My journey of discovery to innovation flow

Innovation is one of the riskiest,
yet most important,
endeavours of modern times.

We’ve all heard about the need for innovation and its importance in organisations and economies. We know its value. In organisations innovation drives growth. For example, Procter & Gamble Chairman and CEO (and co-author of The Game Changer) A. G. Lafley used innovation to turn the P&G business around and create ‘sustained and ever-improving organic revenue growth and profits’, choosing innovation as the key driver because it is ‘the best way to win in this world’.

For humankind innovation drives development and helps us reach fulfilment. The human race has developed through creativity and innovation. In his best-selling book Flow, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shares how, when we are involved in creativity and innovation, ‘we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life’.

Ultimately, organisations, the people within them, and the whole population, in fact, need the ability to innovate in order to develop, grow and reach any kind of fulfilment. Without it we’ll all stagnate and possibly not even survive.

Yet innovation is hard and rarely successful. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen 95 per cent of new products fail. And ‘most start-ups fail’, says start-up guru and author of the Lean Startup, Eric Ries. So, just like we need to continually innovate to grow and develop, we also need to continually grow and develop how we innovate.

What do we mean by ‘innovation’? I see innovation as the act of challenging the status quo to create new value that satisfies a human need.

If we break this down, then we are saying that innovation:

• is a verb; it is something you do
• challenges the status quo: think Cirque du Soleil, Apple’s iPod and iPhone, Nespresso, Uber, Airbnb
• must create new value; if it doesn’t, then it is just creativity (or fun) without action and less likely to be successful
• must satisfy a human need; there is a human need at the end (or beginning) of every innovation. These humans can be customers, consumers, citizens, employees, end users and so on. For simplicity, throughout the remainder of this book I refer to all these types of humans as ‘customers’. The methods and lessons in this book are equally applicable to innovating for any one of these groups.

When we think of innovation we may think of new products, experiences, services or better ways of working (e.g. new systems and processes). The broad range of innovation is well illustrated by figure 1, global innovation firm Doblin’s Ten Types of Innovation.

My journey

After graduating with a Masters in Commerce — my thesis was on branding — I started out as a sales representative for FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) giant Unilever. This was a great place for me to start my career, and all part of my plan of becoming a brand manager. In my final years studying Marketing at university many of the examples of great branding came from the FMCG industry; I was hooked and wanted to become a brand manager on an iconic FMCG brand — think Coca-Cola, Gillette, Guinness, and so on. The advice given to me by those who’d already ‘made it’ was to start out at the coalface in sales before moving into brand management.

After four years at several divisions of Unilever in New Zealand and the UK, managing various brands, I had a bit of a personal reckoning; Unilever was a great consumer-centric organisation, but I realised I was only getting to do the stuff I loved (strategic brand work and new product innovation) on average one day a fortnight. I wasn’t unleashing my creativity enough, and, as Csikszentmihalyi would say, I wasn’t in ‘flow’ — and, frankly, it was contributing to making me very depressed. I looked at what I had enjoyed about my previous roles and what was missing and decided I wanted to work as a brand and innovation consultant for a brand consultancy, and I haven’t looked back.

I loved that first brand consultancy role. I got to help clients and their teams develop new brand strategies, reposition their brands and innovate new products and services. I got to do the things I loved to do as a brand manager and account manager, but on a daily basis and without all the project management and administration.

If we were to take the key learnings from this experience, I’d say they were that I stopped and reflected on my feelings and distilled these into needs before jumping to solution or a new job. I then ‘prototyped and tested’ these possible new jobs by spending a few days working at a couple of agencies and brand consultancies before pursuing one of these roles.

I’ve since spent the last 17 years helping organisations and teams grow and be more fulfilled through brand strategy and innovation. Over this time I’ve continually learned, experimented and refined techniques around the question: when does innovation succeed and fail, and what is a method for repeatable success that we can all apply?

My studies and then roles at Unilever really piqued my interest in how organisations and teams could repeatedly innovate more successfully, whether that be for new products, experiences and services or better ways of working, such as internal systems and processes. I’d had some success at Unilever with the experienced people I worked with and the excellent processes Unilever had in place, but I knew organisations and teams could still improve further.

