It was standing room only in Dr. Anita Sands’ session at Communitech’s Tech Leadership Conference on May 29.
The 200-person room was captivated as the innovation expert discussed change leadership and how technological innovations need to occur in every industry. As Sands pointed out, everyone now works with tech, regardless of industry.
Sands shared her 10 best practices of enterprise innovation. Her main points were: focus on your customers, disrupt yourself and build out process innovation.
After Sands talked about everything from big data to the growth of the importance of the mobile experience, I sat down with her over lunch to talk about leaders, an organization’s capacity for change and what early signs of disruption might look like.
Q – Tell me more about capacity for change, the importance of leadership and the role anyone can play in creating innovation in a company.
A – Two things: innovation is a mindset; it’s not just a department. It’s a leadership challenge insofar as it requires the ability to challenge the status quo to assume [there is] a better way to do something you are already doing, which is hard to accept when you already have a successful business, and to think about your thinking.
The other thing is that, for the most part, innovation is very hard work. It’s not all about shiny, new things. But there are a lot of opportunities to unlock when you think of innovation as something that connects what’s possible to what’s valuable to your clients.
So, the leadership challenge is there. It’s an ongoing leadership challenge.
Capacity – this is the thing that everyone misses. They miss it in terms of resources, they miss it in terms of skill sets, they literally think that it’s going to be possible to run the business day to day, make their numbers and still manage to ideate new concepts, incubate new concepts and then bring them to fruition so one day they are comparable in size to the current successful incumbent businesses.
What was clear in what Geoffrey Moore said [in an earlier keynote at TLC] is that there is a breaking point at which companies will struggle with resource allocation across the main company and the new innovative ideas.
Even if you want to do incremental innovation, even if you want to be a fast follower into certain places your competitors have already gone, even that requires capacity for change. And, successful process innovation requires people who know the business and how it runs, people with the skill set to drive change, and people with the program management skills that actually execute it.
So it takes an ecosystem of skills, a team, and you’ve got to create that capacity.
Q – It’s interesting that people think of innovators as these lone cowboys riding into the Wild West, who are going to change their entire industry. You brought it down to process – that’s where you can make the biggest changes. Can you summarize that?
A – It’s important to understand what innovation is and what it isn’t. We aren’t all going to be Apple, we aren’t all going to be Steve Jobs. Therefore, how do you innovate inside the boundary conditions of your industry or geography or so forth?
[With] innovation, it’s important to know what it’s not. It’s not necessarily always invention; innovation is not just about new products or new technologies. You’re looking for innovation in everything you do. So that’s what I talked about when you think about mobile as a way to completely re-engineer your business processes and create a new operating model.
Also, innovation does not have to be big blue sky all the time. There’s a lot of value you can unlock with incremental innovation. The ketchup bottle being turned upside down is a great example.
Q – You talked about disrupters that blindsided big industries in the way Airbnb caught the hotel industry off guard. There have to be early signs. These things don’t happen in a vacuum. A startup doesn’t appear overnight. What are people missing?
A – That’s a great question. I think these businesses generally fall into two categories: businesses of transactions or businesses of audience. And you’ve got to understand what you’re in.
In the case of Amazon or eBay, it was a transaction business. You started to see, at some point, that the level of transactions they were processing was really sizable.
For the likes of an Airbnb or WhatsApp, these are businesses of audience. The point is that WhatsApp didn’t have a sustainable revenue model when they were acquired for $18 billion or whatever, but they had an audience. They had 450 million users.
So I think you have to understand if your competitors aren’t who you think they are (in the case of hotels being innovated by a home rental website), and they could come from these emergent spaces, are they going to be transactional players or audience players? Then you need to look for the leading indicators.
Q – Any final words for Waterloo Region?
A – I think Waterloo has everything going for it.
Too many people are commenting and speculating on the demise of BlackBerry That story is far from being over. There are many chapters left to tell. The company has created a set of assets and resources in this ecosystem that are going to continue to deliver huge dividends for the region.
The overall evolution of the industry of the community here is going to be absolutely unstoppable because of the wealth of talent, expertise and now vast global experience that exists inside of that company, and among and within all of its employees. I am buoyantly optimistic about the future of Waterloo.
