GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Reynald Chapuis is Innovation and CSR manager at France Job Center (Pôle Emploi). He recently prefaced a book by Olivier Pujol and Stéphane Bernard on ‘Innovation’s delight: find out an idea, and implement it’. He kindly shares with us the multiple innovation initiatives going on at France Job Center.

Innovation and CSR divivision was set-up in 2012, with a mission to:

• define innovation for France job Center, including everything that brings a better user experience, prospective on what are a public service and center in 2030, and value creation strategies for a 3 to 4 years layout;
• define CSR policy, covering everything that brings engagement, awareness, and responsibility.

Participative Innovation

Employees involvement in innovation goes through a comprehensive process to unfold creative and responsible services:

1. Idea: Any employee can pitch his creative idea, and send it in a video;
2. Innovation Experts’ Feedback: Selected video (20%) gives rise to an exchange with the idea owner, and decide the next step: 1) stop 2) share the video on E-novaction platform;
3. Community Feedback: Sharing the idea on E-Novaction platform means the idea is refined, and exposed for 60 days to the community: it can then collect feedbacks, and supports or ‘likes’ (supports will be next handled as a capital, in a gamification purpose, with a limited number of likes that one can attribute, and which bring reward if the idea wins).;
4. Demonstrator Project: If the idea is popular, it is granted a proof of concept (‘demonstrator’), and the innovation team will coach the idea owner, agregate complementary ideas, and connect him with experts that will help to build a project;
5. Experimentation: Every French region can pick-up the demonstrator for experimentation (3 to 9 months);
6. Exposure: Demonstrator can exposed on the E-Novation Forum, a 3 weeks event once a year;
7. Deployment: 2 necessary conditions must be fulfilled, a steering committee, and the results of the experimentation (achievements, learnings, target, and impacts). Here the ability to engage industrial process, C-level management, BtoB business unit are assessed.

In one year, 10,000 ideas have been shared on E-Novaction platform, 70% of the empoyees have browsed on the web site.

2/3 of the ideas come out of thematic challenges, at local, regional or national level, which can help to detect intrapreneurs, and unearth pains in the organization, and the user experience: for example, how to make job opportunities appear, with a model which detects companies that are going to recruit (labonneboîte).

E-Novation will be soon opened to Job partners, like a territorial collectivity, and their servants.

Innovation Lab in Paris

An Innovation Lab has opened doors in Paris, 19^ème district, over 600 m2. It aims at:

• designing creative services involving users and public servants, partners and startups (4 weeks preparation, and 3 days workshop); one typical example was ‘moving fromm school to work, how can Job Center help?’;
• incubating, and accelerating projects over 8 to 10 weeks;
• supporting experimentations.

Innovation app store

Emploi-store-idées.fr is a collaborative platform invoving users and coders to turn ideas into mobile apps, and web sites. Scope is on employment and job mobility. Empoyment data and APIs are displayed on developers’ portal Emploi-store-dev.fr, and relationship between users and developers is facilitated. Over 100 apps/web services have been completed, and are exposed on Emploi-store.fr.

Challenges based on employement data and hackathons help to detect innovative solutions. For example a recent challenge, ChallengePE Big Data, was organized to reinvent the way to apply for a job.

Crowdfunding platform Ulule provides training to selected projects owners to help them shape their crowdfunding campaign: 2 winners from the mobility challenge spent 3 weeks at Ulule.

Challenges lead to 27 files uploaded in 6 months, and presented to a jury. Typical prizes rank from €1500 to €5000. An emblematic laureate is Endsight which exploits unsuccessful job applications, and combines a digital solution with guidelines book for self-diganostic.

An open innovation cluster, HR-Lab

Job Center innovation team is committed to a cluster dedicated to HR and digital, HR-Lab, with BPI partner (a HR consulting boutique), and startups engaged on HR, management and personal development. It aims at promoting innovation and digital to facilitate employment, support compani’es growth, and improve happiness at work. The Lab works at federating startups to build common offering, and propose simple unified solutions to job seeker.

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Currently looking after Oracle France corporate responsibility, Dominique van Deth always thought that companies could have a significant impact on Society.

After starting in Consulting, R&D and Product Management, Dominique chose to help Oracle France internal transformation. For 5 years, Dominique has been managing startups programs, and he launched in 2014 a structured program to engage volunteers in helping startup grow. Passionate by social business, innovation and human capital, he is currently looking at Corporate Hacking.

