3 Ways to Assess your Innovation Maturity: A Webinar for CEOs and Corporate Innovators

Brilliant. We'll get started now. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this webinar. 3 Ways to Assess your innovation maturity with of course, Alex Osterwalde. You can see here our very own and myself, Nick Kimmel. Looking forward to running the session for you. Always good fun, always excited to do these. In terms of Alex Ostevalda, you'll know him well. Author of the five books, Business Model, Generation, Value Proposition, Design Testing Business Ideas, the Invincible Company and High Impact Tools for Teams. Alex, that's quite a mouthful actually, that one. And you can see them behind you as well.

I was just writing. I hope the participants have some of them.

Yes. Let us know in the chat if you've got any of the books. Which ones have you got and which one's your favorite? So, in terms of today's session, there's going to be four main sections, maybe five actually at the end because we'll have some time for Q and A, hopefully. First of all, we're going to go in and go straight in there and ask how good is your company innovation to kind of set the scene. And then we're going to talk about three main things in terms of assessing your organization's innovation maturity, which is going to be around portfolio programs and culture. Hopefully the session is going to be quite interactive. We've got some mentimeters set up and we'll be getting you involved as well. There's going to be lots of things that you'll be able to apply to your own business and hopefully it's going to give you some insights that you're going to find really, really helpful. So if that sounds good, give us a thumbs up in the chat and we'll get started with it in just a second. Just before we get into the content, just quickly I want to mention it, we've got some virtual masterclasses coming up the building invincible companies, one with Alex and Eve as well. It's from the 23rd to 25th of May. Um, so definitely check that out. If you go to strategizer.com, you can look for training and you can sign up for it there. And if you want to see David Bland with testing business ideas, he's going to be running a masterclass as well on the 18th to the 20th of April and again, same place on the website, strategizer.com and if you're interested in joining our virtual boot camp and really leveling up your skills as an innovation coach, you can check that out as well. We have a coffee chat that's going to Be from the on April 11, 9am EST 3pm CET. And yeah, if you want to learn more about that again you can sign up for that strategizer.com webinars and that is pretty much it. And I'm going to pass over to you Alex for the content for this session.

Excellent. Let's get started. We had this session once already in the summer with a small group of people, kind of a test run when we sent out our playbook on how to assess your innovation and we actually do this with clients. We now change the name a little bit. We call it the Innovation Maturity Sprint. Over a period of two weeks we check if the company is able to innovate, we or not, how far they are and I'm going to give you this today and how we do it so you get a bit of an understanding and you can download the playbook from the Internet to see, you know, how we propose to do this. We're going to start right away with a question. So I'm going to jump into my slides here. How good is your company at innovation? So we have a mentee which Nick is going to share and you're simply going to give yourself a score, share a number from one. No innovation capability. So your company is in, you know, has nothing going yet. And that can be a choice. I never dogmatic, you know, could be a deliberate choice or you are at a 10, you're world class and you institutionalize innovation, right? That's the key word here. You're not calling yourself a pirate, you're not calling yourself a rebel because if you do that, you're breaking the rules, then you have the wrong rules.

Right?

So world class is when you don't have to break rules anymore but when you have, you know, the, the existing company, the exploit and the exploration working in harmony. And if we're looking at this here, so maybe you can, you can, you know, spotlight just you Nick for a bit so we can see the slide. How good is your company Innovation? We're kind of in the middle but more on, on the right hand side. So six. Interesting, right? Probably also because it's a self selected group here some are typing into the chat window. Go to menti.com and type in because we're gonna have some more questions later on so you can participate.

Well, I think this, this, this group is reminding me of the book Jim Collins wrote. It's not about going from bad to good. This is the group wants to go from good to excellent or from good to great.

