457: The right way to apply Kickbox to unleash innovation in your organization – with Ralph Hartmeier

How product managers can use Adobe’s Kickbox innovation system Today we are talking about using the open source innovation system called Kickbox that was created at Adobe. This is a simple and effective tool for increasing innovation by orders of magnitude in an organization. Our guest is Ralph Hartmeier, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of rready, an organization that started from personal experience applying Kickbox, and which now helps other organizations unleash innovation. Ralph was introduced to Kickbox while he was head of growth for Swisscom. He is also a founding member of the non-profit Kickbox.org that promotes the use of Kickbox. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:50] What was going on at Adobe that led to Kickbox? Around 2013, a serial entrepreneur named Mark Randall sold his startup to Adobe and joined Adobe. He realized innovation in a big corporation such as Adobe looks very different from innovation in a startup. He was given the title VP of Creativity and given as much budget as he needed in order to change Adobe’s cumbersome innovation process. He realized that coming up with ideas was rather easy for certain employees but submitting ideas into an idea management system and validating ideas were not easy. He helped these innovators with a gamified, fun approach to go from raw idea to a validated idea. He put an innovation process guide in a red box called Kickbox and started distributing it to people within Adobe. [5:17] What else is in the box? The most important part is the guide to the innovation process. There is a credit card with $1000 on it. An employee can spend that on whatever they think is necessary to bring the idea forward. They also need to prove what they have done and how they have progressed. There is a notebook labeled “Bad Ideas” to help create a culture of innovation. It’s important to spread the message that not every idea is good and not every idea needs to be good. You need quite a few bad ideas in order to hit a good one. There is a chocolate bar and a Starbucks card. The whole box told a story. Mark Randall gathered 20-30 employees, handed out boxes, and told the story, which was highly inspirational. People started validating their ideas. Adobe made sure to capture the learnings and made sure people are being held accountable. [9:41] What philosophy does the Kickbox promote? Perhaps a company could fund 10 projects with $1 million per year, or they could fund 1000 projects with $1000, and they only need one of them to win for the whole program to pay for itself. Plus 1000 employees learn how to innovate. If a management board chooses 10 ideas in early-stage innovation, that’s a game of luck. Kickbox finds people who want to go the extra mile—working hard, being patient, and iterating their ideas. You should test a lot of ideas with a little money. Let people learn what it takes to validate an idea. Then you will be quite sure you will be able to implement one idea or another and scale it and turn it into a growth machine. We step away from corporate innovation being a game of luck to knowing exactly how many ideas we need to source in the beginning of the year to hit two, three, or four projects being implemented and scaled. [11:32] What is the $1000 credit card intended to be used for? Mark Randall said, “I don’t care.” You use it for whatever you think is right. When we applied the Kickbox idea to the company here in Switzerland, we realized this is very gray from a compliance perspective. We needed to put another system in place, but we didn’t want to lose the mindset that you’re the CEO of your idea. We realized the kickboxers might not know many people within the organization. They might not know how to access somebody who can help them with a prototype. We got rid of the prepaid credit card and use a digital...