We took over a programme for a large client. We reworked it, delivered and improved all the performance metrics significantly. Except one. When we checked in with the cohort a few months later, every single venture was dead. "What?" we asked, genuinely shocked. As we debriefed with the teams, it turned out that there was a huge problem in the way the programme interfaced with the rest of the organisation. Nobody had thought to talk to anyone who ran the operational part of the …
Thinking
The Strange Answer to Innovation Risk: Place More Bets
We all know that innovative projects fail frequently. This is true for the largest corporations and the smallest startups. The traditional corporate approach is to set a 'venture budget' - then determine which few projects get funded from a combination of powerpoint punch and business plan bash. The idea behind this is that the best or most likely to succeed can be identified. Once that has been done, money is allocated, governance but in place and the venture is left to grow - with …
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Don’t Pick Winners
One of the things that we discovered after several years of running innovation programmes was that we weren't good at picking winners. Neither were our clients. Neither were the teams.Nobody had enough information at the start of the process and no one had done it enough to have the experience to do it really well. We had lots of data. We scored teams coming into the programmes. We scored them as they went through, we scored them at the end. If our initial judgement was right about teams then …
£40 million is a lot to spend finding out your business model doesn’t work
One of our corporate clients asked us to have a look at an internal venture. They'd invested tens of millions into it over the previous few years. The idea was pretty clever, and strategically it fitted a space that the company wanted to own. The trouble was that that commercially it didn't work. No engagement. No usage.The platform economics didn't work. After working through the details it was clear that the value propositions for the different stakeholders was unclear at best. Then there …
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The myth that innovation struggles because of culture or mindset
"We don't get the best employees" I was talking to a prospective client, and they said something shocking. "Don't be too excited. We don't get the best employees joining this programme." That was a bold statement, but I hear variations of it more often than I'd like. Innovation is hard because we don't have the right people, the right culture, the right mindset. None of those are problems - but that's for a different piece. Today I want to talk about why that mindset is wrong. It is …
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Why Innovation Fails in Well Run Organisations
You'd think that in a large iconic company responsible for many of the modern world's key innovations that innovation would work well. Multiple innovation programmes, clear direction from the top and a huge desire to change it's DNA to meet competition and win. It took one team over 800 internal meetings, trying to win support, to get their product to market. The company is a stock market favourite and its annual report ticks all the right boxes for strategists, stock pickers and …
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