Hear behind-the-scenes lessons learned from Taylor Lowry and Keri Stephens on how they helped guide a courageous team from a F100 Financial Services company to condense 18 months worth of innovation work into five weeks, setting a new standard for the company for exploring potential sources of growth.
Building Lean Innovation Capability for a F100 Company
Coming into the five-week sprint, our client really had two primary objectives. The first objective was to truly identify disruptive innovation in the market. Their industry was being disrupted and they needed to figure out how they were going to win in the next 10 to 15 years.
The next opportunity that the company had is that they really needed to figure out how they could, as a big company, act more entrepreneurially. How do they act faster and come up with bigger and breakthrough innovation? And so, we needed to build the next generation of entrepreneurs within the company.
The five-week process started with a series of training modules. So, we trained the core team and the sprinters in things like Design Thinking, and empathy, and Jobs to be Done.
The first few weeks were all about really understanding the consumer, so what are those pain points, what are the needs, what are the jobs to be done within those trend spaces. Then we started to converge in on, what are the jobs to be done coming out of those pain points. And then, we really started to converge, and validate, and prioritize those jobs against the client’s unfair advantage, and a competitive assessment, and a market size opportunity, and a quantitative consumer prediction market. In the final week, we took those prioritized jobs and put them into an ideation session, where we were really coming up with actual ideas rooted in those consumer needs.
Essentially, we took a process that would typically take 18 months and distilled it down to 5 weeks. Because of that, we had to move very fast. We had to make decisions faster than we needed to. So, in order to enable that, the first thing is that we had leadership check-ins throughout the process. They served as accelerator teams for us so that we could have a quick check-in, they knew exactly where we were at, and they allowed us to propel and go forward.
The other thing was, is that we had to get comfortable and confident in our decision-making ability. So, we didn’t have all of the data, but by going through iterative rounds of research, testing with consumers, testing our assumptions, and then going out and doing it again, we were able to move very quickly and with a lot of confidence.
Just seeing how much they had grown from day one, it was just 100% courage and hustle that they showed, and we just had a very proud moment watching them and watching them captivate the room with their pitches. And also, really having so much knowledge and depth of knowledge in each of their trend spaces, that was 100% done.
These sprinters left to go back to their day jobs and change the culture. They were able to go back, think about, how do we get scrappier with our research in what we’re doing, how do we think differently, how do we act more like entrepreneurs to move the company forward.
It’s really just the start for this client team, and now that they have all this capability and development, they can really take that back to their own groups and solve similar challenges on their own.
