Managing the Disruption
Creating a Culture of Digital Innovation
Professors PJ Guinan & Salvatore Parise
Ad Hoc Committee on Innovative Business Models
January 10, 2018
Discussion Points from Last Session
Branding impact on culture
Employee centered culture - innovation
Low-risk- hypotheses testing
Thinking differently without losing the core!
Disruption comes in many ways:
Disruption comes in many ways:
Disruption comes in many ways:
Disruption comes in many ways:
So different but what do they have in common?
Fortune 500 Digital Leaders
What does Digital mean to you? Technologies: cloud, AI, VR, cognitive computing, analytics
Engagement with customers- open to understanding the customer decision journey
A new way of doing business- willingness to develop an entirely new business
Re-thinking how to use these capabilities to improve how customers are served
Pro-active decision making- blend data from multiple channels into one view
Contextual interactivity- analyze how a consumer is interacting with a brand and modifications
Real-time automation – to drive down costs but also to provide companies with more flexibility
Journey focused innovation- - extend the relationship with the customer to benefit both parties
McKinsey and Company: “What digital really means.”
Digital Drives Organizational Performance
“Digital Masters are 26% more profitable than their industry peers and generate 9% higher revenue from there physical assets.”
• Westerman et.al. “The Digital Advantage: How Digital Leaders Out Perfom Their Peers in Every Industry – Nov. 2012.”
Is digital significant to your organization?
What role do digital solutions play in your strategy to enable both control and empowerment current employees, to recruit talent, to re-define your business?
Our proposed solution: think like a start-up
Think like a Start-upEntrepreneurial Thinking….
What do you think of when I ask: what are the characteristics of an entrepreneurial organization?
Popular Views of Entrepreneurs
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• Low appetite for risk; adept at reducing and spreading it
• Often start without a sharply defined goal or vision, especially the “Old Masters”
• Distrust projections, extrapolations, studies, etc. that purport to predict the future
• Creates new businesses, but not necessarily original
• Self-confident? No more than anyone else
• Determined? Yes. Over-controlling? Sometimes, but so are others
• Decisive, yes. but then so are others
• Egotistical? Sometimes, and sometimes not
Appetite
for RiskVisionary
Foresee
the Future
Creative
Self-Confident
Determined
Over-Controlling
Decisive
Passionate
Egotistical
Closer to the truth:
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The Critical Questions:
How to protect the core and innovate?
How are your currently negotiating innovation AND control?
How to exercise control, protect the core in organizations that demand flexibility, innovation and creativity?
Our Proposed Solution: Pilot , Pivot, Pitch
180Interviews with Senior
level managers
Qualitative
Quantitative
Surveys
70Across
industries
In-depth Case studies with Businesses
5
12Presentations
(Istanbul, Turkey and Keynote – Loma)
Additional Research Study 2 3
Babson Grants
Published
Papers
Training/workshops
Pilot
Pivot
BootstrappingCrowd sourcingPartnerships
The Essence of Entrepreneurial Thinking: Pilot , Pivot, Pitch
Manage riskLearn Reevaluate
ExperimentsHypothesis testing MVP
Pitch
InnovativeDigitalCulture
Business Metric
Productivity
Time To Market
New Products and Services
The Power of the Pilot: Best Practice
Key hypothesis testing with targeted customers
Experiments/ Lean Start Up
MVP (the minimum amount of functionality that your target customer considers viable, that is providing enough value) (Olson, 2015)
Design Thinking (left brain /right bran)
Pilot: Best Practices
•Rapid Prototyping: A large quantity of prototypes (low, medium to high fidelity)
•Agile/Scrum: Iterative design &constant learning from users (not just for software design for decision-making)
•Hackathons, Proof of Concepts: diverse teams working on a challenge in short time period
• Incubators, Labs, Skunkworks: a small team/group outside of production that experiments with new technologies, new business models
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The Power of the Pivot: Best Practice
“Failing fast to succeed sooner”
Manage risk
Fast, iterative, learn from mistakes (F12- Twelve steps to focused, fearless, failure.)
Lay the foundation for successful mistakes
Pivot: Best Practices
• Senior level support : can not be mandated
•Honest retrospectives: rewarded for candor
•Culture change – flexibility, new business models
•Branded wins and successes – buy-in
• Small financial commitment- why?