Excellent. Yeah. And that's why you showed up, right? So we can even go deeper. And there is, you know, something I deeply believe in. I think innovation is, you know, becoming way more professional. And what was good two, three years ago is not good enough anymore. So I had a little bit of a chat with somebody on, on LinkedIn saying, you know, it's not just, it's not good enough anymore to say, hey, we do MVPs. Like, MVPs great. Like that's, it's part of one of the 20 experiments that you're running. It's definitely not the first one. So there's some, you know, old thinking there that used to be good, maybe five, 10 years ago, not so good, not enough anymore. Okay, so with that, you know what we see when we work with organizations, generally, our clients are pretty big, you know, 8,000 people or more. Sometimes, you know, 100,000, 200,000 or more. They come to us kind of with this, you know, it's not maybe as extreme. We've got it all figured out already. We just need your help with a few things so we can scale innovation, right? So quite a few organizations and there's still those who actually admit we're not so good at it yet, we're not getting the results we want, please help us. But then we get those who say, well, help us scale. And I think that's a noble goal and it's good because we need to institutionalize that. But sometimes these clients don't necessarily realize how far the world has come and they're maybe not as good as they thought. And we never judge, we let them discover, right? So this assessment is more to do the self judgment. So by looking at a couple of questions right now, let me give you a little bit of framing here. So when we look closer at a company, we look at three things to understand three pillars that can show you if your company is innovating or not. And Nick, if anything comes up in the chat, don't hesitate to kind of call it out if it's worth discussing right away. So there are three things, right? There is the portfolio of projects that you are running today and that you've run in the past and give you results, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, making MVPs, testing and doing evidence based investment doesn't matter if you don't have results. The only thing that matters at the end, do you have innovation results that could be monetary, new revenues, better margins, or it could be impact, right? Sustainability, right, Those kind of things. But if you don't have results. Well, you probably can't call yourself a company with world class innovation. And the results should be systematic and predictable, right? So that's what we look at first. The second thing we look at is the programs. Let me just kind of go in here. The company's portfolio are the projects you're working on and that you have worked on, the results that you produce. The second piece is the innovation programs you have. And when I say programs, it might be, you know, a tour to Silicon Valley used to be a favorite, right? Then with the pandemic a little bit less. Or an incubator, an accelerator. Sometimes people talk about hackathons and so and all of those things are innovation activities, innovation programs. So we look at all the programs a company is running in relationship to innovation and we try to understand are they strategically integrated, do they, you know, actually produce? Because if you have this, it leads to this, right? Do the programs produce results? And we'll go a little bit into that. And then the last thing we look at is the fertile ground for innovation, the ability to create results in the DNA of the company. So this is the innovation culture, if you want. So maybe I can get out of the way for a second here. What kind of blockers and enablers of the innovation culture do you have in place? What's blocking innovation and what's enabling, boosting innovation. So these are the three things we look at. And again, the programs influence the results, but the programs also influence the DNA and culture that you're creating. So ultimately you can look at this, you can look at this which are more outcomes, and then you can look at this, which is your lever, the programs you're putting in in place to change the culture and fertile ground and to create the results that you desire. So these are the three things that you want to look at to understand if you have an innovation culture and how far it is, right. So is the system you know, at the beginning or is the system institutionalized and you can predictably produce results? So now let's look at the three. What you'd like to have is on the right hand side where you there should be, where you should be as a company and where a lot of companies actually are, on the left hand side. So when it comes to results you want to have, ideally, and again, I'm not saying this needs to be the case for all companies. When you're fast growing, you don't have to reinvent yourself yet, but when you're like 5 years old, 10 years old, or like Nestle 150 years old. You should have projects coming out of your innovation engine, out of your exploration engine that allow you to grow for decades, and that's generally new business models. Now, a lot of companies don't have this, and it's not even a willing choice. It's because they mainly focus on efficiency innovation, because it's actually easier to do. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do it. But what I like to say is if you're only doing efficiency innovation while your industry is changing, your arena is changing, you're going to efficiently die with a dying business model. And that's the case for many organizations we work with, and they don't even realize. So they're investing in great new technologies, but the technology is only in quotes, improving a dying business model. So again, I'm not saying it's wrong to do efficiency innovation, but if that's all you're doing, you might be at risk of becoming irrelevant efficiently. Okay, so I like to be a little bit provocative here. Now, let's look at programs. Those companies that have great programs, they focus on tangible results, they change to axis. Either they produce results that is on top, or they change the culture that's at the bottom. That's when you have strategically orchestrated innovation programs and activities. Many companies have quite a few activities, but it remains innovation theater. So the typical thing, right, the Hackathon or the Silicon Valley Zoo tour, where you go to innovative companies, and I'm not saying those activities are wrong, but often they're standalone and they remain activities and don't produce results. Right? That's what, you know, Rita McGrath, who we quote, but also Steve Blank and myself, that's what we call innovation theater. It's for the show. And often this can consume quite a lot of money. So innovation results is rarely, I believe, a big money challenge. It's a challenge of doing it right so you can create results. Now, let's go to the last one down here. Culture. If you have a true innovation culture in the DNA of your organization, you're enabling innovation. You don't need to have pirates, you don't need to have rebels, because they don't need to break the rules. You have the right rules in place for innovators to thrive. Because I believe no company has a challenge of ideas or of innovation talent. What they have is a challenge of system and culture. So if you do, don't get innovators to jump through hoops. If they can start an idea, test it, and, you know, either get more funding if they have results or kill it. When there are no results without consequences for their career, then you have enablers of innovation. The reality is many companies have innovation activities, but they have a ton of blockers. It's super hard. And the worst are companies who give you a prize to break the rules. Like why would anybody do that? Right. Steve Blank had a conversation about this in a Fast Company video where he explains, you don't want to break the rules, you want to change the rules. You want to empower innovators with the right system so innovation and execution can live in harmony. Okay, so these three things with what we have here in where we should be, that's a systematic innovation culture. So now let's look at portfolio. Let's look at portfolio. The first one to go a little bit deeper and we'll start with a question. So was Steve Ballmer a great CEO? So you remember Steve Ballmer was CEO of Microsoft from 2000 to 2014. And Nick, you're inviting us to share, right your opinion?

