The growing pains of an innovation lab: Three years, three lessons

Remember when the Fitbit craze exploded, basically turning step-counting into a competitive sport? That was the same year our minds were blown by the first big-screen, slimmed-down iPhone6, and the elegance of Apple’s new smart watches.

Believe it or not, this was only a few years ago. Technology’s increasingly rapid cycles have made these once wildly revolutionary and cutting edge devices ubiquitous; ho-hum. It really goes to show how quickly big, fresh ideas change, evolve and adapt.

The same can be said for corporate innovation labs — they may be more common now, but back in 2014, they weren’t as pervasive. When we started, it was considered a bold move for TD to open a lab away from head office, at Communitech’s innovation hub, in the heart of Canada’s startup ecosystem. We really were an outlier — a 150-year-old institution juxtaposed to ambitious, scalable startups growing from the ground up, innovating with emerging tech, and doing it faster and more nimbly than we were used to.

We clearly had a lot to learn and some serious street-cred to build (both with our new peers, and our own colleagues at the bank). Applying a “learn fast, learn often” mindset, has helped us develop into one of the hub’s more mature stage labs. Not only that, with some 200 prototypes under our belt, 100 startups met, and over 100 intern Lab-grads, we’re now in the position to teach a few things too.

First things first — why a lab?

The bank recognised the pace of technological change would only get faster and to stand still meant we’d fall behind. But what technologies should we bet on? Asking businesses to test every emerging tech on top of executing day-to-day operations was neither effective nor reasonable.

Enter, TD Lab.

Our Lab was created to be an innovation service for our organization: where the aspirational and theoretical could be realised as working concepts, and then quickly evaluated for viability and marketability. Build, test, learn, repeat. Then further explore those concepts that offered the most compelling opportunities.

But, producing insights and concepts was only part of the equation. A key function of the Lab would be to spark an innovation culture inside the bank — collaborate, enable, and challenge colleagues to get engaged.

We’ve seen real success on this front. Through hosting design bootcamps and demo days to hackathon mentoring and concept collaboration, our Lab has fuelled a culture of curiosity and creativity, encouraging new and novel experimentation across all of TD.

Along the way, we’ve also built our credibility externally, becoming a magnet for emerging talent and startups, and building symbiotic relationships that have benefited from and given back to Waterloo’s vibrant tech ecosystem.

Did we nail it all on day one? Not exactly. Actually, not at all. But by constantly evaluating, iterating and refining our approach and methodologies, we’ve gotten pretty good at this.

We’re still on the journey, still making mistakes, still learning from them. So, I thought I’d share some of the big things we’ve learned along the way that have helped shape who we are and how we operate.

1) Don’t just join the community, immerse yourself in it

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s a collaborative process that constantly evolves by gathering insights from outside sources. We apply this mindset to everything we do — our development process, startup engagement, talent outreach, and community programming. So, as much as we gain from being entrenched in Waterloo’s dynamic community, we look to create partnerships that are mutually beneficial.

From day one, we’ve had a co-op program that provides post-secondary students the opportunity to learn our agile and design methodologies while getting their hands dirty contributing ideas and building concepts. Students are mentored by our lean team of designers and developers, and receive indepth training into how we solve real customer challenges. We realise immense value in engaging with emerging talent, learning from their thinking and perspectives, while exploring a potential future tech career in the banking industry.

Working side by side with these students has taught us that we need to continually feed this pipeline, particularly with young women. We now have a formal plan in place to support educational and entrepreneurial programs that promote and encourage STEM participation for key ages and groups that traditionally see a drop-off in engagement.

Another vital area of community engagement comes from connecting with startups who provide unique perspectives and approaches to addressing different customer problems. We take an active role to broker the right relationships within the bank to help forge potential partnerships. Identifying and driving the right opportunities is important, but communicating feedback is equally critical. We’ve learned that a quick “no” can be as helpful as a quick “yes”.

And if we move forward on an opportunity, we need to change the way we engage with startups so that it’s faster than the way we engage with established companies. A startup generally has less time and capital to spend on individual engagements, so we need to get to decisions quicker and look to minimise red tape.

2) If you build it… well, they may not come

Looking back at out our progress, we have averaged more than one working prototype per week since opening our doors. I’ll be honest, at first, many didn’t land with our business partners. This made us pause and reflect on why.

When we started out, some projects began with the coolness of a new technology. HoloLens for banking? Why not! SiriKit now available? Wonder what we can do with that. We turned these ideas into fascinating and compelling concepts, but they didn’t go past the wow-factor with our business partners. Neither did many projects where the inspiration was born purely in the Lab. By early 2015, we quickly realised partner engagement and sponsorship aren’t just desirable — they’re easily the most important thing to get right for a project.

We now start with the business partner and together identify the key challenges our Lab can solve. Once we made this shift, our projects became far more relevant and produced meaningful learnings and concepts.

3) No opportunity is wasted; no effort is a waste

Of course, we still play with cool tech to explore random threads and blue sky ideas. These still build value, even if they’re seemingly crazy ideas. Every idea that starts down a path of exploration can be beneficial to the bank. It’s been an important discovery on our part to find the right balance between projects that meet a near-term business challenge with those that offer a future-forward perspective on the potential for an emerging tech, trend or customer experience.

No matter where we net out, every project produces learnings that inform the team on what works, and what doesn’t. This is really important: each concept must give insight to the bank. It has to be done quickly in a model that is bank-like, but not bank-locked. We’re aligned to TD’s core values, but not limited to conventional thinking, established processes or onerous rules. Freedom is awesome — you just need to be accountable for learning.

Stay fresh

Over the past three years, the Lab has evolved to become an engine for the bank to explore, experiment, and engage. The road to get here has been at times winding, and we’ve had our share of roadblocks to overcome. What has been essential to our progress is a constant openness to iterate and improve virtually every aspect of how we do things — from our Lab model and methodologies, to how we collaborate with internal and external partners.

We are not the same lab we were when we started. That’s a good thing. Stagnation is a killer.

In 2018, we’ll continue to grow and evolve — to use what we’ve learned to push new boundaries and challenge ourselves to try new things.

Stick around. Things are just starting to get interesting.