We took a client on a ‘virtual field trip’. Here are 8 fundamentals for any corporate innovation team and 3 pieces of advice for their agencies.

It’s important for any innovation team to get out of the office, away from the desk and the day to day so they see things from a different perspective. Going to meet with people in other markets is often a great way of doing this, as well as learning from different cultures. This was our original plan with a big Canadian pension fund, until everything went a bit weird and transatlantic flights to the UK were off the table thanks to Covid.

The new way of getting out the office became video chats instead. Our client’s innovation mandate is an important one to sustain the life and success of a storied Canadian pension plan as it enters a stage of extreme maturity.

Over the course of a few weeks this summer, we met with leaders and experts across a range of relevant categories.We met with everyone from those building disruptive new ventures at companies like Thought Machine, Virgin Money and RBS International, to those innovating pensions and investments at places such as Standard Life and Grandhood as well as meeting with inspiring creative agencies like Studio Something, Neu and Filament PD.

Here’s what we learned.

Build for the real world, not fake personas.

So often in innovation, we find ourselves creating personas, imaginary representations of who we think our customer might be. If we asked ourselves honestly, how many times have these actually accurately reflected our real customers, or did they end up looking a bit more like your slightly embellished dating profile? Be honest.

It’s refreshing to hear from a head of innovation for a big, traditional investments company that the likes of himself and his colleagues “rarely understand normal people”.

To create genuinely appealing products, we have to actually understand the real world, not just make boring or cliched documents that suggest we do.

Likewise, we need to make things that actually fit in with people’s behaviours, nobody changes their routine to fit their bank, it’s easy to adopt something that feels familiar rather than being forced into an inconvenient silo or completely new way of doing things.

“I will give you a tool and you will use it and you will save money” — this is how a financial services company thinks about being customer centric, but it’s actually not. It’s what they want customers to be, not who they actually are in the real world.”

Avoid average, be brilliant rather than perfect.

Design thinking has been a critical part of innovation for some time now, however it is not without its flaws. In the pursuit of desirability, feasibility and viability, the biggest and boldest ideas often found themselves watered down by teams needing to get something done.

To truly be innovative, we must avoid average, as we were reminded by those we spoke with that ‘average never wins’. It’s better to make something 100% loveable & 20% doable than 50% at both. Be very wary of compromise, it’s no use delivering something easier to market that few people actually want.

“All this effort, time, money, political capital is going into changing these businesses, so why not go all out and do something wonderful and different. We fail ourselves taking the easy route, that isn’t innovation.”

Less can be more, focus on one hero feature and be comfortable if everything else is just functional.

One thing that often leads to compromise, is trying to cram too much in, being all things to all people, overloading new propositions with features to suit everybody. Instead, it’s best to focus on what that big hero feature could be that meets a critically unmet need, then packaging it up with the common pieces done well but simply.

By doing this, it’s easier to get something out the door that can win a core group of customers. From there you can bring the next features along, trying to be the best at everything tends to be slow, expensive and often makes you more likely to discover mediocrity.

“If there was one thing I have done in retrospect, I would have fought really, really hard for it to have been stood up as a completely, not a separate legal entity, but a separate bank and separate brand in its own right.”

“One mantra to hold onto is it’s really hard to get something transformative live. It’s even bloody harder to protect it, nurture it, hold onto it and allow it to grow and allow it to breathe. That’s really hard. That’s really hard.“

Don’t reinvent the wheel, it’s OK to borrow and partner.

We met one startup who had learned this the hard way, having spent a significant amount of runway building something they could have leveraged from elsewhere through partnerships and borrowing what already existed.

This is especially important in a corporate context, when resources are finite and expectations are high, it’s often important to get those quick wins and show what can be done. Innovation in big companies isn’t a new thing anymore, so leverage where other people have put down the foundations, be that process, frameworks, technology or even ideas. Look to the unfair advantages you have, and connect it up with others to make the best of theirs.

Don’t feel the need to build everything — it is hard, expensive and someone has probably already done it. Instead of building something twice, find something good and build something great on top of it.

“In hindsight, we shouldn’t have tried to build this all ourselves. It cost more, took longer and we could have made something better.”

Does it make money? If not, it better make people happy.

A lesson we heard loud and clear from those who have seen success and struggle with corporate innovation groups was to “follow the money”. Innovation teams that prioritize creating value tend to thrive, those that don’t quickly deliver business benefits are cost centres in a prime position to be culled as soon as a need to find efficiencies arises.

Following the money can mean different things though, innovation teams could create real revenue fast as was the case with a bank we spoke with, getting their early startup partnerships to also become small business customers of theirs. It could also be internal, finding where the most lucrative budgets sit, enabling innovation teams to access the resources required to create breakthrough new products that generate income.

And if you’re not following the money, you better be making customers happy. Innovation projects that don’t drive a visible financial return need to be winning the hearts and minds of customers, or at least getting some column inches that aid things like recruitment, retention and reputation.

