#InnovationProcess

Unleashing Team Creativity | Mastering the Proven Process for Full Potential Innovation | Chris Beer

Unleashing Team Creativity | Mastering the Proven Process for Full Potential Innovation" by Chris Beer is a dynamic journey into the heart of team dynamics and creative collaboration. Chris Beer, a recognized authority in leadership and innovation, unveils a proven process for tapping into the full potential of team creativity. This book provides actionable insights and practical strategies to foster an environment where innovation thrives. From ideation to execution, leaders and team members will discover the keys to unlocking their collective creative genius. Embark on a transformative exploration that will empower your team to break through barriers, spark innovation, and achieve unprecedented success.

(via Intrapreneurship at Pernod-Ricard: Test and Learn in Action – Innovation Excellence)

By Nicolas Bry

Astrid Froment created Kangaroo Fund, an open innovation Fund for the 18,000 Pernod Ricard Employees, and an intrapreneurship program adopting experimentation & lean Start Up. In 2 seasons, it generated more than 250 ideas, 20 finalists, and 10 ideas incubated… she shares with us this exciting story.

Following my article on “Dare to be difference makers”, I have seen a lot of interest in my experience building from scratch an “Intrapreneurship” program. Boosting entrepreneurship in the corporate world, I have run a structure to accelerate the development of new ideas and people behind it for 4 years. Along the journey, I have learnt there is no “true” recipe, but you can apply few principles to increase chances of success…

Revive your entrepreneurial spirit

Getting Entrepreneurship as part of its DNA, Pernod Ricard embarked quite early in this journey in comparison with other CAC 40 companies. In March 2012, my top management gave me the challenge to give life to an Innovation Fund called “Kangaroo Fund”, such a challenging name! My first move has been to transform this constraint into a strength. I discovered that this is an animal not capable of moving backwards, and of course it nurtures its little ones for a while, and moves forward in leaps. It’s a good analogy when it comes to Innovation ways of working, made of a strong ambition with step-by-step progress. I had three months to launch the fund among our 18 000+ employees from any functions and any affiliates around the world.

The program has been launched just before summer with a strong internal communication campaign. I have used my marketing background to build K Fund, it’s nick name, as a brand by establishing an emotional connection with employees across different cultures. With a design agency, we created a character looking like the “shaddocks” to embody the fund main motto: “Everyone Kan-Do”! It was very powerful, lowering the barriers for people in my company to participate.

To enter the fund, people just had to send a 1-minute video. The call for ideas was very simple, it was all about any new offers with a real added value to our consumers: new products, services, or experiences. We received 147 projects from all over the world, engaging employees from very different backgrounds. 66% of the ideas came from Marketing, but also many ideas came from Finance, Legal, R&D, Commercial, HR… Season 1 kick off released a lot of positive energy: “Entrepreneurship is alive and kicking in Pernod Ricard!”

Not being aware of the full challenge at that stage, I built K Fund step-by-step. No need to build big machinery not knowing where we would end up, plus I was the only resource behind it. Developing this initiative from scratch, I have realized the true meaning of Entrepreneurial Spirit: a mindset that embraces critical questioning, followed by quick actions, and continuous improvements. It’s an approach to actively seeking positive change rather than waiting to adapt to change.

Unlock ideas’ value with several leaps

Getting an idea is a great eureka moment but it quickly needs to be tested against reality and to resonate with consumers on the field. People behind the ideas must test usage at a very early stage. Inspired by Lean Startup from Eric Ries and with the precious advice from @Tobias Rooney, an external partner, I wrote a methodology adapted to Pernod Ricard culture. It’s made of several leaps to select ideas and project owners behind it with most potential. Let’s see how it works…

An idea on its own is difficult to assess. That is why K Fund went for a call for ideas limited in time. It mobilizes energies on a regular basis, and it enables the capture of small signals from the field, highlighting emerging consumer’s needs. After the call for ideas, a jury made of internal and external people, selects the top 50 ideas addressing Pernod Ricard strategic vision at the time, and chooses also a balanced portfolio of ideas with a different level of disruption.

Leap 1 / “Why people would love my idea?” This phase enables the participants to understand where the value comes from, the pains and the gains for consumers, the Unique Value Proposition. What’s new & different? What’s the real benefit for people? The idea owners share their new offer already with few colleagues, friends and family, talk with experts to enrich it and understand their idea’s full potential. It takes one month and a couple of hundred euros to come up with an initial unique value proposition.

Leap 2 / “Why people would buy my idea?” It is all about validating a usage, Consumer Traction. This phase digs into understanding who the early adopters are, people buying first the idea, when and where these people would buy the offer. The top 10 ideas selected at this stage get access to a workshop to meet up with some startups, to embrace a build/measure/learn mindset! Project owners work on it alongside their day to day job. Leap 2 lasts three months to focus only on what truly matters. It gives enough time to build a minimum viable offer (product or service), a first realistic version of their idea using a couple of thousand euros, to experiment in market.

