Open Letter to Enterprise Innovators, or those in charge of navigating change.
A few months into the pandemic, we see signs that people are finding their footing — new operation models based on updated thinking, new plans for growth based on a new environment. I’ve noticed movement and new jobs for innovators in high demand.
One thing is clear: real structural change to fill these many #GapsOfGoodness is required to move forward. We’ll need to build infrastructure, deal with issues of bias on our team, and find ways to do a lot with a little. And while we hear the appeal to build, the building that’s required to solve our problems is first internally focused on making sure we can meet our own needs. And only after we are okay and somewhat stable can we meet the needs of the market.
Here’s the humble POV on how to execute at a speed and cost that provides us the maximum amount of learning in the optimal amount of time.
The power of pop-ups: The best way to test your growth/innovation/transformation/operations strategy and find partners is to identify those that care about the problems you care about solving. We believe that you can do a lot with a little if you focus on the power of the community. We host pop-ups to bring people together, convening all elements of an ecosystem (large company, startup, government, for-profit, media, tech).
Pop-ups give just enough structure to convene a representation of an ecosystem around a theme. Pop-ups help us audition partners and collaborators, and they expand the network of all participants. Most importantly, pop-ups help us refine thinking. There is a tremendous amount of learning through panelists, discussions, or purposeful networking achieved through our pop-ups. Pre-pandemic, we would host half-day sessions in-person comprised of three panels, a fireside chat, and a showcase of well-funded startups, followed by a reception and maybe an intimate dinner focused on a theme. Post-pandemic, like many others, we have shifted our pop-ups online and compressed the time to one hour. Our current pop-up programming includes a keynote, informative panel discussions from practitioners, a video Chatroulette-style networking element to leverage the power of our community, and music/entertainment from across our network. Our pop-ups are themed and include practitioners around that theme, sharing their perspectives on how they operate, face challenges amidst uncertainties, and navigate growth.
For clients and sponsors of our pop-ups, the results of these encounters are a set of qualified conversations for follow-up.
For attendees of our pop-ups, they learn something and meet new people. And they, too, have qualified conversations by nature of the community we continue to build. If serendipity can be forced, then this is it.
The results of pop-ups are often a qualified set of conversations between potential partners. For anyone who has worked to develop partnerships, the devil is in the details.
We follow-up the ambition and energy of a pop-up with a structured conversation via a workshop.
Workshops help develop relationships: We like to run 60–90-minute partnership workshops and use design thinking exercises to build a common language. We gather stakeholders across an organization to identify the current state of the organization, explore business models, ambition, and partnership opportunities, and articulate a compelling roadmap for the future.
Partnerships are core to who we are at humble ventures and representative of an ecosystem-building approach. The best way to work with partners is to be clear on how alliances help create mutually beneficial arrangements.
We find a framework called the Partnerships Canvas to help understand how to identify elements of a good partnership, and we try to run through them during our workshops.
This canvas is a triangle, broken down into interlocking triangles which each support the adjacent pieces. Overall, we need to be clear on the AIM of the Partnership.
What do you want to achieve together:
- Desired Value: What do you want from your partner? What are all the ways that they can help you?
- Value Offered: What can you provide your partner? What are all the ways that partnership with you can help them?
- Transfer Activity: What will you do together as a function of this arrangement? How will your organizations collaborate — the work you will do together to generate the value between your organizations.
- Created Value: How will we know that it works and what will you both get for it?
This is one of the frameworks we might use in a workshop as a follow-up to our pop-ups. Workshops speed up our time to determine if there is a real opportunity between two organizations. The results of our workshops may end up being commercial partnerships, but that may require additional workshops, meetings, or follow-ups. Other outcomes of workshops are innovation challenges or acceleration cohorts.
Innovation Challenges: If our clients have apparent problems in mind or a track record of trying to address specific issues, an innovation challenge can be a robust set of activities to help identify partners, collaborators, and partnership opportunities. Crowdsourcing innovation through an open innovation challenge is a cost-effective way to receive breakthrough ideas and solutions. An open innovation challenge can be used as a platform to complement the organizations’ internal R&D while extending its reach to new ideas and ways of thinking with external partners. A challenge can be deployed in stages to take input from a community of internal and external stakeholders and solicit partnerships across a wide variety of partners who contribute financial support, subject matter expertise, or marketing reach via their network. Challenges can also be used to find collaborators or recruit highly skilled and motivated individuals who want to work with or for your organization.
Acceleration Cohort: As a large organization, if you care about accelerating specific themed criteria of businesses or leaders, or you care about investing in a particular category of companies, you should consider the use of an acceleration cohort. Through our program, startups achieve sustainable growth by completing data-driven benchmarks to validate problem/solution fit. Startups are not charged or required to provide equity to participate. Our fixed-term cohort model is a significant due diligence process to identify not only high-potential startups but also cultivate high-potential founders.
We use our curriculum, which is based on lean startup methodology, to facilitate a 12-week virtual cohort that takes founders and early teams, and focuses their efforts to either define product/market fit or identify sustainable ways to drive growth and scale.
You can read about some previous cohorts here.
The most valuable resource we have in limited supply is time. Each of these activities described above has various lifts of time and investment from ourselves and our clients. All of this assumes you have a nascent strategy in place. Otherwise, see this post for an excellent way to build an operating model.
Here’s a proposed timeline and mix of activities to consider in the first year of your tenure in a new organization. Within six months, you can test and try out your strategy to determine if it works, with validation of strategy, marketing wins, a new set of partners identified, and either a set of solutions or early-stage companies/founders identified and growing.
We are challenged to understand how to find these partners — especially during a pandemic when face-to-face meetings are hard to facilitate safely. With many newly formed heads of partnership and or movement in the digital / innovation space, there are bound to be many new strategies, filled with buzzwords, while trying to keep to quarterly KPIs. A quick feedback loop on what your plans are and whether they work is critical for success. Failure is an option, and preferable early on and cheaply. Home runs are rare but accepted if the conditions are right. More likely, a steady march of base hits and course correction based on feedback and insights from customer data will be the path to victory.
If you:
- are an organization of any size trying to build their own post-COVID operating model
- or a startup in need of sales and marketing support as you’re scaling customer acquisition
- or interested in our upcoming innovation activities
Drop us a line (start @ humble dot vc ), follow us on Twitter, and sign up for our newsletter.
