I believe very much in innovation. If we don’t innovate, we’re going to fall behind. At the same time, I believe that technology is just a medium. It’s not about what cool things you are using; it’s about connecting with your customers and creating true business value. What is the customer experience that will equate to business value?
Incremental innovation is more important than just innovating from scratch. You don’t always have to create cool products or something that’s done in a different way. Apple didn’t innovate the phone. They just made a better phone.
Innovation at tradeMONSTER follows a five-step model.
1. Evaluate the Business Case and 2. Execute the Proof of Concept
There are two questions that are very critical to ask yourself first. One, is this the right move for your organization? Two, if this is the right move, how do you execute it right? If it’s not working, how do you make sure that you can fail fast and don’t overrun your time with budgets or creating something that doesn’t have that much value?
A lot of people start with technology when answering the first question. To me that is completely wrong. You can’t just start from HTML 5 or Ruby on Rails or Hadoop. You have to start from the business case and the idea, and think about whether it actually has an impact on retaining or acquiring customers. How will it help to create a competitive differentiator? Innovation is meaningless if you aren’t creating a competitive differentiator or doing something unique.
Rolling out new technology on non-mission critical projects helps motivate people. People love learning new technologies and your risks are not that high. You have balance on both ends. You are trying and getting a non-mission critical project done. At the same time they love working on and trying out new technology and if the Proof of Concept works, it gives you more confidence to propose the idea to your stakeholders.
3. Revisit, 4. Execute, and 5. Fail Fast
The third step is revisiting what you learned from the business case. What is your proof of concept? What is the final plan? What functionality am I able to create? Take it and present it across the organization. Innovation cannot just be an IT plan. If you don’t have support from each and every member of the organization, it helps to support and fund everything. At that point, when you have tested the technology and have already done everything, you are already set. If it does not work at that point, you drop it.
The fourth and fifth steps concern execution and a willingness to fail fast. I always believe in taking on smaller cycles of execution over four to five weeks. With every cycle you evaluate your risk and your value proposition. Yes, a lot of companies just look at IT revenue. But you also have to look at the proposed value that the project started with. Which technology limitations and challenges are you tackling? You have to look at it in small cycles. Evaluate risk and value, risk and value.
Finally, take the functional challenges in reverse order. You can always plug in the functional modules. Take the technology challenges in decreasing order or priority. Once you do that, always include your customers when you roll out a product, through feedback like beta testing or product launch. If in any of the cycles the results are not positive, make sure you communicate it to stakeholders and fail fast. Failing fast is a big win.
Nothing Worth Doing is Risk-Free
There is no safe innovation. There is a varying degree of risk and reward. It will never be safe. But you can always learn from failures. You can focus on your gains and then your losses. Focus on making sure the governance is right. But most importantly, focus on the value proposition. A lot of CIOs focus on a 40% chance of loss, not a 60% chance of success. If you can connect your customers and other stakeholders and show them constant proof of concept and how things are going, it eventually encourages innovation, minimizes risk, and creates a powerful dynamic and innovation culture across the organization.
Not done learning about IT innovation? Read our article about how to take a structured approach to innovation and how that can lead to more ideas.
Sanjib is an award winning CTO/CIO and is part of a new wave of strategic CIOs. His visionary leadership and approach to innovation have been recognized widely for helping to build an award-winning online retail brokerage, tradeMONSTER, and an HTML5 patent-pending mobile trading platform. He has been with tradeMONSTER Group since it was founded in 2006 and directs all aspects of IT for tradeMONSTER and its financial media site, optionMONSTER.
