behave like an investor, not an operator. You know, there's a huge amount to be learned As we've seen from 80-odd years of venture capital success. And if we're going to keep up with the changing world around us, then we have to have people in our companies who can embody those learnings and use them to fuel the ideas that we're working on. And finally, you've got to place a large number of small bets to win at innovation. It is a numbers game, and you've got to stop placing bets on one or two initiatives at a time and spread the risk by placing a much larger number of small bets. across an entire portfolio. It'll mean that you get to work on a much higher volume of projects, and of those, many, many more of them will get to market and generate the big returns that we're all looking for, which, you know, after all, that's what we're all shooting for, right? But enough of my brummy monotone machinations. It's our Office Hours segment, the bit that you're all really here for, which is why we tend to leave it to the end. We're super excited to have Chris, Head of Corporate Innovation at TUI Amusement, with us today. And Chris, I guess, first of all, before we get into questions, could you give us a little bit of background on you and kind of what your role at TUI Amusement looks like?

Yeah, sure. Just to say thanks for inviting me today. I'm really pleased to be part of this. So, my role at TUI Amusement is kind of threefold. I look after our innovation space, Amusement. So that's primarily at the moment incubation. We have a couple of projects on the go where we're working with startups, small businesses, and my team work as the buffer between the complexity of an enterprise and the speed and agility and basically resources at times of a startup. So that works quite well. I do a lot of outreach, so we're talking to different startup organizations, incubators themselves, companies, et cetera, on a very regular basis. And then we have an effort ourselves on some of our own ideas. So where there are technologies, ideas, concepts that we want to investigate, then my team will pick that up and try to at least shape where the company should be moving next in those areas.

Brilliant. And just thinking about sort of this style of investing, really, Chris, I guess, that we've been looking at today, thinking about TUI, how do you creatively navigate this decision-making process for deciding in which new opportunities, ideas, initiatives you're going to invest in? And How do you decide which of them have got the potential to disrupt the industry or significantly improve the experience of your customers?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of different things at play here. You know, having seen a number of innovation centers, not just in our business, but across industry come and go, we make a definite effort to ensure that we have a good mix of things that we think are long-term bets but worth looking at, and things that we think are going to be short-term returns. So companies are very good at figuring out what they're going to do next year and the following year. If we can just go 4 or 5 years in front and start bringing back some of that, then those are the quick wins that keep the interest in what we're doing and the funding working. Then on top of that, we can be looking at the things that we think are further out, but are worth researching, learning, figuring out what we're going to be doing. Then figuring out how we actually move those forwards. A big part of this, and this is one of the things that I speak with my team on a regular basis, is making sure we know what we're trying to achieve. Again, it's something I've seen many times in the past. I think the worst period, and certainly every business that I was talking to, was The rise of big data, when companies were building big data systems to see what they would find, and what they found is they'd spent a lot of money. Unless you actually know what success looks like and what you're trying to achieve, you can't clarify that. So, I think that's kind of the 2 key areas, making sure that as innovators, we are providing success that's measured and recognizable by the company in Not necessarily today, but in the reasonably short term, but being very critically clear on what success looks like. And you referred to it a couple of times as well about knowing when to stop, knowing when to kill your projects. That's a big part of that as well.

And how do you— so it sounds like you've got a pretty good balance of short, medium, and long term, and that's important, right? Because you've You've effectively got to demonstrate quick wins to the business as well, right? So that they don't lose faith. And that gives you an opportunity to get to those longer-term bets, doesn't it, really? But how have you helped to get the company comfortable in waiting for some of those longer-term returns that probably aren't going to materialize in the same financial year, for example?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's building up your own personal equity there. Building a reputation of doing this successfully helps. And then a lot of storytelling. So when I start to talk about concepts that are maybe even in the 5 to 10-year space that we can start at least doing some exploration around and trying to figure out what our best experience is going to be, what that's going to mean to our staff, what it's going to mean to our business. The fact that they've seen some of these things over the years actually come true helps a lot. So yeah, there's a lot of personal equity there, but then the stories kick in when you're dealing with new people or when you maybe don't have that level of equity. And yeah, anybody who does a storytelling course is, you know, making good use of their time, being able to take people through not just, this is a new technology and it's going to mean this, it's, this is the experience, this is the impact it's going to have on our business, this is how it's going to appear to you, this is the emotional, this is going to be the direction of the business. All of those things coming together helps bring that into a level of understanding. But as I said before, If, as long as you've got things that are delivering now, and you're not spending too much on the future, then, you know, a lot is forgiven as well.

Yeah, I think that's a really— yeah, it's a huge point, isn't it? Having balance within that portfolio, right? It's okay talking about long term, but ultimately, you know, patience runs out at some stage, right? I'm sure for investors in corporate innovation. So when you're taking your Sort of opportunity cases, Chris, to your sponsors and senior execs in TUI Amusement. It's hard, isn't it? Because, you know, we talked about earlier, you've effectively got to— you want to find out more, right? Like, you want to experiment and gather evidence so that you can build a more accurate picture of what the upside is on a particular project. But you also need funding to kind of go off and do that. So how do you approach that sort of pitching of business cases or opportunity cases to secure that investment? Are there, you know, sort of unconventional metrics, unique indicators that you employ to help people to evaluate, you know, its investment readiness? What does that process look like at TUI Amusement?