I met him at Les Hacktivateurs afterwork, and he kindly accepted to tell us more about Oracle startups program.

What is ‘the reason why’ for the Oracle startups program? Where does it come from?

#welovestartups was created as a mean to support Oracle France’s internal transformation. We want employees to understand Digital Transformation through practical use cases brought by startups. We started by selecting 6 startups and 6 volunteers and we actually had to refuse a lot of employees. Richard Frajnd, Country Leader, then asked me to broaden the program, which I did in two ways: ‘Adopt a startup’ where employees can choose from a selection of already sourced startups, and ‘Bring your own startup’ where they can find themselves a startup using their own networks.

For Oracle, it is part of our Corporate Responsibility activities, it helps internal transformation, it helps us also to bring additional innovation to our customer, and it is important in our own transition to Cloud where we need to increase the value of our MarketPlace.

2) What is the value proposition for the startups and for the Oracle Business Units? Can you pick-up a few examples of successful collaborations?

For startups, we offer a mentor that they can talk to, so that they can discuss the various business issue they face. We also offer specific expertise on a pro-bono model (limited to a meeting or two). And we put startups forward in our various go-to-market activities (events, digital communication). When it makes sense,  we also bring them in front of our own customers.

Within Oracle, we try to leverage everything we do by asking ourselves: “how could we leverage startups ?” And when it makes sense, we include them. Specific part of the business also regularly contact me with specific requests.

Program’s intend is to build win / win relationships and as the program develop, we will have specific stories to share. We had large presence of startups at many events, including our Digital Disruption Day, our Partner Day, the User Group meeting, and at the coming Digital Mission 2016. And some startups even met Safra Catz, Oracle’s co-CEO in April! Feedback is already very positive from all stakeholders and we have solid use cases under work where we will combine our products with startup solutions.

3) How does it work for startups? How do business unit and employees concurrently engage in the startup program?

We are looking at startups in Digital Transformation with a BtoB model. Startup should have already a product and customers (>100k euros revenue). They are usually sourced from network we are working with: France Digital, Scientipôle, Paris&Co, Réseau Entreprendre. They apply, and we build together a summary slide. The set of startups is proposed to potential volunteers that will chose a startup they would like to work with. We make sure that there is a mutual match so that nobody wastes his time.

4) What are the typical timeline and milestones of the startup acceleration program? What are the skills of your team to support this framework?

It is a one year program and every startup is setting its own milestones with us. Oracle’s employee are typically highly skilled, so there are no specific criterias in this area.

5) What was the most difficult part to achieve? Do you measure a success ratio?

Honestly, things are progressing really well.  It takes some time to convince volunteers, but as program is growing, word of mouth is helping a lot.

6) What is your next challenge? The next steps for the Oracle startup program?

The next challenge is to really develop joint success stories, and maybe to replicate this program in other countries. We’ve already launched a program in India, so let’s see!

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Koen Vermeulen is CIO at Orange France, and awarded CIO of the year in 2015. He kindly accepted to answer a few questions related to the implementation of Agile methodology, and how it brings a brand new spirit for innovation projects.

Hi Koen, tell us about yourself, what is your experience, when and how did you join Orange ?

KV: I have a commercial engineering degree in computer sciences from the university of Leuven in Belgium. I worked several years for Computer Sciences Corporation (a system integrator) for different clients. In 1998 I joined Belgacom (now Proximus) as IT director and left them in April 2012 to join Orange. As of nearly 2 years now I am in charge of the IT department for Orange France.

How would you describe the Agile approach that you’ve implemented at Orange France (for example: project breakdown in short sprints, test & learn, constant focus in the relevant direction for the customer, multidisciplinary team)?

KV: We want to apply the Agile approach while respecting strictly its principles to avoid dilution of the advantages. Agility is about having a vision and a strategy but with the flexibility to adapt it, based on user feedback and the reality of the market. The teams have a high degree of autonomy and are composed in a multidisciplinary way.

At application level we had already quite some agile experience, but now we want to apply this on projects E2E, to accelerate our “first time to user” with a factor 5 to 6.

What is the Orange Digital Lab?

