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At high altitude the air changes considerably; it becomes drier and holds less oxygen. Above 3,000 feet the boiling temperature of water drops 6 degrees, and baking must be adjusted to account for the changes in the air. Baking the perfect cookie at altitude doesn’t just happen; it takes extra focus and special directions. Similarly, innovation doesn’t just happen. Although organizations value innovation, they struggle to achieve it. Why? They miss key ingredients.
Innovation starts with the major ingredients: culture, entrepreneurial mindset, and leadership. Organizations need mechanisms that kindle a passion for diversity and risk, embrace an entrepreneurial mindset, foster adaptability, and ease barriers to creativity and curiosity. All of these support a company’s ability to drive innovation. However, the biggest challenge to changing culture is the pace of change itself. Enabling employees to remain flexible and focused in the face of ongoing change — along with feeling supported — so that they can adapt with creativity and focus is key. A company must approach uncertainty and change with confidence and an entrepreneurial spirit.
I have seen far too many customers not bake culture into their innovation strategy and end up with dry cookies. Culture can be shaped and molded with leadership alignment, burning desire for change, and employee enablement to embrace change.
The next ingredient is the customer. If culture is the major ingredient, the customer and co-creation is the secret sauce. What do your customers value and seek in an experience? What inspires and motivates your customer?
As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, I have spent a number of hours ”going to gemba” and understanding the needs of my customers. Gemba is a Japanese term meaning “the real place” and showing respect for your customer by visiting the place where they use the product or process is the first of many lean principles. Understanding, listening, discovering and empathizing is the foundation to success. One of my customers was a telecommunication call center that needed to design a better process to improve its operational efficiency. Employees valued providing a seamless and top-notch service experience, and they were motivated by using a simple process. I watched how an agent painstakingly logged a case in three different screens and manually escalated support for their customer. Shadowing my customer’s actual process led to a cross-functional innovation team that designed an intelligent routing and AI-assisted support process that decreased call-handling time by over 50%.
Customers often want to just design a product to improve their experience. Many organizations accomplish this, but an innovative team is not just about customer experience. It is also about the opportunity to build long-lasting relationships with customers who trust in you and your product or service.
Once you have the research, insight, and empathy with your customers, true innovation starts with adding rapid and lean experimentation to your recipe. Innovation is built upon rapid, intentional experimentation placed with small bets, quick learning about effectiveness, and then extending learning into another adopted bet. The Pareto Principle states that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes, and as such experiment with a minimal viable product (MVP) in mind. First, you will want to develop a couple of risky hypotheses, which are critical to the success of your idea, to test your MVP or prototype. Once you have your hypothesis defined, you will want to rapidly build the prototype, test the hypothesis, iterate with the customer, and either pivot or extend. Baking rapid and lean experimentation into an innovation strategy is an imperative for companies to remain competitive and stimulate growth.
Finishing the recipe of sustained innovation includes governance and scale. How do you encourage continuous innovation? Innovation governance and scale is sadly a neglected topic in many companies. It is like forgetting to chill your cookie dough before baking, leaving your cookies still edible, but flat.
To scale innovation and design-led thinking principles across the company you will want to think about who is in charge of the innovation process, who owns assigning the roles and developing the cross-functional and diverse team, and ultimately who legitimizes the process. What is your dual innovation strategy in terms of a core unit of investigation and an edge unit of investigation, and will you have a centralized research function or a decentralized function? Additionally, funding innovation starts with a shift in mindset. Leaders will typically fund an innovation team and intentionally trade off a short-term probability of success in return for greater potential impact. Selection and prioritization, value and measuring all fit into how you should approach your funding model.
The Salesforce Customer Success Group supports turning such insights into action through our Expeditions engagement. Expeditions supports customers who consider Salesforce their technology partner and need strategic guidance to deal with issues connected to innovation and transformation, such as C-level alignment, culture, customer-centric design, and ineffective digital operations. These ingredients are just that, ingredients, but true success is in the hands of leaders to ensure their company is using them.
Want to hear more about Expeditions, Innovation, and Designing for Customer Success? Get the ebook here, and visit us at the upcoming World Tours.
Laura James, Sr. Product Director, Success Cloud Products
