Innovation Tools

How do you change the nature of work in a 300 year old company employing more than 50K people in more than a dozen countries? How do you teach, inspire and manage them? How do you bring new skills to middle management? How do you become truly customer driven, fast moving, and agile?

In partnership with the Chief Innovation Office, MTN and ING pioneered a transformation model named “PACE” for customer-driven innovation and employee empowerment to accelerate the speed of brining bold products to market.

Brant Cooper discusses what it takes to complete rapid experiments and how it can be the fast track to overcoming uncertainty.

The goal is to separate what customers will do vs. what they say they’ll do. Too many entrepreneurs and corporate product people rely on “positive feedback” to make decisions. Countless hours and dollars are wasted assuming they know what their customers want based on little to no evidence. With rapid experimentation, customer behavior is a key part of the process.

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Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)

There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.

Katie Hanson, Director of Product Management at Benefitfocus, shares how her company quickly adapted to help their customers find affordable benefits during this global pandemic and how it led to the creation of a new offering. She also talks about the importance of supporting her team during these stressful times by understanding how they are “really” doing.

In this episode we’re excited to have Jason Harris, Director of Corporate Marketing & Communications for UI LABS. UI LABS is a first-of-its-kind innovation accelerator, addressing problems too big for any one organization to solve on its own. The challenges we are addressing in manufacturing and smart cities are at the intersection of digital convergence: computing, big data, and the Internet of Things (IOT).

In today’s episode, we are really excited to host our guest, Kyle Nel. Kyle is the Executive Director of Lowe's Innovation Labs and has a very unique approach toward innovation which was fun to explore in this episode. They leverage a narrative-driven approach that uses story (and comics) as a strategic tool to map out the future for Lowe’s that they are working to bring to life. They then work backward to build that future, rapidly testing technology prototypes to solve everyday problems.

In the latest episode, Dan Kaiser of CUNA Mutual shares his expertise in answering key questions when it comes to creating breakthrough initiatives and launching an innovation center in large, successful insurance companies.

In the episode, we dive into how BEA Systems, a multinational aerospace, defense, and information security company has organized their innovation strategy into 4 operational buckets and how they not only identify new products but innovate on the core business.

We also talk about how they have done a fantastic job getting rid of the distance between the end customer and new product development teams amongst other things.

In this episode, we interview Neal Cross, the Chief Innovation Officer of DBS. DBS is a bank headquartered in Singapore that generated $11 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in profit last year. They know the finance landscape is changing rapidly, and as a result are on an inspiring journey towards not only creating an innovation group within the bank, but turning the entire bank itself into an innovation group.

Today’s episode is hands down one of my favorites as it’s filled with practical tips, tactics and stories to building a more entrepreneurial organization. It’s our first time doing a host chat, where I’m joined by the Moves the Needle Co-founders, Brant Cooper and Aaron Eden.

Faced with immense and accelerating challenges, winning organizations are developing three customer-centric disciplines: Designing for Delight, Delivering for Delight, and Engaging Customers, Talent, and Partners for Delight. Learn practical steps your organization can take win new customer, retain existing customers, and build a culture of rapid learning and innovation.

Editor’s Note: This Podcast is a recording of a Live broadcast where we interviewed Mike Kendall as part of Customer Experience Week.

What new ideas should corporate leaders be exploring in the coming months? Here’s a brief list of books, articles, videos, and tools to promote innovation, transformation, and growth within the enterprise.