KV: In order to assure we’re applying the way of working as it should and to accompany the teams working in an agile project, we’ve created an environment in which we create all the conditions with experienced staff to realize these projects. The purpose is that people participating in these real operational projects, get familiar with the way of working through real-life projects. We’ve implemented several projets already in 2015 and in 2016 we will increase the use of these approaches.

Orange Digital Lab is a framework to incubate around 7 projects involving employees from different departments, thus achieving tremendous short lead time for project delivery.

Next to the digital lab we also have an Agile starter offer (focus on project start) and agile in self service mode.

What other agile methodologies do you practice?

The agile methodology helps us in having projects E2E, quicker and more adapted to the most urgent needs in production by ensuring basically a closer collaboration, more autonomy, focus on what is essential and feedback. But also the way we “produce an IT system” evolves by making development and operations team work more closely together, working in shorter feedback cycles and automating repetitive tasks as much as possible, also often referred to as DEVOPS. Although not applicable and needed for all systems, we want to evolve towards a situation where we can technically deploy new features on a continuous basis.

The other point that makes projects, with an important IT impact, expensive and long is the complexity of integration between systems. Therefore we develop new interfaces as self-service APIs, as if they were functionally exposed on the web. This requires simplicity and ease to understand what the API is about, security should be embedded and operational robustness to avoid issues causing chain reactions on the rest of the application landscape.

When moving towards this new way of working, which resistance or hurdles are to be anticipated?

As with every change, people are initially concerned and afraid of the unknown. We’ve noticed so far that nearly all people who have experienced this way of collaborating are all very satisfied (satisfaction levels of around 90%) and don’t want to go back to the former way of doing projects. The change management approach also looks at the environment around the key actors (management, governance, support functions etc.) and not only to the direct project members. We have a specific work stream looking at rewarding project work the same way as “more classically structured” operational organizations.

Author’s note: agile and cross-functional teams lead to unified decision across departments, autonomy, common culture and team spirit: ‘the team leads the team’  and activates collective intelligence.

Editor’s note: ISPIM recently announced Orange as the 2016 Grand Prize winner for Excellence in Innovation Management for Imagine with Orange.

image credits: enregistrer

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

In preparation for the Intrapreneurship – Get Up To Speed event at NUMA Paris, where I will present the Rapid Innovation model in relationship with Intrapreneurship, I had a short chat with Hans Balmaekers, the event organizer, about intrapreneurship.

1) Hans: It seems Intrapreneurship is taking off in France. Why is that?

Nicolas Bry: Large and medium size companies realize that innovation shall not be the monopoly of Silicon Valley startups, and that they have an obligation, and many opportunities, to sparkle innovation from the inside. Examples include corporate fab labs, participative innovation, innovation centers, innovation studios. These tools shall be combined wisely with corporate historical assets: customer base, international footprint, technological know-how, and brand value.

A recent association which I’m part of, The Hacktivateurs, illustrates this vivid and holistic entrepreneurial wave.

To complement innovation from the inside with innovation from the outside, open innovation offers a wide range of possibilities. Orange has activated a good number of these tools: learning expeditions (with the help of Orange Silicon Valley), crowd-innovation / open innovation with users (Imagine with Orange, Lab Orange), cocreation on common platforms (Orange Datavenue, and Orange Partner), corporate accelerators for startups (Orange Fab network), corporate capital venture (Orange Digital venture), …

2) Hans: On stage in Paris you will share your case study. As a taster, can you share what was your biggest challenge since you started?

Nicolas: I belong To Orange Vallée, a small entity within Orange Innovation division, to address untapped innovation opportunities in fast-track mode. One of the biggest challenge is the adoption of innovation. The change that innovation brings has to be perceived as a solution, not a problem. Therefore, I have developed a model called ‘Rapid Innovation’ which builds on 4 principles to help innovation to find its market: autonomy, creative tension, strategic alignment, and modular design. Come to Paris event, and you will discover what ‘Rapid Innovation’ holds in store!

3) Hans: What’s the next step for your intrapreneurial project/program?

One of Orange big asset is its international footprint and culture encompassing over 30 countries in Europe and Africa. In these countries we have very close relationship with our users. Imagine with Orange is our crowd-innovation platform that let users circulate their creative idea across the Internet, and get support from the community and from Orange experts.