“We’ve all seen through the innovation fluff pieces announcing the new innovation lab is hosting an accelerator program for disruptive artificial intelligence startups leveraging proprietary blockchain technology … that we all know a regular customer will never see. Don’t waste your time and their money.”

Make things, not decks. Focus on getting something to market fast, learning more as you go.

This is pretty straightforward, and we all know it, but it’s a habit many slip into. An idea is much better as a visualization that can be put in front of customers than in a slide for executives. Even better, the more real you make it, the more they feel they can get behind it.

This extends to prototypes, those who pushed to make things, getting them in the hands of users seem to do very well. Enough cliches have been written about failing fast, but they exist for a reason.

“There’s a balance between being lean getting things out too early and turning people off because we were rushing.”

Not everything needs to be perfectly integrated.

We heard a few times of the desire for big corporations to design and execute an innovation project as if it were a mature project. With the complexities of big companies, reputational and legal risks and lots of good people doing their best work — it can be very easy to take a small scrappy project and turn it into a monolith of features that fit perfectly into the system.

If you find yourself asking, “well, what if we get a ton of customers and the system can’t handle it?”, instead of over investing in mitigating that risk instead think of how great that scenario would be and hope it happens.

“We get questions like ‘oh my God, this works for like a hundred people but what if it scales to ten thousand?’

That would be a brilliant problem to have and if it gets to that we will start scrambling to get the pieces together because it’s not only about that agility to move fast at the beginning of something it’s the agility to move fast as the thing grows or changes.”

Pick your battles, break what you need to but be OK with just bending things too.

Everyone who has tried to change things in a big business knows there’s a lot of internal factors that can be frustrating. Almost every innovation head talks of the need to change procurement, make it easier to work with startups, follow new processes, incentivise people differently and create a culture of innovation.

It can’t all happen overnight, and nor is there a magic cure to combat the innovation antibodies. Instead, the best stories are when people were savvy about what they needed to fundamentally change, and what they could experiment with, and take a more gradual approach to change.

We heard about how innovation leaders at storied and regulated banks took time to work with procurement enabling a better way of working with disruptive startups as well as how they reinvented traditional recruitment processes. Sometimes with permission, sometimes asking for forgiveness later.

Political capital is important, don’t spend it all at once. Bending a few rules and telling the stories of the outcomes can be a more sustainable path to building the business of the future, plus it will mean your relationship with procurement, finance, HR and legal will remain a positive and collaborative one.

“You can’t go round upsetting the people around you. Yes procurement processes can make it really hard for me to work with small vendors, and yes the compliance team can say no to something I want to do differently to how it is today. But at the end of the day, those people are there to help me, so I need to work with them, and be on the same team. You get nowhere ruffling your own team’s feathers. We win together.”

While we learned a lot that can help corporate innovation teams, including our client, it’s fair to say a few things in here rung closer to home too. So here’s three pieces of advice for any agency helping big companies to innovate.

Be honest, but think about how you share that honesty.

Something we always said we’d do when setting up Now or Never, we wouldn’t tolerate telling our clients what they want to hear, we’d always be upfront about things. We learned there’s some better ways to make that happen, it’s no use telling someone they’re wrong or we wouldn’t do it that way without thinking about how you deliver that message.

A lot of these topics are challenging and there isn’t always a clear answer. Admitting that fact and being honest about the tough stuff is important. A true partnership with a client can mean working through this tough stuff with clients not for them.

Being honest doesn’t mean you always need to touch a nerve. Through the course of these conversations and debriefing as we made progress, we learned how our thoughts are best received and have the greatest impact.

Leave your insecurities at the door.

As we’ve continued our virtual field trip, we’ve heard about other companies like us, and have started to conversations with other consultancies and agencies where we might overlap a wee bit. At first this set off alarm bells, the instinct was to be protective and maybe a bit defensive. This brings out the worst in everyone.

We’re being paid good money to do what we do because we’re good at it. Shutting up, listening and learning about how others go about it is actually a gift for us and can only make us better at what we do. And sometimes it’s better to get out of the way of someone else who does something better — high tides raise all ships.

Vulnerability isn’t a bad thing.

A little patience can go a long way.

As an agency, the urge to go faster is always there, you want the decisions about the next phases, you want to see the work become real, it’s also nice to see the money coming in. Big companies take time to move, they can often get frustrated by their own internal innovation teams moving too fast for them. So if you’re trying to move even faster than the innovation people, it’s not helpful.

As an agency you don’t always see the full picture for what your client is up to, be appreciative of that. Being at a slight distance is good, getting too close means you can lose what makes you stand out as bringing something different. Not to mention, sometimes spending some time letting things soak and develop rather than snap decisions can lead to the best outcomes.

It’s a much more sustainable relationship that is likely to see success as the long steady walk than the rapid sprint.

What now?

Our virtual field trip continues, so if you’re doing fun things in innovation, especially in financial services in Asia, we’d love to talk with you.

And if you’d like to know all about this pension fund, well if you ask nicely we can make a connection :)