BUILDING AN AWARD-WINNING INNOVATION LAB IN 9 MONTHS
Leverage Design Thinking to re-ignite innovation at a 100+ year old industrial company.
Shortly before the formation of General Electric (GE), Thomas Edison began experimenting with electrified rail as a proof-of-concept. Just a few years later, the newly established company piloted an electric train line for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. With a three-mile track and 10-cent fare, the accident-free operation was a glimpse into the future of North American passenger rail. GE would go on to win the bid against Westinghouse for New York’s Grand Central Terminal, because of its locomotive. Since then, GE Transportation has continued to be a key partner in U.S. domestic manufacturing, shipping, and industrialization, with an ever-expanding global footprint.
Our founder Thomas Edison was a tinkerer, a thinker, a doer, and an innovator — he was inspired. According to the Edison Innovation Foundation, he operated on four simple principles, instilled by his mother:
1. Never get discouraged if you fail. Learn from it. Keep trying.
2. Learn with both your head and hands.
3. Not everything of value in life comes from books — experience the world.
4. Never stop learning. Read the entire panorama of literature.
GE and the later GE Transportation were founded on these principles of fortitude, experimentation, and entrepreneurial spirit — all of which carry into our brand messaging today. Edison recognized the value of design and research-led organizations as a means of discovering new value for people and opportunities for business.
His entrepreneurial spirit is what attracted me to GE companies in 2013. When I transitioned from my role at GE Energy and accepted a position at GE Transportation in 2016, it was quickly apparent my new home was struggling to reimagine its legacy software solutions within an industry ripe for disruption. During my time at GE Energy, I’d spent three years embedded in the Bay-area startup scene, partnering with and learning from best-in-class design innovation firms including Frog, Adaptive Path, and IDEO to re-imagine everything from delightful customer service frameworks to proof-of-concepts, pilots, and products for our Fortune 10 customers BP and Chevron. In contrast with this experience, there was an immediate realization GE Transportation was lacking the type of formal innovation framework seen in forward-thinking companies and prevalent in the venture-backed startups I’d been exposed to — those who would jump at any chance to take a piece of veteran-provider GE’s market. Somewhere along the way, GE Transportation had lost some important parts of founder Thomas Edison’s original vision, spirit, and appetite for innovation risk — and it felt as though my invitation into the company was an unspoken mission to remind our teams of our roots.
With that same entrepreneurial spirit and while maintaining my responsibilities as a UX design lead, I leveraged my passion, spare time and expertise in design thinking to build a case to create an innovation ecosystem at GE Transportation. After several months of iteration on the design led approach with key stakeholders, executive leadership promoted me to Global Design Manager to lead what would become an award-winning innovation lab in nine months.
*The case study will take you on a design-led journey of creating an innovation lab along with a few lessons learned from the experience.
The problem to be solved?
INNOVATION BY ACCRETION
The existing approach to innovation was reactive in nature and myopic overall. The company relied on project-centric customer feedback for siloed functions and teams as a way to improve solutions incrementally day-to-day and rarely emphasized the need to strategize more holistically and look further into the future for leap opportunities.
Several components of our culture and organizational structure were inhibiting our potential:
- There was no “north star” vision for the workforce to aspire toward as a collective business.
- The office environment was not conducive to creativity and collaboration.
- There was not a dedicated cross functional team of researchers, strategists, technologist and user experience designers to think more holistically and create longer term value.
- The business did not have a mechanism to capture richer insights by partnering with their customers in co-creation efforts.
- There was not a strategic creative process in place to drive net new solution introductions to the market.
- GE was not empowering 1500+ employees to be more innovative.
Who are the users?
WORKFORCE EXPECTATIONS SHIFTING
The target audience and users of the Innovation Lab are all employees at GE Transportation along with the company’s external customers. In both environments, balancing the needs of existing users with the expectations of future users would be paramount.
The employees at the company are talented and passionate about their work. They have both in-depth functional expertise and a deep understanding for their perspective customers’ problems. However, a majority of the employees have been working for GE Transportation most of their careers and have become accustomed to the status quo of legacy business processes steeped in history and nostalgia.
The customers’ employees are also extremely talented and passionate about their work. Anyone who has met someone that works in the railroad business would probably attest to this as a fact. Similar to GE, the railroad industry as a whole is steeped in history and nostalgia and can sometimes be averse to fundamental changes in the status quo way of working.
An interesting statistic around the workforce of the transportation industry was that in 2018, 50 percent of the veteran workforce was eligible to retire and the new replacement hires are recently graduated and highly educated. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for a fundamental shift in the space due to shifting expectations of workplace solutions.