It’s also a free-way to let Orange employees express their ideas for digital innovation. With Imagine with Orange, by mixing internal ideas with external feedbacks, and reversely, we get the best of both worlds. After one year and a half, we have reached 7,850 members, from 56 countries, having shared +1350 ideas. Share your ideas, Orange is helping you to give them life!

4) Hans:What’s next for intrapreneurship in France?

Nicolas: Intrapreneurship is not only about collecting ideas, and rewarding best pitches. It’s about transforming ideas into projects, and projects into innovations with a tangible market. I believe that several projects have to be selected and concurrent tools implemented (idea owner coaching, multidisciplinary and collocated innovation team, outcubation, innovation committee / not roadmap committee, …)   to bring ideas to market. Innovation is a game of number: you have to roll-out parallel initiatives to let intrapreneurship thrive.

image credits: les hacktivateurs, poker.co.uk

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Tiago Félix da Silva Lopes is a brilliant and enthusiastic Digital Director at Portugal Telecom. He recently gave a very convincing presentation in Lisbon on the way Portugal Telecom organized for digital transformation: it settled a specific unit dedicated to digital, and even created a digital brand, MEO. Quite different from the traditional Chief Digital Officer approach. I’ve taken a few notes related to his peculiar experience.

Digital is now

Digital is not a trend, digital is how we live: our habits as consumers have changed, digital is a cornerstone in our lives.

We’re always on, and on the move: smartphone is used in a multitasking context, and people don’t leave home without their smartphone.

Digital Transformation implications for Corporations

Organizations need to go mobile as mobile is present at every step.

Digital is a major milestone in customer journey, and impacts strongly customer satisfaction. Faster, cheaper, more choices, that’s the digital customer experience, which all customers are now expecting!

Digital also impacts values, transforming corporate DNA.

Digital is not an option, and digital can not be something done on top of other things.

Digital is not doing old things in new ways: it’s part of your mindset, digital is about to finding entirely new things to do, and new ways to do them.

Tthe digital wave revisit topics such as: updated company vision, improved efficiency, increased customer conversion and loyalty, greater competitive advantage, improved customer journey, thriving culture of innovation, increased internal collaboration, deeper data analysis, and more empowered workforce.

Reorganization through a single digital unit to address the digital challenge

Digital requires organizational and top management focus.

At PT, one single digital unit was set-up to exert focus: it was preferred to an organization where digital is managed in silos. It was considered as a timely solution before digital maturity, where digital is fully integrated in all functional areas.

Digital unit is covering all digital functions: marketing, sales, customer care, with the ability to execute (design & web technology), and thus creating a single digital vision, unifying communication and goals, and developing synergies.

The benefits of a single digital unit are: team spirit and cross-collaboration, increased delivery speed, standardized work methods, expectations alignment, and individual empowerment.

Digital Unit scope and achievements

The main objectives of the digital units are:

• Providing a consistent and simple customer experience, changing marketing and sales, products and services, into digital;
• Promoting the adoption and usage of digital sales and customer care channels, increasing overall efficiency;
• Enabling major business improvements and streamlining of operations by leveraging digital technologies.

Its course of actions and skills include: digital marketing, e-commerce, e-care, design & web technology, reporting & analytics, and transformation projects.

Many achievements stand out:

• Management of digital presence (web site, store, selfcare, forum, app, social) of brands, and set-up of the 100% digital brand MEO for  quadruple play offering.

• Superior mobile experience adopting RESS combining responsive design and speed;
• Digital onboarding, personalization, and improved customer journey with a single sign-on digital passport across the ecosystem, complemented with online help, forum, and social care;
• Omnichannel strategy, buy online, and pick-up offline;
• Integrated media planning and reporting, shifting from banners to social media, video and mobile advertising.

Tips for the road!

Forget waterfall approach, going for agile sprints.

Become thinkers and makers:

• Understanding the “why” behind each initiative, and generating new ideas, consistent with company priorities;
• Small teams including business owners, covering development process from analysis to deployment, and delivering new functionalities every 2 or 3 weeks;
• Analyse, assess, and iterate.

Think digital and customer first.

Digital transformation is about people, it’s about people using technology.

Transformation is our nature. Our life is a permanent beta, never stop starting!

