Your first 100 days on the innovation job

Today we are going to talk about your first 100 days on the innovation job. We're excited about this one. We've had a number of conversations with our clients recently about this exact same thing, how we can help them in their first 100 days or as they're getting started in their innovation role. So we hope you will find this interesting. Joining us today we have Alexander Osterweilder, founder and CEO of Strategizer and Tendai, Vicky Partner at Strategizer, and myself, Carol Hill. I'm a program director here. So in this webinar today, we've got a very short agenda. We're going to focus really on the key points that we think are will be helpful for you in your first 100 days in the role.

Which is spot the gaps. What types of innovation do you want to do? And you know, where are the growth goals? So getting us started here with the first topic in the first hundred days, what's extremely important is to have a shared understanding with the leadership team where you want growth to come from. And that shouldn't be defined just by the innovation leader. It actually needs to be a shared understanding. And often, you know, normally it should be driven by strategy in the leadership. So, number one, understand the context. What are the expectations in terms of growth? And we led with the hot or not because acquisitions are still a tool in the toolbox. But what you really want to assess is all the different sources of growth and what the expectations are from the leadership team there. And if it doesn't exist, actually as the innovation leader, you could facilitate that, but you need to have these numbers. What does the company expect from organic growth, for example, going into new markets with existing products. That is not innovation, that is organic growth from expansion. Then you do have mergers and acquisitions, which are a legitimate tool. What do you expect in terms of growth from acquisitions? Then you might actually decide to do open innovation and partnerships. How much growth do you expect by working with other partners, potentially, you know, from university collaborations around research and development? Then you might have, not always the case in companies, corporate venture capital, like obviously now the things we're lining up here, more, you know, corresponds more to larger organizations and then the last one is actually internal innovation. And one of the things you can kind of look at is companies may have an overarching growth goal, but then you need to break it down. How much comes from each one of these source of growth overarching from the different tools. And I can already tell you that not all leaders, nor, you know, senior leaders, nor innovation Leaders think about the entire toolbox. You do need to think about the entire toolbox. And once you actually show this to senior leaders, they understand, oh, wow, we need to make explicit all these different sources. But now there's a second thing you want to define, which is extremely important, and this often exists a little bit more, is what types of innovation, what types of growth innovation you want, not just which sources, but what types of growth. And I'll give you the example that we use quite a lot is Pingan, simply because it's an interesting exercise or example to show in particular also related to AI. So when they started to invest in AI, artificial intelligence, way before, you know, became super popular and invisible with chat, GPT and open AI, they said, we want to really cover the full range. We want innovation that is closer to the core business. We want to use artificial intelligence to improve the core business, but we also want to explore completely, completely new arenas. So if we take our three categories of innovation and we kind of, you know, use the concepts here from Clay Christensen, and so first category, efficiency, innovation. Improve your business, in this case, improve your processes based on the application of AI. What they did is improve their loan applications by getting people to apply online and observing, you know, their voice, their facial expressions to see if they would, you know, accept or decline the loans. And guess what? The actually the default rate went down and the quality of the loans and the number of the loans went up. So they improved their core business. Now again, you can like this or not like this. Clearly with AI, there's some ethical things that we need to discuss. But this worked really well in terms of improving the business. They said, well, we also want to come up with completely new value propositions. So not just improve, not just efficiency, innovation, value propositions. So before jap, way before, they launched a really interesting bot called Ask Bob. Ask Bob is a medical bot that helps doctors, not the end consumer, but doctors in China and has today 1.2 million doctors using it to support them in their diagnosis. That is a third of the population of all doctors in China. Crazy, right? And the platform itself is part of The PingAn Good Doctor, which serves 400 million users, again using technology and AI with new value propositions. And then the last one, thinking about completely new business models, they said, well, we want to build completely new Internet businesses that provide growth that doesn't, you know, relate clearly to what we've been doing so far. So one example is that they launched ping on OneConnect, which is a banking platform that offers banking services, technology Service like artificial intelligence services like the loan applications we've seen here, not just to their own bank, which was about 3% of the market at the time, but to all banks in the region. So they decided to self disrupt by offering their technology to other banks. Think of it, right? So three very different types of sources of growth. Improving the business, sustaining the business, and adding completely new business models. So the question to you is, I think, you know, when you start with your 101st, 100 days, and if you're not doing it, you should do it pretty quickly, is asking yourself how much do you invest in these different sources of growth and where do you as a company want growth to come from? So extremely powerful to define this in addition to the vehicles of growth that we've seen before, like organic venture capital, etc. With that I'm going to help hand it over to Tendai quickly for a concrete example.