Absolutely. I've got the mentimeter up here. Some of you were asking in the chat for the link again. I've shared that there. I've also shared the code there so hopefully everyone has access to it. I can see already it's quite one sided. Although the yeses are now growing. So interested to see how it's going to end.

Yeah. And you know, the question is not so straightforward. It depends a little bit what lens you take to judge Steve Ballmer as a CEO. Like if you take his management capabilities, you know, how he's managing people. Okay, that's, that's an opinionated thing. But if you look at growth, how much growth, financial growth has Steve Ballmer created for Microsoft and shareholders? You'd clearly be in the blue camp because Steve Ballmer grew what Bill Gates started phenomenally. Okay. So that you should not forget. Right. So as much as you might love or hate Steve Ballmer, he was producing financial results for owners and shareholders. Now my guess is when you look at the. No, you're not judging just that angle. But for those who are judging, no, you might forget again, Steve Ballmer milk the cow and got a lot of milk out of the cow. Right. But of course still have the bigger no camp. So I think the opinions are probably now rolling in. Also in the chat I would like.

Sandra said, Sandra M. Said depends on the timeline. You look at short term financials or long term financials driven by successful innovation pipelines. I think that was a really good.

Yeah, yeah. And that's where we need to get to a slightly more refined kind of opinion is Steve Ballmer created insane financial results from what Bill Gates and himself like started. But he missed out on every single innovation you probably could miss out on because Microsoft was so focused on on Windows and Office and killed anything that looked differently with the world's one of the world's best research departments. They missed out on everything. And that was not because they didn't have smart people. That's because the management milked the cow and looked at one business model, did that well. And our friend Steve Blank likes to say, well, visionary CEOs are not just great at assuring world class execution of a tested and proven business model, which Microsoft had. They're also world class innovators and they create product and business model innovations that allow the company to continue to grow. So if we take Steve Ballmer, he actually drove Microsoft up, up, up, up to a cliff. And now you gotta give Steve Ballmer credit. You know, he brought in Satya Nadella who turned the company around. Now think of it, same company within a short amount of time completely shifted. So it wasn't a people problem in the sense of, you know, innovation, talent or capability to innovate. It was a leadership challenge to change the structure, more of the growth mindset to explore. So I would, you know, not be as black and white as some of you might have been as a CEO as a, you know, judging co as a Steve Ballmer as a CEO.

Alex, on that point, I think there's a fantastic comment about judging the CEO. Nicholas Hartman has said I'm not able to judge his work result. He did not report to me. So I thought that was excellent, that was fantastic.

He did report to me because I was a shareholder. So.

Christina Cordova also made a good point. He was good for his time. Perhaps it was maybe a different time.

So I would challenge that. Right? So again, he was a good CEO. Again, I mean take the human aspect maybe out of how he managed the company, but he was a great CEO to create financial results. But he was not the visionary CEO like Bill Gates at the beginning or Steve Jobs at Apple that could reinvent the company constantly. So he was a growth CEO that could create the growth of a tested business model. So think of Steve Blank's words, right? Not just world class at executing and growing a tested and successful business model. He was not good at creating a new business model. So that's where I draw the line again. So we can jump depends on the lens. But now what I want to show you is that this is obviously not uncommon. So let's take Netflix, the startup, and use this kind of as a, as a framing to understand. Well, and I think back to Steve Ballmer at his time, what is the big thing that changed? And Netflix is a good illustration of that. So some of you might know, in the early 2000s, Netflix founders Reed Hastings and Mark Randolph, they were in a tight spot, so they offered the company for sale to Blockbuster. Might remember it was the video giant at the time for $50 million. Okay, $50 million. You might remember what the response was of Blockbuster CEO. There were actually several CEOs who refused to work with Netflix. So at the time he said, well, neither Redbox, another competitor, nor Netflix are even on the radar screen in terms of competition. So he did not take Netflix seriously. And let me take a contrarian view, of course he was right not to take Netflix seriously. If you take the lens of an execution focused CEO who manages just and focuses just on the exploit portfolio, because Netflix was not a serious competitor at the time and nothing would indicate that they could become that. But for those of you who used our portfolio map, so here you can download it, find it and download it. You want to understand that down here in this category you have disruptors, which can come from the outside, so technically it wouldn't fit inside your explore portfolio, or it could come from the inside because you're good at constantly creating many, many projects that could be your future, which Blockbuster didn't do. And many of the companies work with, we work with only are starting to do so today's CEO and some of the great entrepreneurial CEOs, they always look at both. They're world class at managing a business and they're world class at inventing the future while the company is still successful. So think of it, right? It's this dual portfolio. So when we judge portfolios, we look at what's the company doing here, Is it at risk of getting disrupted? But then more importantly, what type of innovations do we have in the pipeline or have come out of the pipeline? Efficiency innovation, sustaining innovation, and business model innovation. What we see is Most companies have 95% of innovations focused on efficiency innovation, which is kind of up here. So they're at risk of efficiently dying. So we carefully judge the portfolio of existing projects going on now and results the company has produced systematically. So if you take a Nestle, you could say, well, systematically, not really. You have an espresso like 40 years ago, which was a great business, small innovation at the time. But what else have they Done in terms of exploration. There have been world class at AT M A beautiful acquisitions. But the question is, is that enough for long term survival? So that is the whole topic of portfolio. So we first and foremost judge the portfolio that the company has and has had in the past in terms of results, because that shows you how systematically they're producing results. Because the only thing that matters in innovation is results. Results. Not if you run MVPs, if you use the business small canvas and so on. At the end of the day, it's systematic results that allow you to judge. So that's one lens we take. Then the second lens we take to judge a company's innovation capability, ability. Culture is programs. So we deeply study their innovation programs. And our friend and colleague, Rita McGrath, she likes to say, just like Steve Blank and even myself, innovation theater is what we find in most companies. It's an excessive focus on ideation and all that goes with it.