What’s the goal of the initiative?
INNOVATION BY TRANSFORMATION
Enable a 100-year-old industrial company to drive new and meaningful leap innovations.
I aspired to systematically recapture the magic of our founder Thomas Edison’s approach to innovation. My ambition was to create an innovation framework that enabled the GE Transportation business to re-imagine a new future collectively, to embrace “failure/learning,” and to be inspired to try new things out in the world with customers and users. I believed that by harnessing the creativity of the workforce in a more unified approach with a common vision of the future would ultimately reveal leap innovation opportunities.
My high-level goals were to:
- Create an innovative ecosystem that encouraged people to embrace learning and to try new things.
- Enhance GE Transportation’s ability to capture richer insights from our customers systematically.
- Provide a common vision for the industry stakeholders to drive toward together.
- Speed the success rate of new product introductions to the market.
What’s my role in the project?
EMBODY THE SPIRIT OF OUR FOUNDER
As the Global Design Manager, I led the vision, strategy, execution, and branding to create the award-winning Innovation Lab at GE Transportation. I hired the cross functional team, configured the workspace layout, designed the digital platforms, created the engagement model, and formed the new product introduction process for the business.
In addition to creating the lab, I led the cross functional innovation team in 30+ co-creation workshops with customers across our entire supply chain on five different continents to re-imagine the future of the industry together. The outputs consisted of research reports, vision roadmaps, proof-of-concepts, high-fidelity demos, and marketing videos to help make our future a reality.
I also led business strategy workshops with our entire executive team to internalize our findings from customer co-creation workshops in order to commercialize our product roadmap strategy (back-casting).
MY APPROACH TO INNOVATION
Balance the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the goals of the business and industry to take innovative leaps, avoid costly changes, ease adoption, align vision, and put immediate value into customers’ hands.
User-centered Design
Focusing on the user gives my customers a better experience — making products and services more relevant and more compelling to use.
Business Strategy
Looking beyond single customer solutions to evaluate the industry as a whole, to create opportunities and drive change in a uniform direction.
Emerging Technology
Keeping a pulse on the latest and upcoming technology trends to envision future workspaces, the evolution of relationships between humans and devices, and to imagine what’s next.
During discovery I strive to learn what people really need by immersing myself in the users’ environment and prioritize actionable opportunities. Together with a multi-disciplinary team, I then ideate concepts, evaluate assumptions, and leap past obvious solutions to arrive at an innovative vision of a potential solution. Once we have alignment, I involve stakeholders and users at every possible step to iteratively design and improve ideas. I then evaluate solutions, implement feedback, and continuously validate to craft a human story that resonates with both executive stakeholder and users to drive adoption.
DISCOVERING WHAT WAS TRIED, TRUE AND DESIRED
During the discovery phase of this initiative I began (as I almost always do) with secondary research to enhance my knowledge of the subject matter. I desired to learn from others’ successes and failures and focused on the foundational elements of innovation frameworks.
I read 30+ papers in academic journals from renowned scholars such as Teresa M. Amabile and Vanessa Theis (to name only a couple). Through this effort I learned of significant innovation framework elements, for example, employee motivation and new product introduction processes at large organizations.
Teresa M. Amabile provides insight into the importance of both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation when it comes to sustaining creativity throughout the lifecycle of a novel idea when she proposed the following:
“Motivational Synergy: The prevailing psychological model of the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation suggests an antagonism: as extrinsic motivation for an activity increases, intrinsic motivation must decrease. But there is considerable evidence from field research that, under certain conditions, certain forms of extrinsic motivation may combine synergistically with intrinsic motivation, enhancing (or at least not undermining) the positive effects of intrinsic motivation on creativity.” For example, research in business organizations has uncovered several extrinsic motivators operating as supports to creativity: reward and recognition for creative ideas, clearly defined overall project goals, and frequent constructive feedback on the work”.
Through her rigorous primary research of leading innovative companies, Vanessa Theis provides detailed instructions on new product introduction process best practices. The following is an excerpt from her research:
“The idea comes from an individual, goes through concept development with the involvement of relevant specialists and is transformed into a robust concept while a multi-disciplinary team is assembled to develop it into a project. These teams enhance the initial idea by improving its market attractiveness, technical viability and strategic adequacy. The prioritized ideas are assessed by innovation committees, composed of the directors of the technology and innovation, commercial, industrial and business sectors, as well as the managers of the new products and markets, polymer science, pilot plants, laboratory, client accounts and innovation performance sectors. In summary, the goal of the committees is to classify projects according to specific organizational strategies, assess the development and results of ongoing projects and approve the continuation of projects into the next stage of the innovation funnel.”