Yeah, so I think we need to keep spotlighting Alex in just the slides rather than spotlight me so, so we can have a conversation. Yeah, so here's an, here's an example from an organization that we actually worked with and it's been kind of edited a bit to, you know, protect that organization. But one of the conversations that we're having was that they wanted to actually, their growth ambition was to double the, double their revenue by 2030. And if you want to double your revenue by 2030, where are those sources of growth going to come from? And when we looked at what they were doing so far, they hadn't been able, they were not really on track to meet their goal and they felt a lot of pressure of how do they feel that gap? Because what it was looking like was they were on track to have the vast majority of their growth come from M and A. Then the conversation becomes, is that sufficient? Can we do something around more transformative innovations? Can we do something around more sustaining innovations and we do something more around efficiency, innovation, then also what vehicles are we actually going to use? But the cool thing about this is that once you make it explicit, it then drives the conversations of the options that you have. Right. You start thinking about what can you actually do to sort of drive the conversation. And some of the conversations that are, some of the questions that are being asked in chat is do you need to have every type of innovation to keep a healthy, sustainable business? My sense is yes. Does your innovation function have to work across all three? Not necessarily. The question is just like, where do you want to contribute? So those are choices you can make as you understand what's actually happening in terms of the lay of the land inside your organization. Anything else to add, Alex or Carol, to that?

Yeah, I like what you said about, you know, the kind of the question there was like, you know, what is, what is a healthy. And it depends on a lot of things. And again, we never like to say depends, but it's, it just needs to be a conscious choice. So if you're a business that's wildly growing and has zero disruption risk, well, of course you do not need to yet heavily invest into transformative innovation. But you know what, if you're growing, you're a mature business, you're growing, you're just focusing on efficiency, innovation. And you do know that the market is changing. Well, you probably want to start now with, with, with innovation in the more transformative space. It just needs to be a conscious choice. And that's the problem, that today it's not a conscious choice. There is no benchmark to say this is what you need to do or not. It depends on your company. The readiness depends on the industry. It depends on so many things. But what we need is that the innovation leaders work with a senior leadership to make it a conscious choice so that you can gear the company up to do the right thing structurally, as Tendai said.

And the conscious choice part of it is so, so important. It is so, so important because sometimes folks are starting their first hundred days and they have no explicit agreement with their organization on what their contribution is going to be to overall growth and revenue. And they don't have that agreement. But maybe the leaders that are hiring them and giving them the role already have a sense of how much they should be contributing. And so it's really great to sort of put the lay of the land, make it explicit and agree on these things within the first hundred days before you turn your attention to start doing the actual work of implementing any of the other choices that you have in terms of vehicles.