Right?

Idea competitions. Ideas are free. They're everywhere. That's not hard with little capability or commitment to follow the process through to actual results. So a lot of companies still have quite a bit of innovation Theater. It's for the show. And some of them do this just to show to investors and analysts, to kind of keep them happy while they're actually not even expecting results. Now, of course, this is changing. So I don't want to be sarcastic here, I hate sarcasm. A lot of companies are saying, why do we just have Innovation Theater? Why don't we have the results we expected? If we invest 10 million, we expect a hundred million back. Because the yardstick we now use is you put one in, you should get 5 to 10x back. That's the return on portfolio that we expect from innovation activities when we work with clients at Strategize. So quick question. What's the question, Nick?

The question is, what are the funniest examples of innovation theater you have experienced or even led? Looking forward to seeing some answers from this one. Some, hopefully some. Well, let's see. It can be quite sad sometimes and.

We'Ll make fun of ourselves, right? Because I can tell you at the beginning, when we weren't world class at this, we did a lot of stuff, you know, maybe 20, 15 years back that was innovation theater. Looking back, you know, probably quite a few of us have been involved in creating a standalone hackathon. So let's make fun of ourselves and maybe point out some of the innovation theater that is still going on at companies. And I can see people are very shy. Only one person so far, kind of we need a refresh or we need more courage.

I think we've only got. Have we only got one person in there at the moment?

Oh, we got four great TV show participations. I love it. Yeah. Oh, I remember, I remember one company that was talking about, I think it was in the Middle east, the whole TV show around innovation Idea contest. So my pet enemy, I can tell you, are idea competitions. I see companies buying idea software called idea, you know, idea innovation management. Ideas are ideas, they're free. There is something around open innovation scientifically, you know, trying to get people to work on a problem. But idea contests are the biggest innovation theater because that's the easiest part. But you could use them as a starting point. So again I'm saying when they're strategically integrated, the idea mailbox.

I like it. I like it when you, you often feel it. Sometimes when you feel provocative, Alex, you're just like, if you're doing idea competitions in your company, stop. Like, you know. But then it says, as you said, it's about within the context, right? Yes.

And the problem is a standalone. Right. So hackathons can actually be useful if there's a follow on where the teams can go and get follow on investments. Unfortunately, many of these are really not with follow on. And then the idea mailbox. Probably for me that's a complete like waste of time. But okay. Interesting, right. Pirate stickers and flags. That's one I really point out. If you're asking people to break the rules, you're too lazy to change the rules. So you see it today. I'm trying to speak in tweets, like my friend Steve Blank. It's a pure. If you're, if you're, if you're trying, if you're getting people to break the rules, you're too lazy to, to change the rules. That's actually a good one. I'm going to call myself Steve now. Okay. So anything else jumping out? Nick. Yeah.

Designed a bus where people can ideate on campus. Rather like, do they need a bus? Thinking bus.

But so again. Right, so some of these, you know, they look like idea like, like innovation theater in isolation. But. But I can tell you marketing innovation programs within a company is actually a super important job. So a bus that goes around and promotes real programs that work could be very powerful. So I want to be very careful with the sarcasm here. When activities are integrated, some that are innovation theater as standalone are actually very valuable. The problem is that they're not orchestrated in most companies. There's not one strategy that drives innovation and innovation activities. And we got a rich. We got a lot of people commenting here in the, in the chat. It's great.

I saw as well a speech of the CEO at a conference about innovation. That's not one that I've heard about, but it's something that they do. Right. So that's quite interesting.

I know some that then actually do the work. So my favorite is Bracken Darrell from Logitech. So he talks about innovation, but I know what happens inside the company that really happens. But then there are CEOs who literally do this for the show, for the analysts, and they know exactly that nothing's happening behind the curtain. Right. Okay, maybe one last one. One last one. Let's move on.

Okay.

Anything interesting standing out?

Just one. That was the classic going back to the old idea box, but hadn't been open for two years.