Yeah. So I'd say there's probably 2 things that we're doing here on top of knowing what success looks like and having our measures in place, which again feeds into this space. The first is that we actually have some money. It's not a lot. It's enough to kick off most of the POCs or the trials that we want to work on. So it's not anything that the company's going to have dire consequences if it's missing. I'd love us to be spending 20% of our budgets on there. It's definitely not that, but it is enough that I can kick things off. But I think aligned with that, and very relative as well, is real signaling about what you're trying to achieve at each of these stages. Your CFO is used to talking about EBIT and counting the money and counting the money out and in and looking at the differences, you have to be selling a different story at that point as well. The early stages, it's evidence gathering. You are looking for evidence, thinking back to something like the first trials we were doing with virtual reality. At that point, it was, can we put together something interesting on a VR headset? And Will one of my hotel reps be able to use it? And will my customers be happy to put it on and try it? There is no EBIT involved in that. That is just, are we going in completely the wrong direction here? Or is there something that could potentially work? That gave us the ability to then move into the next phase and the next phase before we reached a point where we would actually invest larger sums of money. But yeah, it seems to work.

Yeah, at that point, it's amazing how many corporate innovation teams that we meet that have kind of got funding for kind of them as a team and maybe like some subscriptions to stuff like the tech that they need to collaborate. But it's so important, isn't it, to have that almost seed funding, if you like, from your company that enables you to go a certain distance down that road, right? Without having to pitch to explore absolutely everything. So yeah, like seed funding, a standard would be just a brilliant thing to see, I think, within most of the companies that we work with. And when you're kind of a little bit later on, sort of down the road, what kinds of metrics are you looking at then? So, Even, I guess, after you've gathered quite a high level of evidence from your experiments, it's still going to be too early to talk about revenue and profitability in sort of 3 to 5-year forecasts. So what are some of those alternative metrics that you look at? And yeah, how do you get investors to be comfortable with those alternative kind of non-corporate metrics?

Yeah, that's a very good question. It really depends on the type of project that you're doing at the time or the type of delivery you're working at. Realistically, one of the common outcomes from my area is a business case. So, while I may not be doing the 5-year delivery plan, I will have at least giving a good indication to the company, is this worth investing in? What are we likely to do? What are we likely to achieve? And that comes from the testing and trialing beforehand. So, I wouldn't say there's any particular angle that you're going for here, but eventually you've got to get into the corporate language for it to be accepted by the rest of the corporate. So, if I can turn this into a recognizable business case, that the next project team will be able to pick up and run with, then that's a useful success case for us.

Yeah. And it's interesting, isn't it? I mean, just thinking about sort of learning and discovery, just going back to this kind of seed funding point for a second, you know, what does it say about companies who aren't providing that seed funding? It kind of signals that They really value learning, right? Because I guess a huge amount of what you're doing, Chris, as well as learning about what works, is learning about the stuff that perhaps we shouldn't be investing in, right? And that is a value that is much harder to articulate, but, but something that is really, really important, right, to store those learnings and, and make sure that we, you know, carry those with us moving forward.

Yeah, I agree. And the seed funding doesn't have to be large. So a big success for us prior to the pandemic, we'd had this concept on the go for a long time about our customers being able to speak to our holiday reps before they go on holiday. So they were there to answer any questions, look after them in any way, tell them what's going on. And we put this in place now, rather than building a system, it came into my area. We found an appointment booking tool with online chat that was used mostly by doctor surgeries and hairdressers, somewhere I'm not particularly familiar with. But, you know, we found this technology. It cost us, I think, for the 3 months that we ran the trial, €140. We tried it in different languages, we tried it in different customer segments, different markets, and at the end of, I think, 2.5, 3 months and €140, we had the exact evidence of what does or doesn't work in that space. So, you know, having that money doesn't have to mean millions of euros hanging around unaccounted for in the business. It can be small things like that. And we've had a number of them that are sub-1,000 euros. I work in an enterprise, 1,000 euros isn't worth talking about. That's just nothing on any of the measures that our finance team has. And again, having the equity in the company, having proved yourself a few times, then those questions become a lot lighter. But it's very true what you say. If we aren't prepared to invest in innovation, why are we putting together teams to work on innovation?

Yeah, brilliant. Chris, thanks so much for joining us today. It's been a hugely insightful conversation. Really, really appreciate it. If anyone's got any questions, Chris, are you happy for them to reach out to you maybe on LinkedIn?

Of course. No problem at all.

Brilliant. Chris, thanks so much for joining. Hugely, hugely Appreciate it. I think we might have one question here from, from the audience. So Stephen Parkin, so he asked, how do you prevent projects from becoming pet projects for one or several corporate sponsors? In other words, how do you ensure that sponsors remain objective and don't fund projects based on their personal affinity with the solution? Good question.

Yeah, it's a very good question. And maybe you don't Always try and get around that. If something's quick and easy and it can stop a conversation or it can answer something in the short term, do it. It may be that that's the best way to close down the pet project, just to prove one way or another that it's going to happen. And yeah, we've seen there's a number of pet ideas that we've had in our business a number of times, and that's certainly an approach that we've taken. Other times, you just need to put it through the same measures that you're using everywhere else. Is this something that's genuinely innovative? It's not just business as usual. It's likely to have an impact. What are the measures? What does success look like? So, I think it's maybe some difficult conversations on the side because of who it is that's asking you to do this. But if you really don't believe it's worth doing, then the paperwork should show that.

Amazing. Thanks so much, Chris. Really, really appreciate it and really brilliant to see you. If you'd like some professional help as it relates to corporate innovation, then you can book a demo with me right here and we can walk you through how Future Foundry can help you to 10x your impact. or drop me a follow on LinkedIn, get some daily snippets of corporate innovation goodness in your feed. But that's all for now. Keep an eye on your inbox for the next Future Foundry Live that's happening in July. Lovely, lovely warm July. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you'd like us to run this episode of Future Foundry Live inside your company, we did that a few times after the last one, then more than happy to help you out and do that. And if you enjoyed this episode, Head over to LinkedIn, share your feedback, tag us in that. We'd love to hear it. But for now, we'll see you next time.

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