There were many books on building a culture of innovation, which, while important, weren’t about the process of innovation. One book on this topic that did really stand out was Robert G. Cooper’s Winning at New Products. Firstly, it stood out because it drew on a number of studies from the field, looking at what separated the winners from the losers in product innovation; it was rich with research results. Secondly, it related this to the Stage Gate Innovation process that almost all leading FMCG companies, including Unilever, were using at the time.

The most significant finding in Cooper’s work in my view was that most innovations fail because of little or poor work at the front end of innovation. The ‘front end’ of innovation being the stages from project initiation, exploratory research, customer need generation, ideation to concept development (prototyping and testing). Everything that comes before development, commercialisation and launch. The number one factor was poor customer research — ‘a lack of thoroughness in identifying real needs in the marketplace’, with innovation teams often ‘making assumptions in order to justify the project’. Quality work was often missing, and very few resources were being allocated to these early stages: ‘Only 7% of the money and 16% of the work effort (person-days) goes to the vital pre-development (front-end) phases of the project!’ The time pressures to launch are the main drivers of skipping or doing these stages poorly. Speed in innovation is very important, but not at the expense of managing the innovation journey properly. In fact, it is often a false economy, with this rushing of stages resulting in rework or project failure in the middle and back end of the process. The further you progress along the innovation journey, the more time- and resource-intensive and expensive it becomes. So getting your upfront work done right is critical; it lays the foundation for everything that follows.

While it is important to fix these weaknesses, Cooper also wanted to identify what the winning strategies were. To answer this research question Cooper investigated 2000 product innovation projects — two thirds were successes and one third were failures. From these case studies he identified nine success factors:

1. a unique, superior and differentiated product with good value-for-money for the customer
2. a strong market orientation — voice of customer built in
3. a sharp, early, fact-based product definition before development begins
4. solid up-front homework — doing the front-end activities well
5. true cross-functional teams — empowered, resourced, accountable, dedicated leader
6. leverage — where the product builds on the business’s technology and marketing competencies
7. market attractiveness — size, growth, margins
8. quality of the launch effort — well planned, properly resourced
9. technological competencies and quality of execution of technological activities.

As you can see, five of the nine success factors are related to the front end of the innovation process, with a further two being equally attributable to both the front and back end. Of the five directly attributable to the front end, according to Cooper’s research the first four have the biggest effect on success overall.

It was pretty clear to my young self that if we could improve the front end of innovation we would dramatically improve its success. While the back end could still be improved, it was already far stronger and this wasn’t where my passion or skills lay. This gap gave me purpose; I wanted to build on the significant contributions by the likes of Cooper and organisations such as Unilever. I was passionate and I was curious, so I focused on researching what others had found and then practically applying it in the field on real projects, generating and applying my own thinking, working with colleagues and clients — experimenting with it all and keeping what worked and filing what didn’t.

17 years later …

Innovation is still very difficult, and success rates don’t appear to be improving. Why is this?

Over this time I’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the most innovative and successful organisations, and those with ambitions to be (as well as those who were at the peak of their performance only to be disrupted by a new player), such as Air New Zealand, The Australian Institute of Sport, Bausch & Lomb, Cadbury, Coca-Cola, Diageo, Commonwealth Bank, Kraft, Les Mills, Mondelez, Nestlé, Nokia (in its heyday), Sainsbury’s, Siemens …

And it is this journey that has led me to writing this book. To share with you my learnings and experiences of what works and what doesn’t.

This is not a book of scientifically researched methods — that hasn’t been the journey I chose. It is practical and applied. It is based on tens of thousands of hours leading and training innovation, thousands of workshops and hundreds of client partnerships and collaborations across multiple industries and continents. It is a story, and method, of what works from experience.

Learnings

• Most innovations fail because of too little or poor work at the front end of the innovation process.
• The biggest culprit is poor customer research; that is, a lack of rigour in identifying real unmet customer needs and validating the solutions through real customer testing.