The one stop shop to building your own innovation ecosystem

And our topic for today is your one stop shop in building your own innovation ecosystem. And welcome. We have our beautiful ads from the Swiss Alps here where we're going to structure the webinar today. First look at, we're going to look at a topic on democratization of innovation. Then we jump into something called the Innovation practice. Once we look at the Innovation Practice piece, we give you a sneak peek into how our programs look like and what does that entire area look like. We share a few use cases that we have seen in the industry of how people have used these pieces and then we pick up questions after that.

We have a real mission at the moment right at Strategizer and that's to enable different organizations to gain access to the best in class innovation processes. So for sort of large corporations were in the business business today of making sure the entirety of their organization has access to it. But for small organizations that haven't yet been able to benefit from it at scale, we're hoping to make it more accessible. Right. So Alex, could you give us a little bit of context on the work we're doing there and why we think this is important?

So I'm going to talk a little bit about this idea of democratizing innovation and what we mean with that. So I'll start with the basics. You know, maybe some of you, well probably many of you who join these webinars have already seen this. Innovation is going from an idea which could be a product idea, could be a customer need. Going from idea to business models, value propositions, just solutions. Once we found that, then we start to scale what we found and we it turns into a management problem. Right now this first part is pretty messy and sometimes people think it's all about creativity or it's all about the creative genius or it's just I need to find the right idea. That's all BS because basically it's process and teams that work together to search and find these value propositions, business models or solutions. So we underestimate the process part sometimes when we don't know innovation. Now a lot of experienced practitioners here, some of you said you're experts, right? So you know what I'm talking about. But the big thing also to understand when it comes to large and small corporations is, is that these are two very different worlds. The management world of exploit running a business and the exploration world of finding solutions to you know, maybe a new business model, new value proposition or new features. And of course it's a spectrum, product management, maybe somewhere in between, all the way to the right and business model innovation definitely very much to the left. But what we really want to do and what we're trying to do at Strategize and started with kind of the books we wrote is to systematize and codify the exploration practice, or at least some of it. And I'll give you a bit of a hint of what can be codified and systematized and other things that can't. Now we're domain experts. Like we've been doing this forever with hundreds of companies. So we're really, really good at this. We also admit we're never going to be content matter experts or subject matter experts of pharma or food. So we can bring in this process into completely different domains. Because turns out the fundamental challenges of innovation of exploration are exactly the same across different industries and even very similar from large companies to smaller companies. And Akshay and Mathieu will actually show you some of the differences between what are the challenges for large companies when it comes to democratizing innovation and what are the challenges for smaller ones. So now just to frame it a little bit, when we talk exploration, we're talking about innovation culture. We call innovation culture readiness. What are the three things you need to master? Some of it can be easily codified, some of it not so much. Right. So first, one, leadership support. There's a couple of things in there. What we can already give is a couple of best practices. I'll give just give you one that I always bring up when I evaluate a company, large or small, or when I do these kind of webinars. How much time does the CEO or the senior leadership team spend on innovation? Well, from our best practices, we see should be 40%. Now, of course, we don't have the scientific research to kind of prove that today, but from the many, many projects we see when there's no support, doesn't happen. So there are a couple of things there that you can maybe codify, but not maybe as much as we'll see in the innovation practice. Then we have organizational design. So there's some best practices around how you design the org chart to enable innovation. There's similarities across different organizations. Of course it's going to be very different in a large company, in a smaller company. But there are a couple of principles that we can codify. Now, the piece that we tackled most coming kind of bottom up at Strategizer, first with tools and then the process of