Okay, so with that back to the second task that you need to do in your first 100 days, like in the first one of, of spotting the gaps besides defining the growth goals, you want to really define how innovation ready is your organization. So we do something called a maturity sprint where we look at the readiness of the company. Are they starting from scratch and have nothing or are they, you know, really, really good at it already? And it's very simple and we had a webinar on this, so we won't go deep. We'll actually refer you to a playbook that Tenday and I launched and put out there. But we look at three things. The first one is your portfolio. What have your results been so far in innovation? What type of efficiency, innovation, sustaining innovation and transformative innovation have you produced so far? Just looking at the results, are they, you know, healthy and inexistent or, you know, what do we have? The other one is we're looking at the funnel and your ability to kill projects. So just looking at how the, the funnel works. Second aspect is what we look at all the innovation programs you have today. So if you have corporate venture capital, we'll look at that. If you have an intrapreneurship program, we'll look at that. What types of programs do you have? Are they connected, are they integrated, are they managed as a unity? Or are they standalone pieces in different parts of the organization and people have never heard or talked to each other? Sounds crazy. Still the case in many companies. And then the last one that we assess is the existing innovation culture. How hard or easy is it for a team to explore an idea today? When we assess these three, we get a good sense of, you know, the innovation maturity today. And sometimes teams say, us, we don't need any of this, let's get started right away with work, that's okay. But if you have some things, it's better to start. And I do think that even in existing companies it's good to kind of understand how hard or easy is it to explore an idea. So we put this together in a playbook that you can download. So just use the QR code, anything that you want to add. Tendai and Carol, because the both of you have done a whole series of these together with people who, who start in the innovation function.

Yeah, no, I mean it's a, it, it's, it's great to benchmark where you are in terms of portfolio culture and, and, and, and, and growth and all that. And, and Katie is asking what that might look like for a company with 50 employees. I think what it looks like is just a quicker assessment, shorter conversations, maybe, you know, a couple of workshops. But I do think we do need to know at least what are the enablers and blockers of innovation within our culture, regardless of where the organization is. Right, Carol?

Yeah, I think something that's interesting too when we do this assessment is really getting that transparency of where everyone's at because you often find that senior leadership thinks one thing and people on the ground are thinking something else. And so getting that cross functional group view as well as kind of the view from the top and the view from the Bottom is super helpful because it's a convers starter as well to just get people to see where they're at. So one of those most important and underestimated roles of the innovation leader is that of the catalyst. So it's your job to really create those alliances, as Alex was saying, and also to build bridges with other people in different functions or you're going to commit career suicide. So really thinking about who are those early adopters and ambassadors that you want to work with is super important. So we're going to talk about that now. And we had a nice little quote here from Hobie Darling, who was a former GM at Nike. And when he was doing his work, he saw that really a lot of the work he was doing was about politics. And we mentioned this earlier with Jenny, one of the innovation leaders that we're working with. And so he said when you work for a large company, you need to spend a lot of time lining up the cannons, but when they go off, they go off with a big bang. So really thinking about how you're going to create those alliances is super important. So if you could just into the chat, type in what you think, which key functions in your organization are the hardest to work with when it comes to innovation? In fact, what Tenday said, in fact, when you start, some canons are joined. When you start, some are. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Facing you. Perfect. Sales, operations, Legal, hr, Accounting, Finance. Legal. Hr Finance, legal. I'm seeing a pattern here. Culture. Great. Marketing. Oh wait, that was Alex. Manufacturing. Okay, great. I'll just give everyone a minute. Portfolio, management, Products, Culture, Data scientists. It interesting no one mentioned UX because that's one that I'm seeing is having some kind of tension with some of the clients that we're working with at the moment. But no one's mentioned that someone from.

Strategizer should type CEO.

CEO Culture, C level.

A lot of Strategizer CEO is terrible. Killing all the innovation in the company.

No comment. Okay, brilliant. Okay, so thank you everybody. Someone's put CFO now in as well. Good. So just thinking about this, in what ways can you work with your innovation catalysts? And we've identified a number of different areas that are important. So the first is the leadership support and really ensuring that you've got that top down support as well as the bottom up. And thinking about, we were talking about where should you get to in that first 100 days when it comes to a governance board and who's going to be making those decisions? Well, in 100 days you're probably not going to start from scratch and create a new governance board, but you should at least be able to identify who those people would be. I don't know. Tender Alex, if you wanted to say anything about that, all good. And the second piece was the strategic alignment. And we know that if you first of all don't have an innovation strategy, you're doomed to fail. But also if you don't have an innovation strategy that is connected to your corporate strategy, then you're also going to be in, you'll be suffering to get any success there. So strategic alignment is also incredibly important. And the third one that we've identified is the EBITDA relief and Tenda. I don't know if you want to talk about this because this was a solution that you came up with for an organization.

