Innovation Battle Part 2— 3 More Learnings from Start-Up, Business, and Design
What I learned from entrepreneurship, management consulting, and design — How do we innovate at the speed of light?
After the management consultants, design consultants, and entrepreneurs (the gorilla, peacock, and roadrunner respectively) rocked the first three rounds of the innovation battle, they took a breather. Now they are ready for action. Each walked away with a win, but the battle is not over.
Round 4 — Focus on learning quickly
When focusing on creating a ‘new to the world’ product, the key is repeatedly iterating to discover what works. By iterating, I mean simulating the intended user experience with the customer to learn and improve quickly before the high fidelity version of the product is completed. Each simulated user experience is a cycle of experimentation that can reveal the necessary components of a working solution. The goal is to increase the speed of learning and insight discovery to build a transformational solution set, as quickly as possible.
Some start-ups iterate quickly and try wildly different ideas with low fidelity prototypes to gain a breath of insight, but the approach varies by start-up. Their advantage is the openness to experimentation, but not all are in the ‘prototype to learn’ mindset unless they have a member of the team that has been through the process before, have been introduced to the rapid prototyping process, or have a data scientist on the team to implement a ‘systematic’ approach to iterating. In short, this can still be a challenge for start-ups as they may be focused on increasing the quality of the output before placing in users hands instead of following the Lean Start-Up approach and releasing minimum viable products.
The challenge in management consulting is senior leadership is usually less deep in the user research than junior staff, and is more likely to use frameworks and connect to patterns from previous project experiences. With a few words, they can shift the outcome of the project that the entire team is marching towards. It’s great for cross project pattern recognition, but not so great for the survival and proliferation of latent insights. In design consulting, latent ideas have a greater chance of survival, but the bias toward ‘making’ and iterating before making a final product differs by firm.
Ding Ding Ding! — The roadrunners win, but are injured. They iterate quickly, but don’t always follow a process to evolve. Design consultants bring the iteration experience, but focus on high quality while management consultants get stuck analyzing and perfecting the plan.
Round 5 — Assemble the Avengers of innovation
Design consulting assembles killer teams. Teams usually have a researcher, designer, and businessperson with an engineer coming toward the implementation (making) phase where a working prototype is involved. Each person brings a different expertise and will lead at varying points as the project evolves. The strength of the team is in the diversity and depth of expertise (example, having a designer on the team helps lead the team through prototype iteration in moving from research and synthesis into action).
Ideal start-up teams have three key roles: a hipster, a hacker, and a hustler. ‘Hipster’ is code name for designer, ‘hacker’ is code for developer, and ‘hustler’ is code for businessperson. At a glance you may think they do not have the ‘research’ represented to create something revolutionary, but exceptional teams have a founder that was a user that experienced the pain of the problem and is motivated to bring the solution to life. In essence, the team carries the key insights within. When investing in start-ups, VCs look for founders who have this ‘unfair competitive advantage’ of direct life experiences related to the user, an intrinsic motivation to solve the problem, and skills that make them difficult to replace.
Management consulting teams have access to people with a range of expertise, but are more homogeneous because of the similar training and experience. They bring a range of frameworks, but lack the experience of going through the rapid iteration cycles. In developing new innovations, what makes individuals valuable is how many ‘cycles’ they have gone through and is less about how many ‘methods or frameworks’ they know or the years of experience they have. Start-ups hiring former consultants without entrepreneurship experience refer to them as ‘athletes’, but the meaning is closer to ‘jock’. Former consultants are powerful ‘Swiss army knives’ that have great potential, but need experience to instill the ‘makers bias’ and develop the ability to know when quality is needed over speed and vice versa.
Ding Ding Ding! — The peacock’s agility dominates the round. Design consultants orchestrate strong and diverse teams, start-ups struggle to find talent, and management consultant teams are mostly homogeneous.
Round 6 — Death by ego
The biggest issue for early entrepreneurs is themselves. A majority of teams are ‘incomplete’ and searching for the right co-founder with the ‘tech’ skills or design skills needed and fail to recognize the value of business expertise. Early on, most believe they can do it all, think they ‘just need a developer’. Specifically, the developers are hot commodities as they are the ‘builders’ that everyone knows is necessity, but they usually fail to see the value of the ‘hipsters’ and ‘hustlers’. Designers can be the difference between customers actually signing up and repeatedly using your product or service and having a powerful product that collects dust. Business people are usually the key to getting paying customers and having a clear business model. Entrepreneurs fail to continuously sprint forward until they figure out how to quickly assemble, morph, and evolve as a team.
Design consulting addresses the ego issue at the team level. The compositions of teams are carefully orchestrated with each team member representing an area of expertise. In the relatively flat team, each member leans in to lead when his or her area of expertise is called for. Management consulting usually has layers of management and each junior level defers to their senior to make the final call on decisions. These layers can breed conformity and focus heavily on the opinion of senior leadership. While there is a danger of conformity and the speed is slower, there are clearer roles, responsibilities, and a chain of command.
Ding Ding Ding! — The gorilla takes the round. Structure and hierarchy work to keep order while design consultants flat structure cause overlap and sometimes ambiguity. Start-ups at times ignore assigning roles and establishing processes.
Conclusion — Innovating at the speed of light
After rounds of battling for the title, one challenge remains across the board: Continuity threw growth. For management and design consulting, they enter with a SWAT team of talent, execute, and leave unless there is a shared incentive to stay and a big budget to keep the team going. For start-ups, they either have to adapt and grow organically, get acquired (which has its own set of challenges), court an investor or a combination there of.
Each party has their benefits and challenges, but as pressure continues to innovate at the speed of light, they will continue to adapt and steal approaches from one another. Having worked as a full-time entrepreneur, management consultant, and design consultant, I can sense convergence towards common points and believe elements of each could be powerful if combined.
What do I see in the future? I am waiting for someone to create the SEALS of Innovation, similar to the U.S. Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land), but including ‘Space’. This diverse and dynamic team of ninjas will quickly assemble, discover insights to solve tough problems, co-design and iterate on prototypes of working solutions, and breath life into beta product along side clients and users, who will carry it into the future. After the team’s quest is complete, they will move onto solving a different challenge to rock the planet, or disband to make change in their respective corner of the world. Fast and furious. I will keep searching, but if I don’t find this team, I may just have to make one.
What kind of ninja are you?