Leap 3 / “How to make money with my idea long term?” The top 3 ideas enter a phase to dig into the offer/market fit, and to understand how to build new revenue streams. It’s all about Business Stickiness…. The project owners must break silos to get access to expertise they do not have yet. They put together a team made of internal experts from other business units and external partners to explore a new value chain: everything from procurement to new production techniques, from exploring new route to markets to engaging with customer/consumers in a different way… also considering all legal and fiscal implications. Developing a new business is challenging! This phase starts with a boot camp to acquire new capabilities such as Business Models Experimentation. It lasts 6 to 9 months to get enough time to understand repurchase, key for a sustainable new business. At this stage, a burn rate is agreed every 3 months, and official time from business unit is allocated project by project.

In September 14, we launched K Fund Season 2, receiving again around 150 ideas. As I gathered an enormous amount of learning from Season 1, I made K Fund Season 2 evolve accordingly. The K Fund methodology has been iterated along the journey and has become the foundation of Pernod Ricard Innovation ways of working. It has also accelerated the adoption of agile capabilities within the group.

After the 3rd leap begins the real challenge! In 2015 I built an internal Start Up to incubate the top ideas in market at a small scale…

Selecting ideas with potential is not the most important

What makes a difference is identifying and accompanying people with the qualities to make it happen. Anyone can have good ideas, many new ideas are surrounding us, the strength comes from transforming those ideas into sustainable business value.

As you do not become an innovator overnight… project owners need support to enrich their expertise, to learn about business model canvas tools, and to boost their leaderships skills. Like a start up CEO, they need to pitch and to prepare their ideas for business investment. Coaching is critical. Time and money behind it should not be underestimated. Training organized at different stages of the idea development are highly valuable. These gatherings are in a way a first official recognition from the corporate entity. It also enables evaluation of the project owner’s qualities, to challenge their thinking, and maintain the right level of energy at every step of the idea development.

Mobilizing a community to accelerate the idea’s development is key at every phase. Every K Fund event has been filmed to transmit stories to the core business on their journey. It gives visibility and credit to the participants. It has also been a good way to mobilize people with expertise in the group, to tap into our collective intelligence, a strong corporate unfair competitive advantage. In 2016, our Innovation community reached 1,000 employees on our Enterprise Social Network, and became a real asset.

Identifying people with entrepreneurship qualities is unfortunately not enough… I have underestimated the difficulty to assess new disruptive ideas, the temptation to judge it through the lens of the core business when it should be challenged with a new business model in mind. Some Corporate Leaders need to be coached to become Corporate Business Angels to facilitate decision making, to agree on burn rates, to lower the barriers in the core business when necessary.

To conclude, many questions remain open on THE recipe for success of an entrepreneurship program in the corporate world. If I had an opportunity to do it again, I would keep the entrepreneurial mindset and key methodology principles of the KFund journey, but there are a few things I would do differently.

1 / Be specific on the call for ideas / I would start first to clarify the scope. I would deep dive into the Pernod Ricard Value Chain, to understand where there are frictions, and find out how we could generate new revenue streams. I would then make a call for ideas around these areas. Entrepreneurial initiatives are a way to create value, to build potential growth options for the future…

2 / Get Operational Sponsors / Then I would only experiment on new business model ideas addressing critical challenges for our Business Units to obtain sponsorship from the field from day one. I would then make sure we have some corporate business angels to facilitate decisions making and agree on burn rates on a regular basis to keep momentum…

3 / Recognize Talents / I would go further than freeing intrapreneurs’ time from the core business. I would try to find ways to better value these people with HR departments, as it is a real pool of talent for corporate entities. Entrepreneurial capabilities shall be valued in their carrier’s path. It is such an asset for corporate to get skilled people that can quickly adapt to the change our industries go through, with capabilities to transform ideas into new business value while consuming the least time & fewest resources…

You need to be passionate to move ideas forward, passion drives engagement and actions. Passion also makes it an emotional journey… Several sponsors are necessary to accompany corporate entrepreneurs during this bumpy road, to show empathy and to support people through the unavoidable periods of trial, doubt, and struggle.

Go for it, make your own experience…

[Entire post, click on the title link to read it at Innovation Excellence.]

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Speaking of Innovation and Innovators…

We are proud and honored to have had our @CreativeSage company Twitter account chosen for the seventh year in a row now (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018), for the Top 50 Innovation Twitter Sharers List! We want to thank Innovation Excellence and everyone in our community who voted for our account again this past year.

Additionally, Founder/CEO/Chief Imagination Officer Cathryn Hrudicka maintains a multidisciplinary artist account at @CathrynHrudicka that some of you may want to follow, too.  She has served as an Artist-in-Residence, and can recommend other Artists-in-Residence in all artistic disciplines, for companies and organizations.

At Creative Sage™, we love to work with clients on social innovation, educational innovation, healthcare innovation, civic and government innovation projects, as well as corporate innovation projects. Our core capabilities include creativity training and coaching, and the design and facilitation of innovation programs, including in the areas of design thinking, arts-based processes, applications of science and neuroscience tools when appropriate, change management, and business model innovation.

We have been very effective in helping organizational leaders and employees move through transitions and cultural changes. We work with for-profit, nonprofit, B-corps, trade associations, and other types of organizations.