the books and the innovation kind of experiment libraries, is the innovation practice, where it's all about process and Investing in projects that show evidence. And then ultimately there's one thing is can you actually kill projects to invest in those that should really succeed? This domain here is the one that we can really, really codify. And my personal conviction is nobody in a company should spend time on reinventing the wheel here because this is what we do, we know how to do this. So we want to liberate your time so you can spend more time on this kind of stuff. This kind of stuff or the subject matter expertise in the innovation process, right? Bringing in what's really important in the food industry and beverages and pharma, whatever other industry you're in. Now when we do talk strategizer, we're going to focus on this today, the innovation practice and how we can systematize this. Today we do a lot of this as advisory with large corporations, right? So here it would be governance with organizations and here it's leadership, education and coaching of senior leaders across organizations so that the innovation practice can work because the innovation practice without the top down support cannot work. Now what do we mean with democratizing the innovation process or the innovation practice? I want to show you this graph, this is how we think about it is when you have no experience and no guidance and no structure, you need extremely strong skills. So when I started on innovation, I didn't know anything. So I had to work really hard to figure it out and I had to invent the whole process and the tools and came up, we came up with a business model canvas. So skill level needed to be extremely high. Now over time, when you have more guidance so the tools are there, the process is there, maybe even the slides, the less you actually need skills. So the more guidance we as strategizer first in, in books and now with our tools and, and programs and platforms, the more guidance we can give you, the less you actually need to reinvent the wheel. And maybe this is not where it's entirely true. You can focus your really high skills on where it really matters, coaching teams, right? But what we also see is it's much easier to spread innovation practices across a company because not everybody has to be attend, right? My colleague who's brilliant in doing this, extremely high skill level. But not, not everybody can be the Roger Federer of innovation, right? So if I make this concrete, it all started out with books, right? So providing those tools, highly tested tools that have stood the test of time. Business model Canvas is used by millions, literally of people. 80% of accelerators in the world use it and the books, we give you some guidance, right? For 30 bucks or so you can learn, but that's still not enough. So what if you had all of the slides, you had the workshop structures, the run sheets. So we still do a lot of this for corporations, but we now packaged all of this in our program licenses, right? Because if we give you that guidance, you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you can customize it. Okay, what if we could do better? What if we gave you in that package elearning videos where you don't have to train. You just click on a button and you get, you know us been doing this for ages. You get a preset process, you get preset workspaces. If you do this in a digital space and you get a coaching playbook. So we're trying to make all the secret sauce, everything we know accessible because ultimately we're not in business to do consulting. We want companies to be able to do this on their own, right? So we're kind of undermining or cannibalizing our whole service approach because we want companies to become independent. But what if we didn't stop there? What if we went on and said, well, you get all of this in a dynamic portal. You can manage a cohort of teams across a large organization or if you're in a smaller company, much easier for you to do as an all around innovation leader because you have to do every single role. What if you had a preset, you know, experiment and you didn't need to do all of this and reinvent the wheel, but we gave it all to you? Ah, what if you had portfolio management? What if there was decision support with AI? What if you had an experiment library or automatic presentations? You do the experimentation, the testing, all the data and the data objects are in the platform. You press a button, out comes a wonderful PowerPoint that will wow, your leadership. Wouldn't that be great? Now, not all of this exists today, but a lot of it does. And that's going to be the role of Matthew. And actually to show you, this is what we're trying to do, this is our philosophy to democratize innovation in large corporations by spreading it across the organization and in smaller ones to make world class stuff accessible without the McKinsey level fees. So with that, I'm going to hand over to Akshay and Mathieu to tell us a little bit about how this looks in reality in large and small companies.