By reading books from authors Dan Pink, Simon Sinek, Eric Reis, and others, I learned that autonomy and the “why” are foundational elements that drive creativity in large organizations and the reason consumers are interested in your ideas.
As Dan Pink highlighted:
“Researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses, half of which granted workers autonomy, the other half relying on top-down direction. The businesses that offered autonomy grew at four times the rate of the control-oriented firms and had one-third the turnover.”
As Simon Sinek wrote:
“When most organizations or people think, act or communicate they do so from the outside in, from WHAT to WHY. And for good reason — they go from clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. We say WHAT we do, we sometimes say HOW we do it, but we rarely say WHY we do WHAT we do. When communicating from the inside out, however, the WHY is offered as the reason to buy and the WHATs serve as the tangible proof of that belief.”
In addition to the academic journals and renowned books, I reviewed magazine articles on innovation stories from Fast Co., Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Inc. etc. It was in this Harvard Business Review article where I learned that the benefits from more productive co-working office spaces could be quantifiable.
“Office space is not just an amortized asset. It’s a strategic tool for growth — 75% reported an increase in productivity since joining their co-working space.” — Harvard Business Review
Ultimately, the synthesis of learnings from secondary research provided visibility into the innovation frameworks that leading companies were leveraging as competitive advantages in their given industries. The key insight was companies that continuously showed up as innovation leaders are employing an innovation as an ecosystem approach with frameworks that evolve iteratively and become more robust over time.
At a high level however, the five elements that consistently emerged as foundational to innovation frameworks were a strong vision, creative work place, dynamic and cross functional talent management, robust technologies, idea-to-product processes, and legal prowess.
From this, I was able to conduct a competitive analysis of widely recognized innovative companies against GE Transportation to showcase an artifact to leadership which proved as a necessary catalyst for this initiative. The results visualized a substantial gap between the innovation elements leveraged at GE Transportation and the one’s deployed at leading innovative companies such as Google, 3M, Siemens, and IBM. Who doesn’t like a little competition to provide a sense of urgency in corporate executives?
These new learnings, in addition to my previous experience in the space, provided direction into the different primary research work streams I would need to undertake to help bring this journey to life in the context of the GE Transportation business and industry.
I interviewed and surveyed 100+ cross functional employees in every career band to understand if/why they felt compelled and/or enabled to innovate at the company.
One of the most interesting insights out of this exercise was around GET’s hiring practices. It was stated that “we hire the same type of people, who are motivated by GE’s reputation for rapid career advancement through their people leadership program and not necessarily motivated by intrinsic passion to innovate”.
I leveraged my professional relationships for site visits at Apple’s Enterprise Design Lab, Google Labs, SAP Innovation Hub, Booz Allen Hamilton Innovation Center, Teague, and Frog to learn first-hand of the different approaches to innovation frameworks at leading companies.
I participated in an “Innovation Readiness Assessment” at SAP’s Innovation Hub to get a third party evaluation of how we measured against the best in class. Through SAP’s journey to become a design-led organization, they worked with 450 customers on co-innovation projects. Their experience led them to design an innovation readiness framework and assessment tool to show where a team or organization falls within their 4 stage model. SAP’s model is based on three measurable pillars to innovation: people, process, and place. GE Transportation’s innovation readiness score was 62%, which put us between stages 1 and 2 out of 4. This meant that the business still viewed design as a cost but had begun to consider it important.
I visited GE’s Aviation and Healthcare Labs to leverage their experience within our industrial context. One great learning from GE Healthcare was how they trained and certified 1400 employees as “Design Thinking Champions” in order to generate critical mass in shifting mindsets for more creative, inclusive and progressive approaches to problem solving throughout the business.
I interviewed leading innovators from other companies that were successfully driving innovation, such as Cisco Labs. I learned about a new software platform called BrightIdea that could be leveraged as the digital platform for our innovation portfolio management process. Since deploying their innovation program Cisco has increased revenue by $60MM from 86 new ideas and is projected to be at $170MM.
Before the ideation phase of this initiative could begin I needed to synthesize, visualize and disseminate the learnings from secondary and primary research to generate buy-in across stakeholders in the business and to increase the desire to participate in this effort moving forward.
I made the case that GE Transportation had a real opportunity to shift from “innovation by accretion” to “innovation by transformation” through a design-led approach.
