As our ThinkSprint mission moves forward we’re sharing learnings on building a new type of business model for innovation-led services. Here are the notable nuggets from the last six months.
Get on the same wavelength
Different organisations often use different words to describe the same thing, or, the same word to describe different things. This quickly creates confusion and unnecessary frustration. Imagine all the time that gets wasted because people aren’t on the same wavelength? (According to the Holmes Report it’s a $37 billion dollar problem!)
‘UX’ is a good example. From a ThinkSprint POV it’s all the customer touchpoints of a business, not just how easy the website is to use. Part of the confusion is due to other similar acronyms like CX (customer experience). If a user is a customer and a customer a user, do we need both?
The best case should be a common glossary that all parties agree to before a project. The common case is that you default to the biggest organisation’s way of working.
Whatever you do make sure everyone is clear on the spiel right from the off or you will waste unnecessary energy.
The seller’s sweet spot
It sounds so obvious that to get adoption you need to create an offer they can’t refuse, but from our own experience this is not easy to do. The trick is having a sense of which customers and needs are going to exist in 5 years and knowing how to you can meet these at the right price with the right trade offs today i.e. bundled into something any reasonable buyer would say ‘Yep, I’d be stupid not to make my life easier by using this'. Then you are in ‘The Mafia Offer’ zone. The classic error is wanting to be too clever, usually to increase your competitive advantage. This is gets you into the zone of ‘Hard Yards’ — a place without a budget line yet because it’s so new. Whilst it feels good being up there it’s a actually a slog because you’re educating busy stakeholders and hoping for commitment to a product that’s not anchored to mission critical operations. But perhaps the most dangerous place to start is the ‘Playbook’ zone. The space where everyone follows the rules and value propositions are many shades of grey.
“The granddaddy of all [strategy] mistakes is competing to be the best, going down the same path as everybody else and thinking that somehow you can achieve better results.” Michael Porter
Moreover incumbents own the Playbook zone and all the customer relationships there — so avoid as you’ll never make a dent. Best to start in ‘Hard Yards’ and simplify your way down to something that can be adopted without too much fuss today.
Here’s what we did…
Step 1. Consider rethinking your beachhead customer. We began targeting specialist business units as opposed to generic ones because their remits require the ThinkSprint approach e.g. expert core (them)+ expert crowd (us) = agility + speed.
Step 2. Remove processes and features (i.e. complexity) until your product can immediately be linked an established job role and function. What’s the thing they’re already doing that you can help them do a lot better?
No more faster horses
We spoke on the main stage at MRS Impact in March alongside the VP of Insights for Samsung Europe. The title of our presentation was ‘No More Faster Horses’. Our point being that if you simply ask consumers what they want from innovation they’ll give you an obvious response because they can’t leap to the future and visualise it. Very few people can. (If Henry Ford asked consumers at the time what better transportation would look like, they’d have never have said a car — they’d have said a faster horse.)
Therefore…Why not instead present the future to them, measure interaction and get real metrics on what appeals and what doesn’t?
This is what we have built; a platform to invent future facing propositions.
A client can stress tests briefs, generate lots of future facing concepts and create mock-ups that can be tested against audience segments — all in days rather than months. This unlocks a torrent of actionable insight on how, when and where to innovate…
But as we’ve realised the promise of a services platform is not without problems;
- Even if you ‘think’ you’ve got the full context of the challenge there’ll always be some new piece of information that comes out the blue and sets you back.
- The more complex the types of challenge you’re working on the more you will need a layer of human facilitation to unbundle the problem and then package it up into a series of tasks. This takes time and diligence.
- To move quickly and make a real impact all projects must have a mandate from the top. This legitimises the project’s importance to everyone in the business and therefore removes common roadblocks.
We are carefully navigating each of these problems and we’ll let you know how it goes in our next update.
