Overcoming the Fear Factor: Breaking Down Customer-Facing Organizational Silos for Product Strategy Excellence

An Excerpt from New Product Innovation & Development 2015:
A Frost & Sullivan Executive MindXchange

SESSION ABSTRACT
The guest speakers hosted a duel-presentation covering the collaborative innovation initiative between United HealthGroup and AARP. They shared some of their experiences around learning how to identify and recruit potential “landing zones” or business owners for their innovation ideas, building evidence to reduce risk and learning best practices for preparing others to promote ideas.

Their organizations were both seeking growth through innovation. When they started working on the initiative together, they realized it was having little to no market impact. The question that arose was, why aren't we better at innovation? So they began to develop an innovation capability and discovered that it was not easy. The first step they took to was to put some definition around their work. The guest speakers clarified why they were working together and created a care-capabilities perspective. Next they put forward an actionable-shared purpose, which touched upon points such as impact, achieving growth and retention. Finally they developed a vision for the initiative.

PRESENTERS
Jennifer Draklellis, Senior Director, Innovation, UnitedHealth Group
Marla Hertzel, Director, Innovation, AARP

TAKE-AWAY
The two organizations are learning how to be innovative. They decided to service both the “student and the teacher” and having this perspective helped them manage the many challenges they had with innovation.

BEST PRACTICE
To innovate effectively, organizations need to shift from the operator mindset to the innovator mindset. The operator is uncomfortable with uncertainty, makes data-driven and analytical decisions, works hard to be accurate and precise and works to avoid errors to zero. The Innovator mindset is just the opposite because it is comfortable with uncertainty.

ACTION ITEM TO IMPLEMENT
You need to hold people accountable differently. There are three types of accountability: Results: Did you deliver the predicted outcome? Execution: Did you execute the plan well? Learning: Did you follow a rigorous learning agenda?

Other accountability factors:
Are you taking the planning process seriously?
Are your predictions improving?
Is the team facing the facts?
Is there evidence of learning?
Is there a clear hypothesis?

TAKE-AWAY
Another challenge to overcoming organizational silos is the inherent performance tension involved especially when a company puts forward an innovation agenda. That is because there is more to innovation than just ideas—they are only the beginning.

BEST PRACTICE
Innovation = ideas + execution. The problem you need to recognize is that companies are built for efficiency, not for innovation. They're managed by the operator mindset and this is appropriate because if they weren't, they wouldn't make the money needed to survive.

ACTION ITEM TO IMPLEMENT
You address this challenge by creating a smooth transition from innovation team to market. Look to the business owner to shepherd the following concepts into the organization for complete execution.

Think about folding your concept into the operational side of the organization.
Seven hints for selling ideas:

1. Seek many inputs, listening actively about the concept you are pursuing.
2. Do your homework, gathering a lot of data and facts to talk about the concept intelligently and tie it into the company.
3. Make the rounds, meeting with people one-on-one, give people the opportunity to get used to your idea.
4. See critics in private and hear them out, good for a lot of push-back. Also prevents people from ganging up on you.
5. Make the benefits clear, arm your supporters to go out and sell your idea.
6. Be specific, relates to your executives and the right time to approach them. You need to test your big notions about the concept.
7. Show that you can deliver, people want to back winners and want that promise and success within the business. Build that reputation and credibility.

TAKE-AWAY
Putting some of the seven tips and ideas into practice, Draklellis and Hertzel asked their steering committee to become champions of their work. The committee members were given a specific request to go out and evangelize their concept to their constituents in two to three meetings in a specific time frame.

BEST PRACTICE
This evangelization helps to show senior leadership support even if the executives were not on board completely with the idea. Just hearing the team talk about it increased credibility to their
constituents and started to plant the seed in the organization so that as these ideas are starting to scale, the organization is already prepared to take them on.

ACTION ITEM TO IMPLEMENT
To collect the feedback, there is a specific technique called the Rose, Thorn, Bud Experiment that the steering committee used.

• Rose: What are the positive or bright spots?
• Thorn: What concerns do you have?
• Bud: What  opportunities does this present and how does it fit into your business?

FINAL THOUGHT
This initiative still continues to be a learning process for both of the guest speakers.

Execution is 95% of What Matters: Delivering Great New Product Outcomes

SESSION ABSTRACT
Guest speaker Phil Swisher shared his company's approach to innovation as he elaborated on two of the company's long-term goals: generating meaningful revenue from new businesses and building a stronger culture of innovation. BBH's approach to innovation is a strategy of what you do and do not do. An innovation does something different than the core business. The same mindset and processes of the core business will not lead to different outcomes. He also articulated some things his company will not do when it comes to innovation, which included ROI analysis, creating detailed business cases, allocating costs to other business units, and attending boring corporate meetings.

PRESENTER
Phil Swisher
Senior Vice President & Head of Innovation,
Brown Brothers Harriman

BEST PRACTICE(S)
Six primary activities practiced by BBH involving solution building and infrastructure building:

1. Pursue ideas using team and firm resources for direct idea advancement
2. Utilize an internal venture capital fund for funding the commercial ideas of others
3. Seeks external wisdom, engages with the rest of the world for insight
4. Innovation, used as a catalyst
5. Innovation, used inside the firm
6. Metrics and advocacy

TACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT
Use a different measurement methodology to determine how innovative your new product or service really is. It can be best described as a cumulative test asking questions such as, “Who else currently offers this product or service?” Points are awarded based on the multiple choice answer picked. The higher the score, the better.


TAKE-AWAY
When building innovative new products, alignment across four populations is critical: the innovation team, business unit management team, IT department and one of BBH's 38 owners. Approval is required only from the partner who oversees innovation and the partner who oversees the business unit in which Innovation is investing.


ACTION ITEM(S) TO IMPLEMENT
Swisher suggests that management ask the following questions of top performing management teams in order to make innovation a strategic priority:

• What commercial projects is your team working on, where outcomes are uncertain? 
• How are you building innovation into the lives of your team members? 
• For each member of the management team: 
• How are you participating directly in the creative process?
• In the past month, how many clients have you spoken with, excluding sales situations and service problems? 
• Who has made the most significant positive impact on your innovation efforts?

BEST PRACTICE(S)
Deployment Values for best practices:

• The standalone revenue generated by Innovation’s new product
• The revenue benefit of the new product retaining clients of the core who would otherwise have left
• The revenue benefit of the new product helping the core business win new clients, or new business from existing clients
• The technologies, people and methods used by Innovation set new benchmarks and precedents, which increases the knowledge, permitted toolkit, and capabilities of the core, and creates productivity improvements and cost savings in the core
• Portions of Innovation’s work, both product development work and product’s code, can be reused or adapted for projects in the core, which increases speed and quality while reducing costs

FINAL THOUGHT(S)
Career advice from Mr. Swisher: The world is small, life is cumulative, always look for ways to help others. Optimize for great mentors and maximum learning, especially earlier in your career. Be passionate about the major areas where you invest your time. Have a runway – you can’t negotiate unless you can walk away.