Yeah, that's. That's pretty bad, right? That's pretty bad. Okay, so now let's get serious again. And I didn't want to say this actually to, you know, fall into sarcasm. I wanted to just show kind of that this still happening. And some of these things is because they're not mapped and strategically integrated. So Tendai Vicky, our colleague, has come up with what he calls the ecosystem map, where he looks at all activities and he maps them on two axis. One is, are they creating value, which could be financial value, new revenue, better margins, new products that sell, etc. Or it could be impact.

Right.

Doesn't just mean financial value because some companies are focusing on, you know, new digital channels just to make it easier for the customer, or they're focusing on sustainability because they want, you know, they're really looking at improving their business model more from an impact point of view. So we call it just value creation to keep it broad. And you can define that category then. And then you have cultural change activities that change the organization, but don't necessarily produce immediate results. Right. So training program for the leadership to understand how innovation works is not going to create immediate value. It's in terms of financial results or impact. But it's definitely, if it's integrated into the metrics and value judgments of the, the leaders, then it's going to create cultural change. So two axis and let's look at the different boxes. So down here, if there's no value creation and no cultural change, it's probably innovation theater. So if it has no impact on cultural change, doesn't get give you bitter innovation culture and it doesn't create results, you're probably down there. Then is Their value engines, what we call activities that mainly drive results output, but they don't necessarily change the culture. So typically today, what I would put up there is corporate venture capital, which actually works quite well when it's done well, but it doesn't change the culture of the company because generally it's not even strategically integrated and not even integrated with innovation. Then down here we have the culture builder activities that focus mainly on transforming the organization, but don't necessarily have an impact right away in terms of financial results or impact results if we're talking about sustainability. And then we have the best over here, which we call the transformation catalysts, those that create financial or impact results and change the DNA, the innovation DNA of the culture. At the same time, what we do is we take all the activities of an organization and we map them, we take them and I'll give you a case here from a food company. We changed it to make a little bit more, some of the labels to make it a little bit anonymous. We take all of their activities and we get them. We don't do this, we get the participants in a workshop to map out where do these activities fall. Right? So here you'd have the innovation sprints that they do, which change the way the leaders are looking at innovation because they're judging those new ideas and the sprints to test them. And at the same time they produce results. And then you have ideation platforms. So it's again my pet enemy where they might have even bought a software that has the label innovation management. But at the end of the day it's just internal people commenting on internal ideas, which is, you know, talking about fantasies in a fantasy world and not getting out of the building, like our friend Steve Blank would like to say. So what we then do, next step is ask what should we do with those activities? Because some of them might have to go because they have zero impact. Some of them should be maybe improved, some of them just need to be strategically integrated, right? So we ask four questions actually coming from a great book, Blue Ocean Strategy from Kim and Mobourn, the four actions framework, where we ask which programs should they eliminate, which programs should they reduce in terms of funding, maybe a visibility, etc, which programs should they improve and which programs should they create that don't exist yet? So four simple questions to go through the existing activities, the six existing programs to change. So let's take the decrease. Which ones are we going to decrease? In this case, they talked about the annual conference and an FMCG accelerator they believed didn't have the impact they wanted so not going to kill them, they're going to decrease. Which ones would they increase? Put more energy into more money, make it more visible. So you'd have the different things that they were running already but they thought needs more power, more financial resources, etc. And then one, um, a couple that they actually took away. So mostly at the bottom left because there was nothing there. It was innovation theater. They tried it but they just let them live on without having the results based on the mapping. They then decided to take them away. And then in this case it was just one that they added which was a, a program to push evidence based investing. So you can see very quickly you can assess how innovative is this company in terms of programs and you can already work on how are you going to influence the innovation culture, the innovation system which influences the results, value creation and the culture. Brings us to the last theme which is culture. And if you take Bracken, Darrell, one of my still today favorite CEOs turned around Logitech if you want from a cult innovation culture point of view and re infused entrepreneurship in the company. He says he spends 40 to 60 time of his time on innovation. That's what I believe and what we really believe is one of our convictions at strategizer. If the CEO doesn't spend 40% of their time on innovation, then you should immediately change your job if you're in innovation. Because it's not going to happen. Right. And I remember saying this at an insurance company and then after the conference the client walked up to me and said thank you Alex for mentioning this publicly. I think I'm going to change my job now.

Right.

So if your CEO is not spending 40% of their time on innovation, it's unlikely, very unlikely that it's going to happen. And that's mainly a power and symbolic question. If the CEO doesn't take this seriously, guess what? Nobody in the company will.

So the question, interesting point as well. Just before we go to the question Alex Claude mentioned a few minutes ago, he said so then should the meaning of the E in CEO change from executive to entrepreneur or something else?

