It was a great field trip through Copenhagen. Twenty of us piled into a bus for a business innovation tasting tour—complete with opportunities to open the doors of warehouse spaces, cool Nordic designed creative offices, inspiring alternative nooks and crannies of entrepreneurism.
We visited a lot of companies in their raw states*. The energy was palpable and the teams we saw represented a full spectrum of fintech innovation from payments to apps to blockchain platforms to services designed for specialty groups like gamers and teens.
Much to my surprise, we made a final stop in front of a big edifice that from the outside looked like a typical company headquarters. A conventional, corporate-looking, shiny metal sign that said Saxo Bank.
Not the type of place I expected to visit on an innovation tour.
My mindset was: How Could A Large Company Possibly Be A Rebel? Can Incumbents Win the Innovation Game?
The first refreshing shock came when we walked in the door. After the security check in at the traditional looking, bureaucratic welcome desk, I turned to my left and looked up.
An amazing sculpture of a diving board high up in the atrium, with a diver primed to take the plunge.
Walked into their corporate theater for the innovation tasting, expecting a traditional PowerPoint of incrementally-conceived projects.
Surprise—what I heard about was a brave set of projects that took cross-border payments to a whole new level, complete with VR integrations and an extremely novel product mix for international investment and currency exchange.
What Saxo Bank presented was a textbook case that proved how well incumbents could in fact reinvent themselves. As their spokesperson that day, Ashok Kalyanswamy outlined their portfolio of offerings, and it was head-turning.
As I got to work with Ashok on the Copenhagen Fintech Advisory Board over the months that followed, he shared with me their secrets to success. What it takes to win at Incumbent Reinvention.
Ashok and I just had a lively discussion as part of Copenhagen Fintech’s global conference and I invite you to tune in to hear his take on how to build a culture of innovation. It’s inspiring. It works. And, it led to rules of thumb I’ve listed below. Watch it: here.
*Many of which are unicorns today.
ToolBox
HOW INCUMBENTS CAN REINVENT THEMSELVES
Rules for What WILL Get Us “There” (to Next)
🔷 CULTURE. Establish a culture where people feel comfortable to contribute. The full spectrum of people in the organization.
🔷 FUTURE. Proactively bring the future into today’s conversation. Work hard to resist the temptation to begin every strategy session with a SWOT analysis that anchors us in the past.
🔷 LEARNING. Engineer learning into the processes of the organization as competitive advantage.
🔷 CROSS-INDUSTRY. Construct a pipeline of cross-industry insights to alert the organization when customers, products, services or processes could kick it up a notch.
🔷 MAKE IT REAL. BUILD IT NIMBLY. Build, co-create, collaborate on tangible, small-scale examples to address strategic issues. What will the future of work look like for you? What will it take to attract great people? Which technologies can we apply now to get us ahead? How can we create more impact?
🔷 GO BEYOND AMBIDEXTROUS. Recognize that it’s important to a) run today’s operations, b) build out early stage experiments, and also 3) have sensors into the future. Do a check on whether you’re unconsciously treating b and c as second class citizens.
All The Get To Next MasterClasses
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The Get To Next MasterClass Series is a sequence of videos presenting the Get To Next model in detail. Watch to find out how this systematic approach will make your life as an innovator easier, more successful, more purposeful, and more rewarding and how the modules work together to drive your innovation process from inception to implementation.
Sign up for the MasterClass series here.
