Cannes Now Awards Innovation in Business
In an era where tradition and history are so frequently disrupted by novelty, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is reinventing itself in order to keep up with the times. And one of the most significant tweaks is the creation of a new category in the award: the Creative Business Transformation Lion.
The award will recognize and celebrate innovation in products, services, customer experiences, and operational shifts that have driven transformative change in a brand’s core business — different solutions that create efficiency, grow productivity, deepen loyalty and connect with consumers in a way that brings tangible results.
The Creative Business Transformation Lions will encompass four categories: customer experience, business design and operations, product and service, and venture creation and design.
The festival gave an example of a good case that could fit this new category:
P&G dips a toe in DTC waters
Procter & Gamble is a behemoth with annual revenues north of $65 billion, and it is hard to imagine that the CPG (consumer packaged goods) empire could be bothered with small startups. But it was. When Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s brought a Direct to Consumer strategy to sell razors and made Gillette’s share of the US men’s razor market fall from 70% to 54%, P&G realized it needed to innovate to stay ahead of the competition.
Having no experience in DTC, P&G executives decided to experiment. They created P&G Ventures, a startup studio designed to create brands and businesses to solve consumer problems in categories where P&G does not provide them.
With a very lean, but senior, group of executives, the P&G Ventures developed exclusively DTC and digitally native brands, something the corporation had never previously done. They made up for their lack of experience by using external consultants and talents from DTC companies. So far, P&G Ventures has developed 20 projects and has a number of other seedlings.
Where big corporations are inexperienced and slow to try new ideas and take risks, P&G found a way to do the opposite: it created a division designed to both drive innovation and thrive in the DTC space.
We in the Spotlight Team looked for other examples that were featured in other Cannes Lions Int. Festival categories over the last few years, and found two cases that could easily be considered for the new Creative Business Transformation Lion:
IKEA reinvents “tailor-made” furniture
One of the downsides of a company that gets big and multinational is, usually, increased difficulty with catering to specific needs of consumers. Ikea achieved great success by creating cheap, well-designed furniture — but pieces that cannot be tweaked to serve people with special necessities. Or they couldn’t.
In 2018, Ikea’s branch in Israel created ThisAbles, a suite of product adaptors that make the company’s furniture and goods accessible to people with disabilities. But what is really innovative is that they made the project scalable by making the adaptors’ blueprints available on the internet, so that anyone can make their own using a 3D printer — in Ikea stores or on any other 3D printer. Although the offering was initially available for Ikea retail outlets in Israel, its products have now been downloaded and printed in 127 countries.
It not only helped disabled people all around the world; it also made money out of it: there was a surge of 37% on sales of products with the add-ons, and a 33% increase in revenue.
Volvo brings safety to the whole industry
The car industry faces a number of threats in this day and age: Millennials don’t aspire to own automobiles, governments treat combustion engines as foes of the environment, experts say the revolution of self-driving automobiles is just around the corner — and most likely it will be led by tech companies. Carmakers are doing whatever they can to keep their market share intact.
It was a huge deal, then, when Volvo announced last year that it would share with competitors troves of proprietary data on nearly 50 years of safety research through an easily accessible digital portal. The reason for their decision? Women are 71% more likely to be injured in a car crash — and 17% more likely to die — all because most automakers use only male adult crash-test dummies when designing a car.
The EVA Initiative (which stands for Equal Vehicles for All) contains more than a hundred scientific studies covering a variety of subjects and tens of thousands of real accidents and collisions with men, women and children. They bring fundamental information for the design of cars, which will improve the safety of any car, and, ultimately, to all consumers.
These cases are all examples of fantastic innovations that show a transformation of customer-facing functions, reinvention of internal business design and operations, creation or reinvention of new products or services, and the introduction and impact of venture models that drive transformative change. And, starting this year, they will be cherished at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
Since this is a new category, the organizers are being flexible and will accept projects that have been implemented since March 2017. It’s a second chance for projects that might have been overlooked by the jurors in previous years, or it could even extend the glory of winners of past seasons in different categories.
But beware. The criteria with which the Creative Business Transformation Lion will be judged is a clear sign that the Cannes Lions are now focusing more and more on business and social impact projects, and that the jury will no longer be impressed with just a “bare” idea.
The Spotlight Team