And my personal add-on: Digital transformation is not a project with an ending, it’s a continuous set of renewed initiatives.

image credits: Portugal Telecom, vemaral.it

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a well known acronym for software distribution model in which applications are hosted by a vendor, and made available to customers over the Internet. Can this concept be applied to innovation? As a matter of fact, we see a growing number of initiatives where innovation endeavor is hosted outside the company, in accelerators or tech companies premises, incubating the corporate innovation project, and potentially leading to startups creation out of large company innovation engine. Who said that large companies can’t innovate?

Open Innovation services

Open Innovation coaching has been soaring for some time now. For instance:

• Paris&Co leads the Open Innovation Club, to foster business relationship involving startups, medium-size corporates, and large companies; one fruitful event is the Innovation Datings between startups and large companies: upon a selected topic, 20 startups pitch their concept in front of 30 large companies; Paris&Co coaches concurrently 18 incubation spaces hosting 500 startups in Paris, and some of them are thematic incubators (gaming, tourism, city, sport, e-health, real estate), involving directly large companies in cooperation with startups;

• Numa Paris accelerator proposes 2 services for corporates: Shift, and Explore. While Shift is focused on prototyping a business opportunity, Explore is an open innovation sandbox (3-6 months) for large companies to experiment with a network of entrepreneurs. In partnership with Roland Berger consulting boutique, Numa recently announced 3 additional coaching lines: Lab Digital, Start-up Studio, and Digital Inside. Lab Digital explores innovation initiatives in a ‘test&learn’ approach, Start-up Studio is an excubator generating disruptive start-ups from within corporates, Digital Inside tackles digital transformation of the company.

• Player, founded by Marylène Vicari, is the place to commit for collective innovation in the heart of Paris: it blends up prospectivists, startups, digital artists, sociologists, social entrepreneurs, researchers, facilitators, developers, and… large companies, to get inspired, immersed, tripped up, and generate creative and transformative ideas.

Outcubation services

Aligned with the Start-up Studio previously mentioned, several tech companies or consultancy have opened their doors to host startup projects, outcubated from large companies. Outcubation targets breakthrough innovation projects, hosting top talent outside of the company, in a stimulating environment, which can be in the premises of IBM, Google, or 650 Labs, as shown in the following examples.

• IBM Bluemix Garage is trying to fix innovation engine in large companies, shifting mental models, letting projects move in short cycle, and helping more traditional companies to act as if they were startups. It aims at building engaging applications using IBM Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Agile Devops methodologies.

• In the Garage, you can  prototype apps related to IoT, Data, and Cloud, with IBM Bluemix cloud platform, bringing together capabilities from IBM Watson and MobileFirst, and third party APIS like Twilio.

• IBM Garage footprint footprint is international, and embedded within tech incubators in some of the world’s largest startup communities: San Francisco, London, Toronto, Nice, and Melbourne. IBM settled concurrently a series of studios over the world, cultural centers fo design, and helping companies in digital transformation.

• Stéphanie Fastre handles global innovation & creativity programs, like the Google peer-to-peer, user-centered and prototype driven learning program, Google CSI (Creative Skills for Innovation). Google develops an acceleration lab dedicated to the most important projects of corporates, and Stéphanie will share a few elements about it during our next call in Marc. Stay tuned, I will update this post accordingly!

• 650Labs has a singular value proposition for outcubation that Daniel Tyoschitz explains: ‘Many companies come to Silicon Valley for a week, they take pictures, and nothing happens. Sometimes, they have a technological team, to build product innovation, but hey are very isolated. The optimal way is to come and experience the way of working in the Silicon Valley, and rotate, people bringing back home the new way of working. We analyzed GAFA and successful unicorns, how they make decisions (consensual), their culture, organization, skills, and extracted 25 characteristics. We handle 2 days workshop with very senior executives, and dig in two of these characteristics, re-engineering the process, flipping the variables: innovation entices to work differently.

• The Pop Up Innovation Lab is another offer from 650Labs, tailored for multinationals seeking to dramatically increase their capabilities to innovate, and bring new high-­value products and services to market. The lab is here to work on company most important projects, like a new business unit, with a team coming to Silicon Valley, to accelerate the project and work out something new. Strategy, up-scaling, lean start-up for enterprise, design thinking, big data, storytelling are mobilized. Corporates also meet with startups that can contribute to the acculturation. The Lab is 4 weeks long, takes places 7 times a year, with a team of 4 people: clients will complete seven strategic initiatives on an annualized basis and will have tooled up 28 internal change agents. We are not consultants, we are enablers: we let you do it yourself, it’s outcubation’.

