470: Strategies for enhanced product innovation in organizations – with Andy Binns

Insights for product managers on fostering innovation in corporate environments Today we are talking about how established organizations can innovate, resulting in new products and ventures. Most of us who have been in established organizations, know this can be challenging as a culture of innovation is often lacking. Joining us is Andy Binns, a management advisor, award-winning author, and speaker on innovation and change. He has over twenty-five years’ experience helping companies make and execute strategic choices to support business growth. He has been at the coalface of innovation, working alongside the leaders of IBM’s “Emerging Business Opportunity” program. He now leads Change Logic, a strategic advisory firm, which takes a hands-on approach to enabling firms to build new businesses. He has numerous articles published about his insights and his recent book he co-authored is Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:42] Why is your book, The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures In Established Companies, needed? Our first book was Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at Innovation. This sounds outrageous, but although it is challenging for corporations to innovate and get into a market ahead of a startup, it does happen far more often than we realize. It’s hiding in plain sight. For example, Microsoft’s 365 is just a product extension for them. When you look inside these stories, you often find a corporate explorer at the center of them—someone who has the vision, commitment, and passion to drive it through. Our second book, Corporate Explorer Handbook, says that as management consultants and academics we don’t know all the answers. Most of the answers are in the field with the people doing this. Lots of little micro practices and activities together make you more about to fulfill that function of being a corporate explorer successfully. We wanted to make some of those tools more available to people. [7:22] What does a corporate explorer do? I endorse the view that to get better corporate innovation outcomes, you need good processes, good practices, and an enabling culture. There’s a chapter in the book about how to create innovation culture. However, when we look at venture-backed startups and entrepreneurs, we don’t say, “Oh that Musk guy, what a great process he has. Let’s get after that process.” We look at them and say, “They’re extraordinary leaders. They’re people who believe in something, and they follow it with a passion.” That’s what a corporate explorer does. We need a little bit more balance in how we think about corporate innovation. In Corporate Explorer, we tell the story of Christian Kurtisch at Unica Insurance, a firm founded in Vienna, Austria, around 1800. Fast forward 200 years and Kurtisch, a middle manager in Unica’s Hungarian business, builds a first-of-a-kind digital-only insurance business for this company. He does this because he is incredibly passionate about not his idea but the problem he’s solving; he builds support around him in the organization; and he gets really into experimentation in a big way. This is the corporate explorer recipe. [12:24] What tools have you seen resonant with organizations because they help them innovate better? The tool that gets the most attention is hunting zones. Part of the challenge is that large organizations wonder if innovation should be a top-down or bottom-up approach. Do they need a strong direction or do they need to gather lots of ideas? Hunting zones allow them to put boundaries around where they want to generate new ideas. They can use analytical techniques to describe the areas of greatest opportunity and then invite corporate explore...