Disrupt-It-Yourself by Simone Bhan Ahuja

Author:Simone Bhan Ahuja
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Executive Scorecard

•Does your organizational structure support intrapreneurship by allowing people to move fluidly across the organization to collaborate for innovation and problem-solving?

•What place do empowered teams play in your organizational culture?

•Do your management and performance measurement systems support fluidity and agility?

•Have you found ways to allow the “messiness” that fosters intrapreneurship and innovation?

SEVEN

Principle 5: Maximize Return on Intelligence

In 2016 and 2017, I worked with Stanley Black & Decker’s Global Emerging Markets group to help them explore ways to accelerate their growth in rapidly developing economies such as India, China, and Brazil. It was a major aspiration—so why think small? The plan was to bypass incremental product improvements and leap right into business model innovation as a way to meet the needs of emerging market customers, with a focus on the tradespeople who work as carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. We started with a disciplined ethnographic study of the markets to create a foundation of knowledge. The lessons learned from this “walk in their shoes” research formed the basis of several compelling hypotheses that we eventually formed into eight potentially viable business model opportunities.

The next phase? Fast and frugal experimentation.

We prioritized each of the business models and acted rapidly to experiment with our top picks in the marketplace—without breaking the bank. In India, for instance, our research highlighted a critical need to “meet users where they are,” both physically and by targeting their unique needs. The insight culminated in new business model design including mobile services for tool distribution and tool repair. We began the focused experiment with just a couple of vans and a handful of motorcycles serving locations that were popular with local tradespeople.

To extract the most knowledge out of these experiments, we tracked thirteen input and outcome metrics over a four-week period, including average repair time, miles driven, total tool repair sales, and van-related direct costs. The result? Copious amounts of data about customers collected at very low cost that were quickly integrated back into a more refined business model design of this new way to reach and serve customers.

Sam Reid, cofounder of Ideas2Impact and one of our partners in the effort, made the point that the initiative was as much about what we could learn for calibrating future ventures as it was about success in any one experiment. “A lot of organizations spend time telling people to celebrate failure, ‘fail fast,’ ‘fail forward,’ etc., in the hopes that their teams will overcome a lifetime of seeing failure as bad because their boss, teachers, and others say they should,” he said. “This may work for some, but we’ve found it more useful to just call the outcome of whatever we do ‘learning.’ When we do well, it’s learning. When we don’t, it’s learning. By focusing everyone on capturing and applying new insights from innovation efforts, we’ve turned the whole process into more of a continuous journey towards becoming smarter, faster, and better versus a win/lose event.”

Reid is right. Each of our experiments and their metrics allowed us to quickly and inexpensively test models that otherwise would have been rolled out in large-scale pilots.

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