So we call it the chief entrepreneur. Indeed. When the person is 100% focused on innovation, that's when we call it the chief entrepreneur. Because there are some companies we'll see that, that actually do they have a CEO and a chief entrepreneur. So the E stays, but then the E becomes for the CEO the chief execution officer. And for the E on the other side, it becomes the chief entrepreneur. So. So very good point. And it is this entrepreneurial spirit. The thing I'd like to point out also before we kind of get to the question, I used to think it's only entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, like a Bill gates, like a JE Bezos, who could be entrepreneurial CEOs. But it's really interesting. And I'm always, I'm going to get a little bit bigger because besides, Nick, I'm always so like looking up. So if you take Bracken, Darrell, he was never an entrepreneur like a scale entrepreneur, but has a very entrepreneurial mindset and hires entrepreneurs. So since I kind of looked at, looked around a bit, I started to believe that, yes, there can be entrepreneurial CEOs who weren't entrepreneurs per se. So it's the mindset that they have. And that same should be the entrepreneurial cfo, Chief Financial Officer, and the entrepreneurial chro, you know, human resources. But I'm going to throw it over to you. What's the question, Nick? What's the question?

The question is, where does innovation leadership sit in your company's org chart? Number one, is it the CEO? Two, is it the C suite? Cio, cto, cmo, coo. I think we're going for Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Senior Vice President and Vice president is the last one.

Yeah.

So those are the four main options.

Maybe you can go full screen on you so we can see the Menti chart.

Okay, yeah, no problem.

I just want to challenge Nick all the time with technology. I want to.

I think, I think I'm winning every time at the moment.

I think you're winning every time in them. Okay, so we see, right, CEOs still, you know, pretty, pretty soft. Not too many. What is already great is in the C suite, we think that's a really good start. But again, if the CEO spends no time on innovation, we believe nobody in the company is going to take it as seriously. The CEO should spend 40% of their time on innovation. And then the person in the C suite, 100%. What we still see is somebody in the C suite who spends 20% of their time on innovation in the CEO. 0. There's no innovation going to happen in that company, period. Beyond efficiency. Innovation. Right?

And then when Alexa said, don't worry, Alex has said, don't worry, it sits with the external consultant. So it's all good. We got it covered. We got it covered.

All good. That's the worst, right? When it's your external consultants who are supposed to innovate for you. Imagine. Imagine A startup that went to a VC and said, oh, we're going to outsource, you know, finding the business model and the value proposition. Just give us some money so we can hire, not going to mention names, you know, some big brand name consultants. No, that's not how it should work. And then you might say, oh, but strategize, you guys are consultants. Well, we actually tried to become irrelevant first. We coach the teams in the leadership, but we try to become irrelevant and get out of the company like three, three years down the road when we set up, when we help them set up the structure.

Okay, Alex, this is, this is a perfect moment as well to talk about the coach community that we've just set up as well. So if you go to strategizer.com I'm pretty sure you can find there and I'll put a link actually in, in the, in the chat that we've created the community. It's a, it's a great place for us to share best practice. We share some exclusive webinars. And so if you're really interested in leveling up yourself as an innovation coach and connect like minded people, you should check it out. I'll put a link in the chat and then you can apply there to be able to be part of it.

Just mentioning that, that's a great point because I can. I'm going to make an additional plug. So tomorrow I'm going to talk about return on investment in innovation in our coach community. So that's an exclusive webinar for the coach community. So you want to sign up for the coach community if you're interested in that. And maybe, you know, six months later or a year later, we'll talk about return on investment in this more public webinar as well. Because we love to share. Right. And we love to give away and give back. Okay, so this is where we believe innovation should live at the CEO level. So maybe something like 40%. And then in the C suite you need somebody who's 100% on innovation. Right. And often today we see that's kind of in the strategy department. Not always good enough if there's a lot of other work to be done, not good enough if it's at the third or the fourth level. So we really believe that it should be at the top. Now another thing we had, we had Uber Jolie on our webinar. So I'm going to make a plug also for his book the Heart of Business. Uber Jolie is an amazing business leader who turned around Best Buy and One of the things he learned about innovation is that he thought he made this mistake, that the same people who run the business, who manage, you know, business units, would be able to innovate. And let's quickly listen to Uber. Jolie, how he turned around, like not. We won't hear too much about how he turned around. Best Buy can listen to the webinar if you want to see the full thing. We're just going to see what, what he learned about innovation and where innovation should live. And then there's a really interesting kind of outcome there. So let's listen to Uber.

One of the mistakes I made for a while was I was expecting that the organization that's in charge of running the business would be able to innovate. And here's the scoop. If you're running a $50 billion company, 100,000 people, there's a promotion every month, there's no capacity. So a breakthrough moment was when we established the Strategic growth office, about 50 people led by Corey Barry, who later on became my successor. So really staffed with top notch people, 100% dedicated to identifying which opportunities, prototyping, piloting, testing, and then looking at scaling.

