The Innovation Playbook:

Transcription

1 The Innovation Playbook: PLAYS FOR A WINNING BRAND STRATEGY Sports and business may seem unrelated, but a closer look reveals striking similarities. Winning sports teams and leading businesses have learned to propel highly talented teams to success in a highly competitive environment. Even Forbes has noted that winning teams have a solid organizational structure that allowed them to make smart decisions and execute them effectively on the field. 1 Innovation, in particular, is a collaborative team sport especially in the fast-moving consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, where companies must constantly introduce new products and adapt current offerings to better meet customers changing needs. Successful business innovators often find analogous strategies in the world of professional sports: Pat McGauley, Former VP of Innovation at Anheuser-Busch InBev and former professional soccer player in North America Soccer League and Major Indoor Soccer League I played professional soccer and I brought that kind of mentality to the innovation team. We re a team of innovators, but we also work among a whole crossfunctional group of players. Unless you have all of them understanding their key roles, like on the soccer field, you re not going to be successful. We ve spoken in depth with McGauley and studied the observations and advice of leading athletes and coaches in order to understand how companies foster innovation. We re pleased to share with you our Innovation Playbook. Focusing on key plays based on persistence, investment, passion, preparation, and collaboration will help your team and company adopt a winning strategy.

2 1. PERSISTENCE: Recognize that Success Starts with Failure Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and still be considered a good performer. Ted Williams, Boston Red Sox, Ted Williams observation about baseball also applies to product innovation. In the CPG industry, it s not unusual for product introductions to fail but when they succeed, it s like a home run with huge rewards. McGauley has personal experience in this area. He says, If you look at the 150 products I ve developed, 60% of them failed, but the remaining 40% made $8 billion. He understands the difficulty in predicting which products will be winners and which will be losers, but his team never stops innovating because the payoff from successful product introductions is immense. The best innovators recognize that great successes are hard to come by. Innovative companies are able to introduce better products in the future because they recognize that success starts with failure. They embrace them as learning opportunities and then move on to the next innovative idea. 2. INVESTMENT: Dedicate Resources to New Product Development The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. Vince Lombardi, NFL player, coach & executive Football legend Vince Lombardi knew that great success requires great effort. In the same way, the most successful CPG businesses know that market success requires significant investments of time, money, and other resources. Allocating and dedicating specific resources to organic growth, to the actual engine of the company is pretty much required and demanded, says McGauley. In companies like Anheuser-Busch, you have dedicated resources that are fully thinking about product and the way the consumer and the market is changing and recognizing what the world s going to look like in five or ten years. Innovation needs to be rewarded in all departments within an organization, but it s also important to invest in a dedicated team seeking new solutions to fulfill customers unmet needs. McGauley calls these intrepid innovators explorers, and recognizes that they need a safe place where they can thrive within an organization. Anheuser-Busch InBev purposefully hires people into this role so that they can focus on adapting to a marketplace that is changing more quickly than ever before.

3 3. PASSION: Develop a Culture of Innovation No matter how good you get, you can always get better. That s the exciting part. Tiger Woods, professional golfer Just as Tiger Woods is constantly honing his golf swing, successful businesses are never satisfied with what they have. Instead, they constantly look to the future because a passion for innovation permeates the entire company. People who are innovative and passionate about changing things, making things, [and] changing the world are going to be our best innovators, says McGauley. I need and look for people that are willing to buck the system, challenge the status quo, and be a bit of a maverick. That may be uncomfortable in certain parts of the corporate world, but the key to innovation is having people who know how to push the envelope, make us nervous, make us uncomfortable. McGauley emphasizes that it s important to allow those passionate innovators to fail without being penalized. If you fall smack on your face and screw something up horribly, the last thing I can do as your manager is penalize you because if I do, you re never going to do it again. I want to make sure you get up, brush yourself off and go do it again. If a company truly has a culture of innovation, management understands the importance of failure as a stepping stone to success, and therefore gives innovators the freedom needed to experiment in pursuit of the next great idea.