• Yoann Jaffre presents the Open Innovation Lab he has shaped at BNP Paribas Bank. OI Lab has developed 2 acceleration programs ‘as a service’: Innov & Connect and  Fintech Insurtech acceleration programs. The first connects 8 startups from various industries with one of the 12 medium-size sponsoring companies. The second selects 8 startups as well,  and pairs them to BNPParibas business lines. Both programs hosts startups for 6 months in Wai Paris, trains and coaches them (potential pivot), to deliver a collaborative POC within 4 months.

Cross corporations innovation

Outcubation takes a staggering dimension with Cisco Chill, which invites several companies to take part in a ‘Cisco Hyper Innovation Living Labs’.

• Cisco Chill provides disruptive innovation calls for multi-party, multi-disciplinary, hybrid business models solutions. Chill brings together industry leaders to collaborate in innovation – to compress the cycle from months to days to hours! Cisco shares feedback from a retail case: ‘in a 48 hour period, the group created solid prototypes that they forecast could deliver billions of dollars of economic value to retail’. It’s not pure magic! There is work upsteam of the 48 hours: an initial 12 week process culminates in 2 days of ideation, prototyping and ultimately, funding decisions.

• ‘US Chill lab takes place in Building 11 of Cisco’s rambling campus just outside San Jose. It’s a mad scientist’s playhouse, something that Q in James Bond might relish, full of gadgets and drones, telepresence robots, and re-useable materials.’ tells PCMag. Everything is available at your fingertips for creating prototypes with robotics, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D printing, Raspberry, CAD, Wi-Fi, BLE, and RFID, and even a Warp Accelerated Rapid Prototyping (WARP) kit. ‘It looks like a glorious place of experimentation but it’s serious business: the work completed, 4 working prototypes with investment ready business cases, is to be exposed to Cisco’s R&D, innovation engine and funding divisions, and can lead to startups creation’, says Kate O’Keeffe, managing director of Chill.

• At Orange, we are mixing several industries within an Orange IoT & Data Cross Lab: we believe IoT is a perfect playground for cooperation across companies, and that an audience mixing several companies, and crossing different viewpoints, will generate utterly disruptive ideas. Orange Cross Lab is designed with the help of Claro Partners, a consultancy with a focus on IoT, design, and startups. It leverages crowdsourcing web site for creative ideas, Imagine with Orange, to nurture the creative expedition, the Orange Design team to turn ideas into concepts and experience, and the Orange IoT platform, Datavenue and Orange API to support prototyping.

• Through the Cross Lab, Orange offers a framed opportunity to selected partners to share their issues and perspectives on IoT, build a shared vision of their future and create it together, and eventually turn partners into Datavenue customers. Completely adaptable to different partners’ expectations, Cross Lab can be conducted in any country over Orange footprint. Four tangible concepts come out of the one week Lab, each including value proposition, features and underlying technology, business model & ecosystem definition, marketing stories & understanding of competition, and being pitched in front of a C-level jury. Then teams develop pre-selected propositions into prototypes for proof of concept.

What’s the message?

Following all these examples, shall we consider that there is absolutely no chance for innovation to thrive within the walls of the corporation? And is it a pain or a gain? Surely, if every creative initiative had to be outcubated, it would be damageable in the sense that the company would not leverage its assets. This trend clearly shows another face of open innovation and cocreation, demonstrating the unstoppable growth of this way of working.

Nevertheless I don’t think these experiences show the end of internal innovation: while incremental innovation fits within the traditional company business frame, outcubation places are designed for specific, disruptive, and highly transformative projects. This is not the pace for generic innovation, this is about giving birth to a new business unit.

These experiences opens door for intense exploration, wide-eyes open scouting, focus and engagement, taking one step back, considering the big picture, observing usages and unfolding untapped opportunities, thinking collectively in term of ecosystem and platform, fully focusing your time and energy for a few days on the innovation challenge.