Yeah, I mean it was, it was kind of co created with organization and, and really here the conversation is about working with finance. Because one of the challenges that a lot of these leaders have when they're trying to participate in innovation is that innovation, the investment, innovation is a cost that counts against their er, goals. And so we had a, we created an alignment in an agreement with the CFO of this organization that any investment that these companies, the sorry that these leaders made would not be counted against their ebitda. So they got EBITDA relief for every dollar that they invested in innovation. So their P and L still looked healthy even as they took out the innovation dollars that they were investing. And that's a good way of really helping build that ecosystem and allowing people to invest innovation.

Yeah, and that's a common problem, isn't it, across the board that people get excited about innovation but then look at what's going to happen to their P and L because it may take a while to the, it come to fruition. And then the fourth one we've identified is people time. And, and that's also a huge one. So we often work with companies who say, yeah, great, we're going to get people to work on this accelerator, this sprint or work on these new innovation projects. But what about dedicated time? And then it comes down to sometimes the, the people managers saying, well, they've got better things to do, they've got to do some firefighting on the core business. So really ensuring that you've got that commitment from those people leaders and from the senior leaders to ensure that you can actually get the people dedicated to working on your projects. And the last one is a landing spot. So what happens with a lot of companies and a lot of conversations We've actually had recently Tenday with some of our clients is what do you do once you've kind of built that initial idea up to the place where you want to execute and you need some other resources from the core business? And so there's this conversation, I think we mentioned it last time in the last webinar as well, about this handover. How does that work? Should it work well? And I think Tenday and Alex, I think you both have an opinion around that. The handover question.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, the throwing things over the fence thing is like, I believe that one of the reasons why we say innovation leadership is diplomacy is part of the work, is while you're working on these innovations, starting to find landing spots for them.

Yeah.

And so just getting a feel of like, who are the early adopters of innovations in the organization? Who are those catalysts that are willing to take risks so you can start thinking, ah, this would be a cool ending spot for any innovation project we'd be working on, which kind of makes sure that there are no innovation orphans. Right. As you start to actually work on these projects.

Yeah.

Actually comes down to two kind of things you need to do is to create that landing spot in existing business divisions or P Ls. You need to get those leaders involved, not in deciding, but understanding what's coming. So you don't just actually do customer discovery, you also do leadership discovery. So it's like two tasks you have contrary to startup. So it's even harder to do this kind of stuff in existing companies. That's one. The other one is if you are exploring ideas that don't fit in anybody's P and L or anybody's business division. You need the senior leadership, the CEO to be willing to create a new P and L. And the example there is Amazon Web Services that didn't fit anywhere in Amazon, but they were willing to invest in it because they knew they would be willing to build an entirely new business line. That sounds trivial, but guess what? The stock market analysts, they hated that. They said, no, no, you're in this business, you're E commerce, what the heck are you doing over here for IT infrastructure. But because you have a long term vision. And of course a shareholder with Jeff Bezos who had the power to make that decision, he created a new P L. So you need those two landing spots. It needs to fit somewhere in a business or you need to create that alliance up front, bring these people into growth boards. Or you need the CEO or leadership to be willing to create an entirely New business line.

Yeah, perfect. Great. So thank you both for that. So just, just as one of the things that we did, Tendai, when we worked at Pearson together is we built a community of practice to align those key functions, which is what we're talking about now, making sure they're all aligned and involved from the very beginning, involved in, in different ways, not heavily in the decision making, but speaking the same language and that they know what's coming. And one of the things that we also found when we were working with some of our clients was thinking about those detractors. So we had a few years ago, I was working with a number of different teams in the same organization. One team was very hesitant, resistant to change, attended the meetings, but didn't want to do any of the action points. And it became very clear that they were not going to really move forward. It was going to be a lot of hard work. It was going to be pushing massive boulder up a mountain. But we had another team that we were working with where the leadership was involved. They were excited and motivated to be learning something new and moving forward. And so we decided to spend our energy with this team and we were able to actually move ahead with helping them to take on the new framework, new process, and deliver a new project really, really quickly. And so those two things are really important. Thinking about who you're working with, if you're able to decide, but finding your alliances and finding, finding your allies who are going to help you move forward quickly. And then the third is really around early wins. And Alex, I thought you had a quick little story you might want to share here about that.