Okay, so if you look at what happened at Best Buy at the beginning, it was in the businesses, right? So you have Uber at the top. He put Corey Barry in charge of innovation, 100% reporting to Uber. And after the first kind of one year to do the turnaround and fix the core, he himself also started to work on innovation. So he says in a turnaround, you do have to kind of just fix the exploit engine before you can go back to exploration. But they did that without firing a lot of people. So it's really interesting. What he said is, you know, he came in and he wanted to work with the same people in the same team to turn around this organization. Nobody thought that could happen. And what's interesting here is that Corey Barry, who was head of innovation over the Strategic Growth Office, she became Hubert's successor and is now CEO of Best Buy. So innovation is slowly becoming a career path. So it's the counter thing to what I said before. Your CEO doesn't spend 40% of their time on innovation. You should leave that company. Well, today in some companies, innovation is actually becoming a real career path. There are a couple out there, they're still pretty rare, but you don't have to commit career suicide to become an innovator. The tool that we use to map the innovation culture is the culture map. But I want to go too much into this one. I Want to just share kind of where we, where we stop when we do this kind of assessment in an innovation maturity sprint is we get people to score themselves. So an auto scoring with a survey where we get the company to score their leadership support, their organizational design and their innovation practice. And you can download this for free, the Innovation Culture Readiness Scorecard. We get them to score this when we start working with them. So the playbook that we created based on what I just told you today, is conform innovation theater to growth engine. Again, what it looks at is these three areas that we talked about, the portfolio, the programs, and the innovation culture. Studying those, you will understand, you know, how systematic and how institutionalized innovation is at your organization. And with that, we might even have some time for questions. Is that correct, Nick?

It is indeed. It is indeed. There's some good ones already in the chat, but also I can see that we've got some in the Q A coming up already. So if you'd like to ask your questions in the Q A, post them in there. And I'm going to go back to the chat because I saw a few that I thought were quite interesting. Oh, there was a good one from Eugene, if I remember. Yes. So the term ecosystem is bantered around or batted around quite a bit these days. In the context of this presentation, is it purely internal and not external?

What was that? Sorry.

So in the context of this presentation, is the word ecosystem purely an internal thing, not external?

Yes, so I think so we started to stop using the word, started to stop using the word ecosystem for the system we're referring to. Because when we say ecosystem, you know, it mostly most people understand the open innovation, the working with, with academic institutions. So here we're talking a lot more about the internal ecosystem. So we could call that system. But at the end of the day, if the internal system doesn't work, you, your external ecosystem won't really work that well. But we, we are actually in the process of turn changing that terminology. That's great. The other thing I'd add is I didn't really go into the specific tools either. Right. So you can grow organically and experiment. You can invest in startups, you can do mergers and acquisitions. And all of those are the right tools. The question is how are you going to find the right mix of those tools for, for you and your organization? Some will do more mergers and acquisitions. By experimenting, you actually make better acquisitions. Some will really go more organic. So I think there's no right or wrong for those kind of tools. But back to the question yes. Here we're talking about the internal system. I saw one. It's interesting. Tom, Tom Smiley was talking about, you know, if you encourage employees to become innovators, it's great in theory, chaos and practice. So we have. The conviction is actually quite the contrary. So our conviction is that you need to let innovators start so anybody with an idea can go through the process. But here's the thing. The beginning is a three month process. And I'm just telling you kind of how it could look. There's variations of that three months process where they need to come up with evidence that the customer even has that challenge. And if after three months they can't show that, then you kill the project. Right. So we believe anybody with an idea should be able to start. There is no pre selection because at the beginning, to quote Rita McGrath, Good ideas and bad ideas look virtually the same. You can't select, you do not know because it's not evidence. If a PowerPoint, you know, or a spreadsheet looks great, evidence is when you've talked to real customers and you've done real experiments. So we believe everybody should start. But you have a process based on evidence to kill projects and to invest in a small portion, which means you're going to create. So maybe I can just kind of share this in a drawing so I can at least use a little bit my iPad. So if you let, if you let. So who's winning now at technology, young man? It's not a good.

Let us know in the chat who, who won on the technology front. Alex.

So if you invest in 250 projects, small amounts of money, or sometimes not even money, you give people time to do this. After something like three months, you reduce three quarters of the project and you only take one quarter that you continue to invest in. You do that a couple of times, you're going to get a real funnel and you're going to make evidence based investments. And at the end you really have teams and ideas that come out as the best ideas and the best teams. So it's almost like creating an internal venture capital system. This is extremely powerful. So you know, we use the public examples of Bosch and Bayer and now we have, we're working on a, on another pharma case where we can show that their return is 5x to 10x. In this particular case, it's 10x of the initial investment. That's pretty amazing, right? So you should not select which ideas. Our conviction is anybody should start is not chaos because there's a process. Innovation is not about letting anybody do anything. It's about creating an innovation system with processes and evidence based investments. This works. I believe that. My legal folks are always trying to hold me back from this, but I believe you put 1 million in, you get 10 million out. You put 10 million and you get 100 million out. I think we have a system that produces that. Just like in venture capital, you, you work with the same kind of portfolios. There's a, there's a here, you know, kind of what we do is around innovation ecosystems, growth portfolio, growth discovery. So we do build these kinds of innovation systems in companies. So I don't believe this is chaos at all. It's quite the contrary. You create a process that is just enough to have kind of the, the speed and flexibility of a startup with the rigor required of a corporation. So that's kind of stuff that we're trying to do. Maybe you have a question, Nick, that you caught in the meantime.