Furthermore, they train innovators, that once back home, will propagate the innovation virus, and act as agents of change once back within the company’s walls, sparkling innovation internally.

image credits: Paris&Co, Numa, Player, IBM Bluemix Garage, Google, 650Labs, BNP Paribas Innov&Connect, Cisco Chill, Orange

Nicolas is Chief Innovation Officer at Orange Valley, an agile entity within Orange Innovation where he sets up creative units for new business in the digital industry, and structures incubation of internal and external startups and Open innovation programs. He is an international speaker, coach, innovation teacher and freelance consultant for the European Community. Follow @nicobry

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Rapid innovation, why?

Paul Sloane, innovation consultant and author, recently pointed out a study by Capgemini Consulting, entitled The Innovation Game, charting the rise of corporate innovation centers: actually, 38% of the world’s top 200 companies have set up innovation centers.

One key goal for these innovation units is to accelerate the speed of innovation.

But why do we need to fasten innovation?

• In a globalized market, competitors from the other end of the world are close to you; they may even come from another industry and bring with them their own development cycles, shorter than yours, revisiting your business model in what we call Uberization: you have to react fast.
• Reversely, rapid innovation may offer you the possibility to enter a new business because your speed will give you a competitive advantage over the industry’s incumbents.
• While it’s difficult to secure consumer loyalty, innovation is key to seduce them, and has to be done fast because it quickly becomes obsolete. Speed is also necessary for iteration, since the second version is often the right one! And it helps you focusing on the indisputable features: “The faster, the better” they say at Google, and “Less is more” (Muji design);
• Finally, if development speed increases the qualities of the forecasts that can be made, above all, it strongly impacts the return on investment, much more than the cost of development itself.

Rapid innovation, what?

Capgemini categorize four types of innovation unit:

1. In-house innovation labs;
2. University residence, establishing a collaboration at a university;
3. Community anchor,  providing mentors and support for start-ups;
4. And outpost, a small team located in a technology hub, in many cases in the Silicon Valley.

One might think of some slightly different arrangements, translating the main intent of the innovation initiative :

• Dedicated innovation teams, like skunk works or corporate garages, and Lab to market channels;
• Internal incubation and nursery, and participative innovation at corporate Fab Labs, office of innovation, center for creativity, and innovation idea helpers: these are innovation centers acting as coach and catalyst for innovation; they can punctually set-up idea improvement program, business plan competition, innovation tournaments, or start-up boot-camps;
• Open innovation task-forces (Connect and Develop at P&G), and open innovation platforms;
• Corporate accelerators and incubators for start-ups, and acceleration programs;
• Multi-corporate innovation labs (CHILL, Cisco Hyper Innovation Living Labs);
• Corporate venture for innovation.

Depending of the company maturity for innovation, we see innovation take the clothes of a lonely hero, a guerrilla team to cultural islands, and finally to an integrated RD&I.

No matter the type of innovation centre, if you want to foster speed and agility, the Rapid Innovation model I have designed involves 4 principles:

1. Autonomy: give autonomy to the innovation team. Autonomy is cornerstone for motivation, opens the door for creativity and fast innovation, developing a risk-taking culture in an environment of trust, and letting the team lead the team in a start-up mode, progressing collectively. “Small is beautiful”: small innovation teams hit the nail. By aggregating all necessary skills to design a functional module (feature team), you move much faster. Nevertheless, delegation and empowerment is sometimes the hardest thing to obtain from managers;
2. Creative tension: following-up on creativity, you need to execute, translating concept into elegant realization, and powerful experience; fuzziness does not help the innovation team: company’s leader and innovation center should agree on stretched goals (‘time boxed’ project), and scope the problem to solve, embracing then an iterative approach, based on develop, test and learn short cycles; besides, innovation is a discipline, like marketing, design, and engineering. Open innovation, Disruptive innovation, Agile, Design Thinking, Lean Start-up, Blue Ocean, and Business Model innovation are not only words: they are books to teach you how to run faster and better!
3. Strategic alignment: being different does not mean being separate, innovation center needs alignment with the core, and create the desire to change that will facilitate innovation acceptance, turning innovation to a solution, not a problem; sponsorship, a shared innovation portfolio, and nurturing a network of innovation peers in the business units will contribute to a vivid relationship, and knowledge circulation in closed loop between innovation center and the core co, and prevent you from the NIH syndrome;
4. Modular design: to streamline cooperation, keep options open, and present your innovation in bits and pieces: design modules (APIs in the digital world) that business units can reassemble,   and let them create value on top of your platform. Thus you create an innovation capital that can be reused across multiple projects, and let an ecosystem thrive: when every business is an API, new businesses form instantly by linking.