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Pivots that may surprise you:
The Power of the Pitch: Best Practice
New way to secure funding - Bootstrapping
Crowd-sourcing models
Seed funding
Unconventional pitch – early metrics, early buy-in
Venture funding (partnerships)
Pitch: Best Practices
•Exploratory and future focused: gruelingly honest
•Getting your stakeholder buy-in: on the ground floor
•Choose your resource requirements carefully (experiments, MVP, proof of concept)
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How does the Pilot, Pivot and Pitch help?
How to protect the core and innovate?
How are your currently negotiating innovation AND control?
How to exercise control, protect the core in organizations that demand flexibility, innovation and creativity?
The Mindset for the Leader
Servant Leadership
Reverse mentoring
Immersion
Servant Leadership
• Shares power, primarily focused on the needs of the group, people they work with, helps people develop and perform to their highest potential.
• Characteristics of servant leaders: empathy, stewardship, listening, building community, self-awareness versus command
and control
What concerns you about servant leadership?
ALAN MULALLY | Servant Leadership
27
©
Servant LEADERSHIP
Providing a vision and then give freedom, ownership
Proactive engagement in problem-solving
Heavy encouragement of self-management and servant leadership
Willingness to take calculated risks, learn from mistakes, experiments
Ability to listen and entertain new ideas
“I decided on an internal venture team to focus on technology-induced innovations made up of the CEO, general counsel, EVP of marketing and Digital. Since then, we bought three small companies, all cloud-based, and we are integrating these people into the organization. But they are doing the leading not me, I am just facilitating.”
“I had to pull people out of the business, separate a small team into “creative labs” to ideate. We called them ninja teams. And they decided on their own goals and deliverables.”
“As a leader, I realized it was about approachability. I try to encourage people to share ideas. Micro-management is never a good thing, so I am trying to balance the need for autonomy but providing as much feedback as I possibly can. It doesn’t come naturally to me because I have spent so much of my career making sure that our projects are execution focused.”
Servant Leadership| Best Practice
Reverse Mentorship
Pair tech-savvy, millennial employees to share emerging technology expertise with senior leaders, multi-generational teams to educate and encourage use for business value.
Reciprocated arrangement: relies on new developments in business strategy, leveraging the hi-po millennial talent, insures multi-generational sharing
Reverse Mentorship : Best Practice
“We blend co-op entry level people with experienced software engineers and they naturally cross-fertilize, teach each other.”
“What motivates me is the accountability given to me here. Management trusts me enough to be part of the decisions that matter in my area of expertise, they trust me and I have learned to listen.”
Reverse Mentor End-to-End Process
Execute Program
Select
Participants
Develop Mentor
Requirements
Develop List of
Mentees
Solicit/Select
Mentors
Align program
with Business
Strategies
Kick-Off Event to
Launch SessionsExecute Sessions
Wrap-up and
Key Learnings
Finalize
Mentor Teams
Match Mentors
and Mentees
credit: Lisa Bonner
How to Jump Start? Training Immersion
3 to 5 day course
Hackathon
Shark Tank
Research Opportunities: What is most interesting to you? The Digital Assistant: AI, Cognitive computing
How organizations are re-thinking their business strategies
Critical skill sets (leadership, technical business)
required to be digital innovators
Innovation Labs: Evaluation of Moving forward
The new measures of success
How are organizations building a culture of adaptability/change readiness?
Others……..? Help!
Innovation Advisory Council: Anyone interested?
Babson Opportunities: Please Take Advantage
Babson Consulting Alliance Program
Management Consulting Field Experience
Global Connections Through Technology
Strategic Analysis Consulting Project
http://www.babson.edu/executive-education/recruiting-partnerships/graduate/Pages/grad-student-consulting.aspx
Spring 2017: Partner with babson
• Externship Program: Provide student(s) with the opportunity to job shadow for a day during the spring semester. • Great for employer branding and encourages student learning
about your organization and the various job functions .
• Feb 28th - Spring Career Fair: Meet student talent from all four class years seeking internship and full time opportunities.
• MCFE: Submit a proposal to have a student consulting team work on a business project/challenge over the course of the Fall 2018 semester. Deadline to submit, March 1, 2018.