How to overcome 9 common excuses heard when doing innovation within corporate organisations
It can be hard to make progress quickly when working inside a big company, but it’s not impossible…
1. We don’t have the capacity.
‘The call centre is at capacity; we don’t have the bandwidth to accommodate your experiment.’
Fluxx helped a newspaper set up a new mini call centre in a morning. We bought an 0800 number, diverted it to a pay-as-you-go mobile, while routing live support chat to team mobile phones.
2. The brand police won’t sign off.
‘It takes time to develop and launch a new concept under our existing brand.’
Fluxx helped a global fashion publisher to launch a new skincare service. We got round the brand police by launching under a disposable brand, developed in a couple of hours. Customers liked the proposition, and — later — it became even stronger once the famous name was added to the mix.
3. You can’t just talk to customers.
‘You need to follow procedure and talk to the insights team if you want to speak to any customers.’
With most consumer brands, it’s surprisingly easy to find users willing to talk; ask friends, put out a call on social or search forums like Mumsnet. Grass roots insight can be surprisingly quick and insightful.
4. We don’t have time to ask difficult questions.
‘We just need to prove our customers want this.’
Some companies don’t want to face the hard questions. Publishers like making new publications, insurers like developing new policies. Our role is often to ask harder questions: is there a completely new business model, and how can you test that?
5. Not this idea again.
‘Not this idea again! We have tried this before and it failed… it will never work.’
Fluxx helped a leading utility company run small experiments in a small area. It was an old idea, but had never actually been tested. It worked!
6. Innovation is just a sideshow.
‘The innovation event was great but I’m too busy to now work on the idea.’
Fluxx helped a retirement company bring some new ideas to life. By sharing the ideas with a wider group of staff, we were able to find the individuals who wanted to work on the project — and clear it with their bosses.
7. Our brand is at risk if this all goes wrong.
‘We don’t know how our customers will react to this… we don’t want to risk it.’
A focus group hated a bank’s new idea, calling it intrusive. We ran a small, controlled experiment. Customers loved the service they told us they’d hate.
8. This might cannibalise our core business.
‘Anything new, if not delivering immediate profit, is just a distraction from BAU.’
Fluxx helped a financial services institution to set up an internal innovation lab to identify and validate new products. If the future is a distraction, it sometimes has to be done quietly, to one side.
9. We have a plan. The plan says no.
‘We can’t do anything new, because the releases for the next quarter have already been signed off.’
Fluxx helped a cancer charity to test a novel contactless payment donation idea. By using cheap, easy, off-the-shelf tools, we were able to build and deployed the experiment with very little time from the in-house development team. Better still, it worked first time!
If you’d like to see ways we’ve helped companies and could help yours, take a look at our site: Fluxx.uk.com, subscribe to our newsletter and/or read the free download of our new book The Plan Sucks.
Fluxx is a company that uses experiments to understand customers, helping clients to build better products. We do product and service design at such a pace we transform the way organisations work. Atkins, National Grid, the Parliamentary Digital Service and the Royal Society of Arts.
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy “7 things kickboxing taught me about innovation”, “Social media: A silent killer of innovation”, “The one where Friends teaches you how to be a great service designer”, “Six behavioural flaws that make us stupid around money” and “13 things we learned while designing a more democratic Houses of Parliament.”
For more visit our Medium page: https://medium.com/fluxx-studio-notes