And I'll keep it short, so a little bit of time for the last section. This is the story of, you know, Henning Trill, who was managing the whole growth engine at Bayer. I remember talking to him and he said, well, I'm really, really focused on getting some early wins. So while we're targeting transformative innovation in three or four years, I really want some quick wins the first year. So even if your mandate is to create, you know, big wins longer term, you do want to make sure that you get those quick wins in. And efficiency innovation, you know, is not so sexy, but you might need that to stay alive as an innovation function. So think of the whole range. And, you know, Henning was a great strategist thinking of those things up front because again, it's all about alliance building. Results are the best way to build alliances.

So what's fascinating about this conversation that we're having is, as you Start to think about crafting your roadmap, right? So you've kind of benchmarked where the growth is happening in your organization. You've identified who your early adopters are, and I'm really big on ignoring your detractors as well. You then start thinking, okay, well, how do we start crafting exactly the activities that I'm going to start engaging in? And often say, like, one of the things that also comes out from trying to identify your early adopters, your innovation catalysts, is that you start to see what other programs are running inside the organization. And one of the things that would definitely happen is you'll stumble into a lot of innovation Theater, a hackathon that's not connected to a bigger program, an idea competition that's not connected to moving those ideas forward. And so innovation Theater, which is this excessive focus on ideation with no commitment to follow through, you'll start to identify those things. And one of the things that I would say up front is because an innovation leader is a diplomat, please avoid naming and shaming these things. Start thinking about how you can start integrating them and building relationships. And here's a quick example from.

A.

Food manufacturing company that we actually worked with. And these were the programs that were quickly identified as we started seeing what was happening. And you can imagine that this is a kind of situation that our second innovation leader finds themselves in. Jenny, she walks in and she sees that there's a whole bunch of stuff that's already happening. And how do you bring all of those things together? And so what we did was we actually did an assessment together with the organization on these particular programs that we're running. And we just evaluated to what extent they contribute to adding value to the bottom line versus transforming the organization and changing the culture. As we started doing the mapping using the ecosystem map, we discovered that there was a lot of programs that fell into the innovation theater category. And of course, there were also a few that fell in the other buckets of value engine transformation catalysts and. And culture builders. And so as we did the mapping, this then led to us having a conversation of, okay, which ones of these programs do we eliminate? Which ones do we reduce? Which ones do we improve, and what.

New things do we need to create?

And when you start thinking again about what things do we need to create, this is when your roadmap starts emerging of all the activities that you actually need to do. And so together we started color coding these, right? So which ones do we need to sort of, you know, reduce our involvement in? And those were the two that were identified for that. Which ones do we need to improve? So we identified, you know, customer learning, sprints, the innovation Council, as some of the things that we needed to improve. And we decided to kill all of those, most of those things that fell into the innovation theater bucket. And then finally there was a decision to start by creating an evidence based investment framework and also building a coach development program. And then as we started having these conversations, we can then start thinking, okay, well, if these are all the activities that we now want to do, what do they look like when we start working on them? And so we did just a basic, now, soon, later sort of classification of activities. And one of the fundamental things that we thought we should start with is building an evidence based framework, investing framework, because that informs all the other activities that we want to do. It informs how we invest in sprints, it informs how our coaches work with teams, how the investment council makes decisions. And then later on we can think about again, you know, working on startup partnerships, you know, customer learning and those types of activities. Now I'm sure that, you know, people looking at this might go, what, why would you do this and why would you do that? The answer is always, it depends and it's context specific. The goal that we're trying to get you to think about in your first hundred days is.

What are our growth.

Goals, who can help me with that, and what is already in the ground and how can I make contributing to pulling all those things together and starting to really develop an engine that will start creating value going forward?