In addition to offering our services in creativity and innovation program design, consulting, leadership coaching, and training, we may be able to help your organization define and choose a Chief Innovation Officer (or another innovation management role) — or our founder, Cathryn Hrudicka, may be able to serve in an innovation project management role for your organization, on a contract, part-time or limited full-time basis.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation and how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley.

We look forward to helping you find the path to luminous creativity and continuous innovation!

***

(via The HOW and WHY of Innovation – Innovation Excellence)

By Mike Shipulski

Innovation is difficult because it demands new work. But, at a more basic level, it’s difficult because it requires an admission that the way you’ve done things is no longer viable. And, without public admission the old way won’t carry the day, innovation cannot move forward. After the admission there’s no innovation, but it’s one step closer.

After a public admission things must change, a cultural shift must happen for innovation to take hold. And for that, new governance processes are put in place, new processes are created to set new directions and new mechanisms are established to make sure the new work gets done.  Those high-level processes are good, but at a more basic level, the objectives of those process are to choose new projects, manage new projects and allocate resources differently. That’s all that’s needed to start innovation work.

But how to choose projects to move the company toward innovation? What are the decision criteria? What is the system to collect the data needed for the decisions? All these questions must be answered and the answers are unique to each company. But for every company, everything starts with a top line growth objective, which narrows to an approach based on an industry, geography or product line, which then further necks down to a new set of projects. Still no innovation, but there are new projects to work on.

The objective of the new projects is to deliver new usefulness to the customer, which requires new technologies, new products and, possibly, new business models. And with all this newness comes increased uncertainty, and that’s the rub. The new uncertainty requires a different approach to project management, where the main focus moves from execution of standard tasks to fast learning loops. Still no innovation, but there’s recognition the projects must be run differently.

Resources must be allocated to new projects. To free up resources for the innovation work, traditional projects must be stopped so their resources can flow to the innovation work. (Innovation work cannot wait to hire a new set of innovation resources.)  Stopping existing projects, especially pet projects, is a major organizational stumbling block, but can be overcome with a good process. And once resources are allocated to new projects, to make sure the resources remain allocated, a separate budget is created for the innovation work. (There’s no other way.) Still no innovation, but there are people to do the innovation work.

The only thing left to do is the hardest part – to start the innovation work itself. And to start, I recommend the IBE (Innovation Burst Event). The IBE starts with a customer need that is translated into a set of design challenges which are solved by a cross-functional team.  In a two-day IBE, several novel concepts are created, each with a one page plan that defines next steps.  At the report-out at the end of the second day, the leaders responsible for allocating the commercialization resources review the concepts and plans and decide on next steps. After the first IBE, innovation has started.

There’s a lot of work to help the organization understand why innovation must be done. And there’s a lot of work to get the organization ready to do innovation. Old habits must be changed and old recipes must be abandoned. And once the battle for hearts and minds is won, there’s an equal amount of work to teach the organization how to do the new innovation work.

It’s important for the organization to understand why innovation is needed, but no customer value is delivered and no increased sales are booked until the organization delivers a commercialized solution.

Some companies start innovation work without doing the work to help the organization understand why innovation work is needed. And some companies do a great job of communicating the need for innovation and putting in place the governance processes, but fail to train the organization on how to do the innovation work.

Truth is, you’ve got to do both. If you spend time to convince the organization why innovation is important, why not get some return from your investment and teach them how to do the work? And if you train the organization how to do innovation work, why not develop the up-front why so everyone rallies behind the work?

Why isn’t enough and how isn’t enough. Don’t do one without the other.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Innovation Excellence.]

***

Speaking of Innovation and Innovators…

We are proud and honored to have had our @CreativeSage company Twitter account chosen for the sixth year in a row now (2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017), for the Top 50 Innovation Twitter Sharers List! We want to thank Innovation Excellence and everyone in our community who voted for our account again this past year.

Additionally, Founder/CEO/Chief Imagination Officer Cathryn Hrudicka maintains a multidisciplinary artist account at @CathrynHrudicka that some of you may want to follow, too.  She has served as an Artist-in-Residence, and can recommend other Artists-in-Residence in all artistic disciplines, for companies and organizations.

At Creative Sage™, we love to work with clients on social innovation, educational innovation, healthcare innovation, civic and government innovation projects, as well as corporate innovation projects. Our core capabilities include creativity training and coaching, and the design and facilitation of innovation programs, including in the areas of design thinking, arts-based processes, applications of science and neuroscience tools when appropriate, change management, and business model innovation.

We have been very effective in helping organizational leaders and employees move through transitions and cultural changes. We work with for-profit, nonprofit, B-corps, trade associations, and other types of organizations.

In addition to offering our services in creativity and innovation program design, consulting, leadership coaching, and training, we may be able to help your organization define and choose a Chief Innovation Officer (or another innovation management role) — or our founder, Cathryn Hrudicka, may be able to serve in an innovation project management role for your organization, on a contract, part-time or limited full-time basis.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you would like to discuss your situation and how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future. You can also call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley.

We look forward to helping you find the path to luminous creativity and continuous innovation!

***