So before we jump into practice, I think it's good for us to understand and come to a similar understanding of what innovation ecosystem really Means So the way we see innovation, a thriving innovation ecosystem is three components. The first component is more explore than exploit. How do you move yourself from into a more transformative innovation? How do you move into ideas which generate more transformative innovation? Not just sustaining or efficiency, but more transformative. That's the first, first lever that we see you pull, move your lever to explore. That's the first sign of a thriving ecosystem. The first, the second sign of a thriving ecosystem is project volume that you need to run at least around 150 to 200 ideas per year and of different shapes and sizes all across the organization. So that's a project volume which again is a sign of a very, of a thriving innovation ecosystem. And the third is testing speed. How fast can you test? How fast can you learn? So fast paced experimentations, not experimentation that go on for a very long time and where you don't learn, but very fast experimentation so that you don't build faster than you test. So you test, you learn and then you build. That's the idea of a very strong thriving ecosystem.

Thanks for that, for that, for that clarification around what an innovation ecosystem is. Right. And obviously, as we know, as you know from your personal work, from Alex's discussion, obviously there's a part of that which is innovation practice. Now you know, what do we mean when we meet innovation practice? Well, I mean the first component, and lucky for us, right, is a question of innovation tools, right? So in this case, I mean we, we, we came up with the book literally, but obviously to, to do the work, right, you're in and, and to define how you're going to do the work. You're going to need tools, right? And so obviously those tools are things like the business model canvas and, and, and the lean startup canvas and, and all of these different tools that are very important to, to doing the work right. Now of course there's also a question of process management. A lot of you said that you spen designing the innovation process within your organization. As Alex said, you know, we'll never be sort of industry experts between pharma and food and whatnot. But what we found is that actually the process of innovation is remarkably, or ought to be remarkably similar from industry to industry, right? And so when you do the innovation practice, this question of innovation practice, a lot of it should be standardized when it comes to this question of innovation and management. Lastly, of course, innovation skills. Do do your folks know how to use the business model canvas? Do they know you know how to iterate, how to ideate Obviously people need to be upskilled, but spending a lot of time on that is kind of wasted, right? Because again those skills transfer from one industry to the next, from one company to the next, and funnily enough, actually to the next. Slide please. We've literally spent the last 20 years doing this with the biggest businesses in the world, right. And, and, and so what we've tried to do is, is to really take the guesswork out and, and structure a process for your teams, right. Where what we believe can be structured and, and repeatable, which is this question of, of innovation practice has already been pre structured. Right. So actually we'll go in a little bit more detail about what we mean there and, and if you have any questions later on, we'll be happy to answer.

Thanks, Matthew. So on the concept of systematizing of innovation, what we have done is we have packaged decades of our experience into these ready to use workflows so that you can work on the results and you focus more on the leadership, buying, culture change, etc. And leave the practice to us. In terms of these packaged modules that you get, when I say packaged modules, what is it? So it's basically you get these structured proven workflows. So what we are doing is we struck our experience from all over the years have been packaged into these structured workflows, put into it, put into the self coach programs. What we do is you get an access to a lot of innovation knowledge. The latest from thought leaders, from practice, from our experience with working with clients from various industries, a continuous flow of what's latest. The next thing is how do you speed up experimentation? So we just saw a couple of messages saying how do you really speed up experimentation? Testing is very difficult. So you have the entire experiment library which really helps you gear up, set up and structure experiments such a way that you can experiment really fast. You experiment fast, you learn fast. The next thing is a self paced guide. What we have done is systematize the way you can learn about what innovation is. How do you structured stuff and how do you use the innovation platform and the programs that we have to integrate that technology solution so that you're all hands on when you start using it. And the next part is resources. So as Alex said in his presentation, it's all about don't worry about the run sheets, the slides, the workshops, structures, the PDFs, etc. You don't need to worry about all those pieces. All, all of them have been nicely packaged into the resource package which helps you focus on your work, on Working through innovation, coaching your teams, guiding your teams through the de risking process and leave all this part to us. And the last piece is support. So we also offer a dedicated program license kind of a support which helps you manage your operations in the sense that it helps you onboard offboard and structure your day to day processes. So in this scenario, so that is how these are the six different pieces of how we have systematized the piece on innovation practice. Matthew?

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Akshay. And I think you've done a remarkable job at sort of going through quickly what has taken us months to iterate and to create and to create something that we think really resonates with people. I'm just going to go a little bit deeper on this question of experimentation. And obviously there have been some questions in the chat about experimentation. Obviously that's a scary and a challenging thing. And so it's also one of the components of these programs that we spend the most time on. Notably, for example, we've created a sequence of workflows to enable teams to run structured interviews in a way where, where you know, you will feel like a professional interviewer within a few minutes of grappling with these workspaces. Right. Because each activity is broken down in a bite size and digestible structure. And you have a complete run through of how to run these interviews. What questions should you ask when such that even if you've never done interviews, you'll probably run them as well as Akshay and I, who literally do this for a living.

Right.

And so that's really what we wanted to do. Right. We wanted to enable companies that haven't had the time, haven't had the opportunity or, or frankly the people with an organization that haven't had the opportunity to do these things and to benefit from these world class methodologies to do just that. Right. So now actually maybe you could show us what this actually looks like. Right?

Yeah.