I'm having, I'm having a look now.

So while you're checking. Yes, Ricardo's asking, is this webinar available? For sure. We're going to send out the link afterwards. So you're going to get access to this. What is the average time you find realistic for a cultural transformation in a mid sized company with 10,000 people? So I don't think you can generalize that answer. So Fed Frederico asked that. It really depends on a couple of factors. But I tell you the number one factor is the CEO and leadership team commitment, including the board of directors. Because at the end of the day the CEO is an employee of the board or the owners of the company. So if that is the case, it can go very fast. So if the CEO and the leadership team is 100% committed and they make this happen in three, four, five years, you can create a real cultural transformation. One of the examples I like is Ping an, the Chinese banking and insurance conglomerate. They actually grew within 10 years because they made this cultural transformation from the top 500 companies in the world to the top 10, 15 companies in the world. Think of it. And that's because you have leadership commitment. Actually one of the biggest, you know, the CEOs of the biggest financial institutions in Europe asked me that question, how long does it take? I said, well look at Pingan. In a decade they went from top 500 to the top 15. So it's your commitment, dear CEO. And I was really trying to stay humble in the sense that when you're publicly listed company you have a lot of things to manage. But at the end of the day, it's very simple. You know, look at a, a Jeff Bezos and a little bit more power than the general kind of CEO. But it's the leadership commitment. It's the leadership commitment. Look at Netflix. It's the leadership commitment that creates an innovation culture. So you can pull that off in three to five years and create phenomenal, unbelievable results within a decade. You can systematically churn out innovation, innovation results systematically.

So we've got a question from Nicholas Hartman and another especially after his great comments. Thanks Nicholas, for your comments so far. Really good ones in the chat. I've really enjoyed it. So you said you've asked a question about supporting an NGO that's focused on women in Caribbean Island. This is something in terms of innovation, this is something like for innovation coaching, if that's what I understand it, to understand that stuff in the coach community, that's where we've been posting a lot of these types of requests. And then from our wider coach community, that's where perhaps we can get some help for these types of initiatives because we get a lot of these ones trying to like coming in. And that's where we kind of like speak to the wider network to help out with some of these things. So if you connect with me after Nicholas, maybe I can share it for you in the coach community or you can join the coach community yourself. And that's where maybe there's a good forum to try it.

Should we just one thing already to throw in, you know, download the mission model canvas and all this stuff that comes with it from our blog. So on our blog we talk a lot about many different things. Value proposition canvas applies 1, 1 to not for profits and governments. So you don't necessarily. It doesn't differ that much if you look at certain aspects of innovation and testing is the same thing. Right.

So and in terms of GI. Last question, which activities linked to innovation must CEO be involved in? That's 40 to 60% of their time, but in like 30 seconds. Alex, which is a massive question.

First one, I'll give you a silly story. So this CEO of a 50,000 person bank asked me that and I said I don't care, just let people see you're working on innovation a lot. And it's the symbolic value that's number one. Now that's maybe more jokingly number two. It's the CEO in the leadership that, that creates the culture by working on metrics, on rewards, on constantly backing the innovators and so they don't have to be pirates and creating harmony between exploit explore. So innovation is top down leadership support and bottom up initiatives. That's how it works. Bottom up doesn't work without top down. Top down without bottom up doesn't work. So the leaders in particular the CEO, they create, manage and continue to support the system and the ideas bubble up from the bottom and succeed because the system lets innovators thrive. I hope that was short enough.

That was perfect. So I think on that note, I'm just going to share.

Here.

We've got for those of you that want to check out more, go more deep into this stuff and we've got a Building Invincible Companies Masterclass the 23rd to the 25th of May. So go to strategizer.com forward/training to sign up for that if you want to go more deep into the testing business ideas side of things. David Bland is running a masterclass from the 18th to the 20th of April and you can also find that@stragizer.com training. We've mentioned this one, we mentioned the bootcamp. We've got the bootcamp coming. If you want to register for the Coffee chat to find out more about really leveling up your skills, specifically as an innovation coach, you can check out the virtual Bootcamp Coffee Chat to find out more. April 11th at 3pm CET 9am EST. And thank you very much. That's the key message here. If you want to see us next time for the next webinar we're going to be running it from.

You want to show up your technology?

I really just wanted to show this off technology game here, April, just to really round it off. We'll be here. It's going to be 4pm this time CET, so we'd love to see you there. And then apart from that, there's nothing else to say other than just wipe that out. Move this here. Happy innovating.

So Nick, thank you very much for hosting and I'll give it to you. You won the tech game. Like yeah. Thanks everybody.

Thanks Alex. Take care. Have a great rest of your day. Looking forward to seeing you next time. See you later everybody.

Bye bye.