4 4. PREPARATION: Streamline Workflow with Stage Gates Great athletes spend most of their lives preparing their minds and bodies for competition. They know that winning requires discipline and goal-setting, and they work with coaches who set them up for success. Great businesses need to have that same focus on preparation, adopting a methodical approach to innovation. Creativity and outside-the-box thinking must occur within a disciplined framework that provides the checks and balances needed to maximize the likelihood of success. Typically, teams throughout an organization use standalone spreadsheets, , or other tools to track their piece of the product development lifecycle, but this leads to disjointed timelines and miscommunication. The challenge is to create an organized, standardized tool that reflects the experience and institutional knowledge from all parts of the organization. Project managers often advocate for the adoption of the stage-gate process in which distinct stages are delineated by stagegate decision points to streamline the internal approval processes. This shortens the time to market and improves success rates. Adopting the stage-gate process may seem bureaucratic and antithetic to creative innovation, but McGauley has found that it brings order to an otherwise chaotic process. When teams want to bypass our stage-gate process, I actually encourage them to do so because what they then find out is that their project gets stalled, it doesn t have the right approvals, and it can t move forward. They actually say, Ah, now I understand why. If I had gone through your process, I would have gotten to market more quickly. The stage gates are a really critical part of the approval process, says McGauley. They bring projects to management in a very organized manner by taking things that we do over and over and putting them in a process where it actually takes less time to do them. He explains that stage gates drive alignment within the organization and provide a logical flow and path for projects to follow. Anheuser- Busch InBev worked with LxCPG to develop a customized road map based on the stage-gate process. The LxCPG Product Innovation Workflow prepares teams for each stage gate in the product development process. Customized timelines capture every step of the cross-functional innovation process, giving innovators a clear path to follow. Here s how McGauley describes the process at Anheuser-Busch InBev: With LxCPG, we ve captured this institutional knowledge of all the steps and questions that we should be asking when building a new brand. The LxCPG team brought us a tool that captured the questions, captured the critical thinking, and actually built an automated timeline, which I think is just phenomenal. The LxCPG timeline tool really helps us save time and gets our innovators thinking about the next project, not spending weeks and months planning a 150-line timeline. The real benefit [is] that we ll be able to put more products and projects into the top of our funnel, and we know that when that happens, we increase the odds of getting game winners out of the bottom of the funnel.

5 5. COLLABORATION: Adopt a Collaboration-Enabling Platform When I get a feeling about where a teammate is going to be, I can pass without even looking. Wayne Gretzky, NHL player and head coach Winning teams spend years developing their players teamwork skills, ensuring that they re aware of each other s positions and able to anticipate their next moves. Successful businesses need to do the same to encourage teamwork and collaboration among employees, especially when innovating new products within a workflow with many moving pieces. Innovation is a team sport that takes a lot of collaboration, reflects McGauley. There are a lot of people with different goals and different objectives all working within the team, so we need to make sure that everybody understands the significance of the project moving forward and how important it is to move this project to the next phase. Large companies often struggle to align their employees efforts across diverse departments, from Legal and Finance to Marketing and R&D. LxCPG provides an intuitive platform for all inter- and intra-team communication. Interactive chat management allows stakeholders to exchange information easily, and searchable archives allow all team members to quickly find the latest information about the project status and their progress along the timeline and stage gates. When Anheuser-Busch InBev began using the LxCPG, the improvement in communication was transformational. Lanetix brings order by again, streamlining processes within the organization, and taking things off your plate so you have time to actually do broader and more game-changing thinking, says McGauley. 1 Westwood, Ryan. Four Similarities Between Sports And Business. Forbes, July 8, Accessed November 23, four-similarities-between-sports-and-business/# f. LxCPG is the world s only cloud-based digital process automation (DPA) software developer exclusively focussed on the global consumer packaged goods industry. Unlike one-size-fits-all workflow software, LxCPG s suite of software products streamline the processes that drive consumer loyalty and accelerate product innovation, while bringing brand, consumer insights, product innovation, agency partners and wholesalers closer together. Learn More at