A quick sneak peek into how the programs are really structured and we can go into the depth of it, but due to the, due to the time that we have today, I'll just show you a few screen grabs of how the entire process looks like. So when you look at, if you log on to the platform and you open, you open an instance up, you basically land on a page where it gives you a project timeline, a program timeline and a dashboard that helps you map all your milestones. Your milestones are then neatly mapped Your milestones are then neatly mapped to elearning, pre sales workshops, huddles, coach portals, everything all put together into the same page. So the timeline helps the team, you and your team to go through a very neat structured process with achieving milestones in the process so that you know that you're progressing from one milestone to the other. It's not a big Black box of 12 weeks, 15 weeks of doing work and activity and not knowing whether you're progressing. With that you have elearning contextual E learning. So you, you the right set of skills, the right set of context is created in the entire team at the right time so that everybody has the shared, have, has the shared understanding, has the, has a shared vocabulary for you to progress. Beyond that you would have pieces like what Matthew just spoke about. Structured workshops is the sequence of steps that a team follows together to achieve an outcome in a specific time period. So that is how a workshop is actually structured. All of this is on, on a visual, is using visual elements so that it's visual at the start, top of it, but data, data backed at the back end of it. So beyond that then you would have a lot of resources. So as team leads, as team members, as coaches, you would have access to see the experiment library, the different content pieces on the patterns and how do you do assessing, how do you assess your business models, et cetera, et cetera. So you would have all the relevant pieces of extra information guides, resources at your disposal so that you can get world class at innovating. Beyond this you would have pieces on data object. So data objects would. So as I said, this is visual at the front but data backed at the back. So if you say I'm interviewing a few people, you basically are connecting the different pieces of evidence from different interviews and then you can analyze all these pieces in a single view and single frame to see what was the pattern that I learned out of all this. So you would have such, such data capabilities and also beyond that you would have structured team huddles or team meets so that it's a, it's a great artifact that you do, you use for a systemic ceremony. So, so that you, you are world class at structuring your innovation process. Beyond that you would have a business model based progress mapping which helps you come back to the business model again and again and not get stuck in the idea or one part of the idea about a customer or a value proposition or a channel, but then come back to the larger picture and keep seeing where you are, how you are you progressing. Because activity is not progress. So that's an overall sneak peek into the program. So Matthew, would you like maybe if you want to take us through a few work use cases.

Absolutely, absolutely. But before I do, let me sort of just ping on one question. A gentleman, Roger, posted a comment saying, ah, but you know, what we need is a structured way to do this, right? And then you're absolutely correct. And that's what we've tried to do, right? The way Akshay and I always talk about it when we do demos or when we talk with prospective clients is to say, you know, if you have a transient team working on an idea, or even a dedicated team working on an idea, you might have some marketers, you might have some accountants, you might have some people from finance, and they'll all be wonderful and great at their jobs, but they've never launched a new business, right? They won't know about. They'll show up Monday morning full, you know, super eager to work on an idea, but won't know, okay? Now what. And what we've tried to do is to create a roadmap of elearning, of milestones, of structured workflows to enable the teams when they show up Monday morning to know what they ought to do, right? And so now let me just run you through how different profiles that are present here that are represented here today, but that happened in the real world leverage this tool to their own benefit and to their own context, right? And so the first one we'll look at is an innovation leader in a large company, right?

And.

And so obviously some of you will. Will relate to that situation, right? And there's. The challenges are clear, right? You've got to upskill a large set of people. You've got to achieve scale relatively quickly, right? You can't be working with two or three people at the same time. When you're. When you're part of an organization of 10,000 people, right? She's got to run these large cohorts and very quickly upscale. And there's always a risk of, will we have capacity, will we. Do we even have enough coaches? Right? And so there are all of these challenges that are bundled together. And this happened to one of our clients, right? And so the opportunity and the solution for us was to say, okay, we'll set up an internal accelerator within this company based on our innovation programs on our platform, right? We very quickly trained and upskilled their coaches at scale, and within a matter of weeks, we're able to run five teams with their coaches through our programs, right? So what does that mean practically for them? Right? It means that they were able to generate impact Very quickly they were able to make evidence based decisions on those five teams. Actually, could you go to the next slide please? Thank you so much. And they were able to run this program with their internal coaches which obviously significantly lowers the price for them. Right. Because they didn't need our help and they were independent very quickly in this process. Now let's look quickly at another scenario, right. Where you've seen how this might have worked for, for a larger company. Now let's look at the case of an innovation leader who within an SME, right? In this case the challenges were drastically different, right? Whereas in the large corporation there was a top down mandate for innovation with, with a clear budget and a clear need. The stakeholder we have in mind here was drastically different. He was trying to innovate in a company where frankly people were looking at him and saying, do we really need to do that?

Right.

