How we deal with innovation — and with other buzz words
Innovation seems to be everything these days. We overwhelm consumers with new — mostly tech-driven — initiatives, all of which are either groundbreaking, transformational, exceptionally promising — or all of the above. Innovation seems to have a certain sexiness and we’d all better start acting as a startup if we want to survive. Or do we?
Yes, innovation is important. But for us at Jumbo the starting point of innovation is crucial: are you instigating change purely because of technological possibilities, or because of actual added value for your customer? We truly believe in the latter and from this perspective innovation is rather straightforward: it is about aligning your customers’ needs with your own needs — and in doing so develop relevant solutions that contribute to your business objectives in a sustainable way.
Putting this into practice within a fast-growing organisation can be tricky though. At the Jumbo Tech Campus we try to tackle this by adopting the principles of Business Design. This helps us to develop ideas and concepts that our customers truly need while we simultaneously realize our own ambitions. Business Design itself (originating from principles close to Design Thinking) is a field with growing popularity, as well as a growing number of definitions — and buzz words. And we too apply the Business Design principles with our own twist. So which buzz words are most relevant to us?
Human-centered
It sounds a bit obvious, but we do try to put customers and/or internal end users front and center when we develop new solutions. And it’s actually quite simple to engage; we regularly invite customers over to our offices for an open discussion on new ideas, or we use techniques such as job shadowing to get a better understanding of the challenges our in-store colleagues are dealing with.
Lean validation
When it comes to building solutions, we prefer small and uncomplicated. This is why we aim to validate our ideas based on prototyping before we even think about making bigger investments. Discovery Sprints and Design Sprints help us with this. The trick here is to think outside of existing processes and infrastructure: what do you minimally need to test your hypotheses? Often this requires a lot less development and/or integration effort than you would assume at first sight.
Co-creation
We aim to develop our ideas together. Together in this sense means business teams together with IT teams, and also together with our partners where we lack the expertise. And ideally it also means together with your customer or end user (see ‘human-centered’). In our Discovery and Design Sprints we aim to bring together a diverse group of people and we do not let departments, ranks, or positions hinder us.
Applying these principles might seem obvious but is far from self-evident. We also had to — and still have to — invest a significant amount of time and energy into the adoption of Business Design. And we are not there yet. We are more than confident though that this is the right course for us, as we see more and more acknowledgement for the power of a human-centered, co-creation approach based on lean validation. More buzz words anyone?