I accomplished this by quantifying the gap from GE Transportation to leading innovative companies, by elevating the true feedback and desire of our workforce across the business and by providing the ROI around the potential impact of investing in innovation as an ecosystem with a design-led approach.
During the executive share out of insights from discovery, I proposed a series of design thinking workshops to ideate around potential solutions that best fit our business environment and to design a phased approach to iterate as we deployed, with our stakeholders and users at the center.
IDEATE AROUND THE BEST POSSIBILITIES
During the ideation phase I facilitated workshops with both the executive team and front-line employees to re-imagine how to best accelerate innovation at the company.
Core activities…
…Brought discovery research into the workshops as inputs;
…Crafted methods to generate net new ideas that would enable an innovative culture;
…Captured constraints and limitations of the business and how to navigate through them; and
…Held prioritization exercises to hone in on the most important elements by phase.
Concluding synthesis, the key insight from employees at GE Transportation was that this needed to be a holistic approach with a north star but phased iteratively as the business evolved. We needed to think big for the type of innovative company we wanted to strive to be, but we needed to start small and evolve over time with proof-points and re-evaluation along the way.
The three high-level outputs that needed to be designed were an innovation ecosystem infographic to capture and communicate the foundational elements to ignite innovation, a phased roadmap for how to iteratively achieve the goals of this initiative and a new design-led innovation process to speed the success rate of new product introductions to the market.
ITERATIVELY DESIGN THE ELEMENTS OF THE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM
During the design phase I iteratively created and validated all the collateral that would be needed to begin communicating and executing against the vision.
The deployment strategy was a phased approach to the innovation ecosystem to be communicated with a visual roadmap. On the horizontal were the core foundational elements that would ultimately make up the innovation ecosystem, the vision, the place, the people, the technology, the process and the legal capabilities. On the vertical were the different phases each of these elements would evolve towards with no specified time element. The power of this visual was how it highlighted the essential dependencies between each element of the innovation ecosystem, which unlocked the net new types of outcomes and experiences that could be created in each phase with this type of holistic approach. This was extremely important as it communicated to executive leadership that, generally, we could not necessarily invest in one element of the innovation ecosystem over another element because it would continue the myopic approach that already existed and would ultimately lead to continued ROI challenges. It would be paramount to identify which elements had the highest impact dependencies on the roadmap in order to align on the elements that needed initial funding and improve the likelihood of success for this initiative.
Along with the various meta collateral and approach, I needed to evaluate the different workspace options for the innovation lab, the different types of roles for the dedicated cross functional team that needed to be hired, the different digital platforms for the new design-led innovation process to live on and ultimately the budget for this entire initiative.
The selection criteria generated out of discovery and ideation workshops to identify the optimal workspace to drive innovation were a global footprint/membership with low initial capital investment, allowed us to get close to our customers for co-creation workshops, an open environment that was flexible enough to scale to different size engagements as needed and was considered an innovation hotbed of startups and other companies to collaborate and learn from together. The options were narrowed down to the Atlanta Tech Village, renovating our existing footprint and WeWork. The Atlanta Tech Village met two out of the three criteria, but it was missing the global element and had an eight-month onboard time. Renovating our own space did not meet any of our criteria, it would require a large up-front capital investment with a long lead time to create an open/collaborative space, it was not surrounded by a startup hotbed and wasn’t in an ideal location for our customers. It was ultimately decided that WeWork met all of our selection criteria needs.
The cross functional team that needed to be hired was identified and prioritized based on the type of work that would enable the most valuable outcomes for the business during the initial phase. In addition, one of the core capabilities of every single innovation lab visited and studied was the ability to build out proof-of-concepts at a rapid pace. Finally, as a design-led initiative, it was recognized that we needed to begin with design capabilities to build out a backlog of both proof-of-concepts and vision roadmaps during our customer co-creation engagements. These two types of outputs would allow us to rapidly validate potential solutions with the market and also provide us with the optimal paths for go-to-market strategies. To drive the type of pace needed to accelerate our backlog of potential solutions there needed to be two teams of a User Experience Lead and a Researcher, a strong Visual Designer that could go across initiatives as needed and a Program Manager to lead the NPI platform/process. In addition to this initial team structure, I would act as the strategist across all our engagements along with all the duties as the leader of the innovation lab and innovation programs, etc.
