OUR IDEAS MATTER…THE NEXT FRONTIER IS LEARNING TO FULLY ACTIVATE CORPORATE + SCALEUP INNOVATION
After 8 weeks of getting nowhere, I realized it was time to break down the wall between Room A — the ideation team that included innovators, design thinkers, and strategists and Room B — the implementation team, full of actuaries, accountants, and analysts. Because if we didn’t, we faced the prospect of losing our customers in the short term and losing our shirts in the long term.
Our insurance customers were begging us to give them a new way to buy policies, and we were not prepared.
We’d been sitting around the same table for weeks, moving post-it notes around the walls. We’d led hackathons, open calls for ideas, and virtually every technique in the book to try to wrestle down the best solution for how to face the raw truth: We needed to migrate from our traditional sales model.
Despite a room full of powerful ideas, we still had no clear plan to bring this powerful creativity all the way across the finish line. At scale.
Even worse, every time we took our concepts to the operations teams, we heard a lot of “no, buts” like these:
— There’s too much risk in taking the agents out of the equation.
— We’ll cannibalize our sales.
— We’ll become a commodity if our pricing becomes too transparent.
— We’ll lose our high touch brand differentiation.
We were on the brink of missing an important opportunity to innovate because Room A and Room B were not engineered to operate together effectively.
Have you ever been stuck in a do-loop like this, where you’re expected to generate innovation, but you can’t get the organization to jump on board?
What I learned in that conference room that day drove me to shift my business innovation focus from concentrating on idea generation to instead tackling the tougher issue: driving organizational support for new growth initiatives.
Once I stepped back and analyzed the system we’d put into play, I recognized that our process was preventing the organization from building the new line of business we all agreed was mission-critical to our continued success.
To unlock the company’s innovation potential, we had to figure out how to avoid crushing innovation at the starting gate and how to bring a full spectrum of talent to the table.
IMPERATIVE #1: Stop tossing ideas over the wall between Room A and Room B
During the era when we worshipped process efficiency above all else inside of companies, we needed to cordon off our corporate innovation teams to generate ideas as a separate function without the distraction of the groups responsible for execution.
The problem today is different. We have great techniques for generating big ideas. Now we have a second-order problem: idea generators have a hard time getting buy-in from the parts of the organization that ultimately need to build out the new lines of business.
Innovation isolation had an additional unintended consequence: it gave short shrift to aspects of our new initiative that were critically important, but not classified as innovation. In the case of the insurance company the data + technology mindset ended upbringing actuarial models to the process that fueled the underlying risk assumptions we built into the online platform.
When we set up the actuaries as the objection team, they brought tons of “no, buts” to the innovation process. But, when we shifted the dynamic and set them up to contribute “yes, ands”, we were able to incorporate strong analytics and operations into the early versions of our digital products.
Fan the flames of No, But as well as Yes, And. Don’t let the No, But always get the final word.
IMPERATIVE #2: Expand innovation with insights that represent 4 perspectives to drive toward execution
I unexpectedly tackled the second part of the challenge — building out an execution game plan for a novel idea — through a personal experience.
One afternoon while I was working on the insurance project, my son called. He’d just seen Anthony Bourdain’s food journey episode on Croatia and quoted one of the lines from the program: “If you don’t stop what you’re doing right now and come to this winery in Croatia, you’re an idiot.”
My son said, “We need to go to Croatia for our family vacation.”
He and I stayed in that “Big Idea” stage for a couple of days generating tons of what-if Croatia scenarios.
Then, we entered a mode that I now call “Engagement”. We called people who had been there, read everything we could on blogs and social media.
The two of us were inspired by the potential, full of ideas, but no tickets in hand.
IT TAKES INNOVATION REPRESENTING FOUR PERSPECTIVES TO BRING INNOVATION ACROSS THE FINISH LINE
That was when we enlisted help to build out scenarios for finances, logistics, and technologies. And, that was when the plan came to life and the trip became a reality. One of our logistics experts even reached out to Anthony Bourdain’s staff to figure out how to arrange the transportation to the winery that was not to be missed.
The end result? Anthony Bourdain was right — the Croatian winery was the best and the 4 modes of expansion we applied brought the big idea to life.
Embrace 4 quadrants of innovation to move from idea to execution.
Hello, my name is Andrea Kates, I developed an original system to Activate Innovation called Get To Next, where we work with corporate teams to drive bigger, bolder, simpler futures. It’s a research-based approach I developed with based on insights from 30,000 teams and 200 corporate + scaleup client projects.
I started to gather these insights when I was CEO of a San Francisco-based SaaS software company co-founded by the originator of lean startup. Some of the companies I’ve worked with on an ongoing basis: Fujitsu, Ford (China and US), SuMi Trust, Hyatt, Audi, Intel, HP, KK Wind (Denmark), Intergráficas (Colombia), and Stitch Fix.
I’m also a keynote speaker on the Future Of…and I marry emerging research with practical insight into 99 issues that keep innovation from moving across the finish line.
I’m the author of the book on corporate innovation called #FindYourNext, which pioneered the concept of cross-industry innovation (case studies from P.F. Chang’s, Zappos, Allstate, GM, GE, Indiegogo).
I live in San Francisco and I am a global project lead and advisor to corporate transformation leaders. I also sit on the advisory board of Copenhagen Fintech, OpenFinance (Mexico), and Business Institute (Denmark) and have been thought leader in residence at Cisco, and Open Innovation Gateway powered by FUJITSU.
Envision. Expand. Build. Engage. And most of all…Activate. A new point of departure to deliver on innovation.
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