Is that even that important? And, and, and he needed to show them guys, even though that's not what we do with this playbook and with this support, we're able to very quickly become world class at this. Right? Because this was a company that said we don't do, we don't do things with, with half measure, either we're going to be great at it or we won't do it. Right. So what did they do? What was the solution that they got from, from this product? Well, they had training modules both for operators and for team members, which meant that even though their folks had received no trainings before, they were able to very quickly get going, very quickly start to behave like a world class team and they had the guidance on how to go through this process. Ultimately that meant that they were able to test like a world class team overnight. It was a step change in their ability to explore new business models without the need of consultant, which obviously kept the overhead very low and they were able to generate evidence within a few weeks. Both of these scenarios are completely different in some ways, right? But both of these scenarios have a lot in common, right? People leveraged a solution that made them independent quite quickly, right. And which meant it kept costs low, but also gave them the support they needed at a different time horizons and sort of different stakeholders in the way those stakeholders needed it such that very quickly their teams could become world class innovation teams and could behave like the teams of some of the biggest businesses in the world that we ourselves themselves hold the hands on. Right? So actually there's a third case that, that we've seen emerge in recent weeks, isn't there?

Absolutely. So as an independent coach. So one of, one of, one of our coaches in our, in our ecosystem reached out to us and said that I'm facing a challenge. The challenge was that she wanted to deliver world class prints with a high end client but very low turnaround time. So she literally got the contract and she was like I have two teams, they want to start testing and I don't have time for creating decks and PowerPoints and engagement supports and all that stuff. And really needed a quick guidance on the coaches that were not familiar with this entire coaching. What she did is we set it up with the innovation program, the self serve innovation programs where two teams started working on two ideas just in three days. So she quickly started off, no, no time to market. So just quickly started off because of the self serve program. What happened is she, she could enable people who were doing innovation for the first time because the elearning modules, they were quick, quick and fast on it. Every all the materials were available at the push of a button. So all of them coming at the shared language and it's not an overwhelming task. So it's not that you learn the entire elearning at the same time. It's like you break it into contextual pieces and then you do stuff. So you learn about innovation one on one, then you start your idea, then you learn about customer discovery, then you start doing your interviews, etc. Etc. So you just learn the process at the right things at the right time so that you have a structured workflow of understanding. And also the structured workflows helped her and her team achieve a clear set of milestone during her journey. Like do you have evidence on your value proposition, do you have evidence on your customer, do you have now evidence on your business model, etc.

Etc.

So various phases of her journey were mapped out and her, she and her team were very easily able to map these pieces across and ensure that they're progressing. And with the impact was that she could, they could based on evidence, not on assumptions, not on things, no faff, no fluff, but on assumptions. By getting out of the building, by testing could, could reiterate the business model again and again. So in 12 weeks they went through four different versions of the business model, learned something, came back, changed the train aspects of the business model, went back out again, tested, came back in. That happened a couple of times, four times actually. After that we, they had a great world class evidence based presentation to the project sponsor and now she's now on, on the road of getting more contracts, she's getting more, more coaching teams. So she started off with two, but now she's. That program is now being expanded around 20 teams. So what happens is she could display tangible evidence on how world evidence based decision presentations work and how new team members, even the people who are doing it for the first time, can run through this process in a very smooth manner. And all this happened in just three days after she winning the contract. So that was quick, fast and easy. Madhu, anything on your end there?

No, I, I think that was a, that was a wonderful job. But, but I'm, I'm reading a question that, that I'd love to answer. And so when you, when you've sort of finished this example, I'd love to jump in. And first of all, thank you guys for your engagement during this session and I'm eager to jump into the Q and A session to answer these questions.

Right, Alex?

Yeah, I see. You know, Nick is saying, oh, so first we get told you shouldn't design innovation processes just to get shown an innovation process package. And I'll tell you why, and I'm pretty kind of straightforward with this and candid is because we today haven't seen any innovation team design better processes than we do. Not because we're smarter. Is this because we do it more? We've been doing this for a very long time with many teams. I can guarantee you what works today is the result of having done it so many times, having learned. So we're not showing this just because we want to sell. We want to sell. Yeah, we're a company. But we're showing this to you because you should not waste time on stuff you will not be able to do as well. And that sounds arrogant, but it's not. It's just because of the law of large numbers. Right? So what we believe is we can offer something you shouldn't spend time on. So that, and that's what a lot of our clients say, so that they can spend time on where they make the biggest difference.