One of the most important elements identified to ignite innovation at GE Transportation was a New Product Introduction process that empowered 1500+ employees with decades of built up industry expertise to contribute their own ideas more cohesively. I structured the process around the design thinking phases where we could incrementally support initiatives as they built more and more viability with end-users and customers at the center. The new process would provide curated templates of the business model canvas and a newly created design thinking canvas that would act as the common language for the review sessions of each idea. Not only would this provide our governance leadership team with a more strategic lens for making funding decisions, it would also organically educate our employees to think/create with these criteria in mind.
As a business, we needed to integrate innovation into the strategic-management agenda so ideas could be encouraged, managed, tracked, & measured. To accomplish this, we required a digital platform that the new product introduction process could live on. As part of the discovery process I identified the Bright Idea enterprise platform that was created to “harness the power of global collaboration, manage every initiative with the flexibility to grow and to drive innovation activities through to ROI”. The subscription model and configuration capabilities of this solution required little up-front investment as we launched the program, allowing us to prove it out along the way.
As I initiated the Innovation Lab it became apparent that we needed collateral to communicate the Innovation Lab engagement model; the what, why, how and why we would be set up to create proof-of-concepts and vision roadmaps with our customers. Not only would this provide clarity and buy-in with the new approach, but it also acted as a catalyst for our branding strategy. We ultimately had two high-level design-led approaches, one was an accelerated engagement that produced conversational proof-of-concepts to validate with the market and the other was a deep dive engagement that led to code-ready proof-of-concepts/demos and vision roadmaps that were ultimately ready for a co-funded pilot with customers.
EVALUATION THROUGH TRAINING AND SUCCESS METRICS
As part of the deployment of the Innovation Lab, the newly formed team and I held training sessions for the digital platform, the innovation process guidelines, the innovation lab engagement model and types of work that the lab produced. We leveraged these sessions as feedback loops to evaluate the continuous evolution of what became an award-winning innovation lab in nine months.
We quantified and validated our success to leadership by creating ROI metrics for the lab that included platform adoption rates, workshop to PoC to Pilot ratios, and net promoter score surveys. These proof points helped us grow the innovation lab year over year, both in size, scope and budget.
CONTINUED INERTIA
Looking ahead to the merger with Wabtec (Westinghouse’s rail offspring), the new Wabtec + GE Transportation company is poised to become the 4th largest rail solutions provider in the world, behind the pending Siemens + Alstom merger and two Chinese behemoths. According to news reports, our customer base will double and our services will be complementary, exposing GE Transportation to Wabtec’s passenger rail customers and Wabtec to our freight logistics customers. Both companies will undergo a rapid period of growth together with renewed purpose, as we combine institutional expertise, revisit our organizational structures and operating procedures, and ask ourselves what and who we are meant to become. A spirit of innovation and an encouragement for change will be a requirement as we look inward and outward.
Our next steps will be continuous improvement on success metrics, building an innovative culture across the organization at every level with a design thinking training program, and more cross-functional hires as we both enhance and evolve our offerings. We’ve already initiated partnerships with universities and design firms to act as a talent identification pipeline and to continuously keep a pulse on the latest and greatest innovations around the globe. Each of these new elements are part of our innovation roadmap, now and into our combined future.
While my team and I are already making strides within GE Transportation, re-instilling the spirit of Thomas Edison into everything we do as an organization will be critical for us to push forward with our own guiding principles. We as a collective group of thinkers, tinkerers, researchers, hackers, philosophers, and explorers will need to embrace our own design-led and user-centric framework.
Five learned principles:
1. Always begin with your users. Having a deep empathic understanding for your users’ needs and desires is at the core of your success. Design-led (user-centered) approaches have been quantifiably proven to outperform other methods to innovation.
2. Think big with north-star ecosystems and start small with phased deployment. The world we live in is increasingly complex, with a lot of variables that influence success of solutions to markets. Taking a holistic approach at the onset of any initiative forces you to think from an ecosystem perspective and reduces the blind spots that can attribute to myopic strategies. Phased deployment encourages iteration with proof points and lessons learned along the way to decrease unsustainable failures.
3. Timing is everything. Understanding the maturity level of your organization, critical unmet needs and appetite for change helps prioritize the core elements that need to be deployed initially. This leads to higher adoption rates at the onset and helps tip the chasm of change more rapidly.
4. Create champions. Early involvement of employees at every level creates buy-in and awareness. These early adopters act as catalyst for new initiatives.
5. It’s a journey, not a destination. With this mindset, your failures will feel more like lessons learned and your successes will be achieved with more humility and a healthier perspective along the way.
I’m looking forward to 2019 and the potentials of our new business. I can only hope if Thomas Edison were alive today, that he’d give my team and I a nod for taking risks and progressing our own experimental visions.
