Disruptive Innovation als Handwerk Teil 1

As with every craft, the right tools are needed in order to work on radical innovations collaboratively and across units. Here we present you with the most important tools.

Today’s companies are built upon an organizational principle where the intended result is already fully clear from the outset. For BMW, it’s clear that a car will be produced at the end of the process: the company organization and defined processes reflect this, and the engines and design are optimized accordingly. But what happens when the operating framework changes radically? What happens if the focus areas are clear, but not the result? Or if companies are faced by a great number of challenges to which no-one initially has any answers? Most organizations would have a difficult time. They lack the structures, processes and approaches needed to work out the right answers to open questions in a systematic, calm and scalable way. The digital transformation faced by today’s companies makes this problem even more difficult. Numerous companies need to first ask themselves what digitization means to them – for their business model, range of products and services and employees. What does the future of mobility mean for BMW? What happens if software becomes the main selling point, and not the car itself? And what if people start sharing their cars instead of using them just themselves? Suddenly, the challenges are clear, but not the results. And for BMW, it’s not certain that a car will again emerge at the end of this search for answers.

At the moment, however, there’s hardly any support provided for teams who question existing standards to develop completely new, radical solutions. At the same time, existing staff may be left in the cold during the digital transformation and feel as though they will no longer be needed in future. This is strange when you consider that organizations have a process for practically everything: how to work, the procedure to take, when intervention is needed and in what form. But not when it comes to systematically devising solutions to open questions with uncertain outcomes. Let alone the fact that these solutions can be devised not only by digital experts with many years of experience but also employees from various disciplines, such as Controlling, HR, Sales etc. It’s no wonder that employees are overwhelmed by the sudden need to question every process despite the company instructing staff to adhere them year after year. This is why we want to show you with the most important working tools to allow your employees to tackle their challenges independently and in a radically short space of time, as well as to come up with disruptive answers themselves.

THE TOOLKIT FOR DEVELOPING RADICAL INNOVATIONS

#01 - THE RAPID INNOVATION CANVAS FOR DEVISING DISRUPTIVE SOLUTIONS

We have assembled our own methodical framework called RAPID INNOVATIONTarget not accessible as a guide for people facing these challenges. It helps companies to think out-of-the-box in five steps, enabling them to develop completely new and disruptive solutions to differentiate themselves from the competition. The five steps help people navigate their tasks, find out what step they are currently facing and the steps which are yet to come.

The first step involves gathering the major pain points experienced by customers within a specific topic area, e.g. mobility. In the second step, we take one of these pain points and search for companies outside our own sector that have solved a similar challenge in an especially innovative way. The third step involves breaking down the individual solution into components, analysing these and figuring out how they work in detail, and which mechanics are behind the services for resolving customer hurdles. This creates a set of principles for success that can be reassembled as desired. The fourth step is about interpreting and adapting the best solution mechanics for your own sector to create an entirely new customer experience. We call this method of devising solutions: innovation through recombination. The fifth and final step involves developing an initial prototype based on the solution. This provides good insight into how the solution idea can work in detail at a very early stage, and whether customers will actually want to use it.

This type of approach gives people security and a sense of orientation as it puts something in their hands that they can use at any time. Regardless of how large the problem, how large the challenge, or how open-ended the topic; we don’t need to be worried about it. We go through our five steps in each of these cases. We keep in mind that this approach has led to new and outstanding solutions in ten out of ten cases, from which we can continue to work iteratively. At the same time, the project status is always transparent to all parties: we are at step two of five within the approach. To finish, we still need to complete three steps.

This means employees can always keep sight of the goal right from the start without having to know the result.

#02 - SPRINT LIBRARIES: FOR MINIMIZING RESEARCH TIME

Success or failure increasingly depends on whether companies are able to identify new changes, perceive opportunities and yet remain nimble and flexible. Well-structured companies react directly to changes in their competitive environment. They identify potential allowing them to achieve or maintain market predominance. Companies wanting to achieve this need to avoid complexity and excess costs. By this, we mean intelligent and productive work completed in a radically short period of time without squandering a quarter of productive power through structures, processes and procedures.

Today, no-one invests any more time in research at our company. We are continually learning such as by reading textbooks and magazines, and being active on news portals or specialist blogs. All we have had to do is get used to immediately documenting any solution we find that distinguishes itself very well from all the other companies on the market. We take a quick screenshot, add a few sentences to state what caught our eye so positively about the solution, and enter all this into a predefined working template. In doing so, we have established three large sprint libraries in the company filled with up to fifty of these templates: one library for digital products, one for digital services and one for digital business models. When companies, employees or other people approach us with an issue, we no longer do any specific research. It is instead a continual process whereby we simply go through our libraries and select suitable ideas. We find principles for success in nine out of ten cases which can directly assist us and provide an immediate starting point. Everybody has heard of the phenomenon where you find an excellent example of something to do with a specific topic, but you can no longer remember the name or URL. You then begin to go through hundreds of open tabs, search the browser history, or desperately try to locate it again through Google search. This all wastes time that could be put to better use. Our SPRINT LIBRARIES have not only reduced the time spent researching massively but also build knowledge through modules that can benefit all staff.

#03 - WORKING TEMPLATES PUTTING AN END TO POWERPOINT BINGES

Instead of a Powerpoint presentation overload, we have devised a dedicated working template for each individual working step in our RAPID INNOVATION FRAMEWORKTarget not accessible. All employees need to do is to fill the relevant template with content for each step. Developing entirely new solutions is difficult enough without people needing to worry about how these results have to be derived or processed, let alone putting together a completely new presentation for each topic. This also gives rise to a range of other benefits: employees invest their time in topics which are really important, like the content. And since the preparatory work for the individual working steps is always the same, a very wide variety of solutions can also be compared against one another. No-one needs to spend any more time or mental energy on to how to devise or prepare the individual solutions. They can be immediately recorded without spending a lot of time: both the context and the was they were devised are as equally clear to see. This saves time and effort that can instead be invested in decision-making and refining the solutions.

IN GENERAL: DURING TIMES OF CHANGE, ADAPTABILITY IS THE GREATEST ASSET

We believe disruption is a craft that everybody without exception is capable of learning and applying. Similar to learning a musical instrument or sport. Continually applying this craft helps enhance skills, increases focus on tools, and lets staff focus on what’s most important. But the process of developing such approaches needs to be radically simplified for employees. Having the right focus can help achieve this: in an age of constant change requiring continual adaptation, people can invest their time in responses and not in processes that are only partly adhered to for their own sakes. Companies that free up their employees from unnecessary processes can look forward to a productive future. But they need to provide staff with a framework to set clear specifications of what needs to be completed from the company’s viewpoint, and to allow the organization to make a clear-cut decision at the end of the process. It will provide you with unexpected opportunities and take your business to the next level.

Ruppert Bodmeier is speaking on this subject at Connecta Bern.