Rapid innovation, how?

Depending on where you are on the innovation curve, your context, your timing, your innovation framework will vary:

• Are you looking to thrive a global innovation culture where innovation is every employee’s job? Stress on Alignment.
• Would you like to strengthen your current value proposition, plough your land without distraction toward customer’s interest, and unfold consistent business model or user experience? Stress on Creative Tension.
• Or would you like to open the box, and prepare the launchpad for a new business unit, diversification and growth relay? Stress on Autonomy.
• Or your priority is more to anticipate threat from new digital players, and a risk of Uberization? Stress on Autonomy.

A slick exercise is to design your ideal innovation portfolio, and see how it balances between exploratory probes, disruptive innovation, quick wins and incremental innovations. This will give the shape of your innovation center.

Not every innovation will be accepted or reach success: innovation is a game of numbers: keep in mind that the innovation center is here to last, and sustain a continuous flow of creative projects.

A few milestones over a 9 months’ timeline for setting-up an innovation center will take you from creating the framework for your organization, to implementation of methodologies for creativity, and execution, and searching for engagement on your innovation portfolio.

Building your innovation center is a primordial essence of your identity, it’s like your “tao”: the road where it goes and you feel like going, where it’s viable and you think you will harness innovation opportunities. Design, test, and iterate, only you can make this path, and “become the innovator you are”.

image credits: Cap Gemini Consulting, theubercloud.com, shutterstock.com

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Hannes Erler is Director Open Innovation Networks at Swarovski. I was lucky to listen to him twice this year, explaining how Open Innovation is thriving at Swarovski. Below is a short summary of his insightful presentations.

“Over the years, Open Innovation has become the new normal” states Hannes, observing the soaring use of ‘Open Innovation’ words since 2000, through Google Books Ngram Viewer. One has to remember that 90% of IP are not utilized by those who invented it, and thus Open Innovation, by fostering networks crossing over company boundaries, enables a closer link to the outside world.

Inter-organizational collaboration

Yet cooperation in Open Innovation mode is not native as we noticed in a previous post ‘Open Innovation is not easy, but is facilitated in the digital world’. Cooperation principles are powerful but demanding, to achieve ‘Creative cooperation across borders’ requires a specific mindset of trust and networking. Hannes sums it up with a solid sense of humor: “Open Innovation is like a parachute, it works better when it’s open”.

The clearer you are on your intent, the more effective will be the cooperation: “Open Innovation is about engaging partners, and understanding customers, targeting areas where you want to win”.

Once the process is up and running, Open Innovation draws unexpected material combination in Swarovski experience of innovation: from cooperation with Christian Dior on ‘Aurora Borealis’ in 1956, a shimmering finish that enhances the sparkle of cut crystal, to partnership with Jean-Paul Gauthier in 2014, or activity tracker developed with producer Misfit in 2015, a new Shine product, working without battery thanks to the new ‘Energy Harvesting Crystals’ technology which transforms the energy of the daylight into electrical power. “After 2 years, our 46 engaged Open Innovation partners correspond to $B 22 in R&D spending, and Labs in over 33 countries ” nails Hannes.

Internal process learning

In this journey, the toughest part is to get the internal organization to learn how to cooperate. Involving internal stakeholders must be carefully managed. Research, Marketing, Sales / Customer, Technology Development departments can be internal customers, allies, and promoters in the successive stages: co-experiment and prototype, opportunity definition, and first delivery. Leadership is stronger when developing a network of collaborations, rather than building on a central leader.

Design Thinking approach is quite helpful in this perspective, as it triggers the Test, Fail & Learn culture necessary for innovation. Though Daniel Swarovski was an innovation visionary, contemporaneous corporate innovation culture had to make its way, with the emergence of creative talents, “from lonely heroes, guerrilla groups, cultural islands, to a structured innovation entity”.

The way forward

Open Innovation will continue to help exploring and integrating transformative technologies at Swarovski, from enabling technologies, application techniques and jewelry manufacturing, to new materials and material combinations. The output is leading to untapped market opportunities, as well as speed in commercialization.

Making technologies available to others (modular design), and letting them design new business out of collaboration: a relevant example is Crystal In-MoldFoiling, an innovative technology to integrate Swarovski crystals into plastic products produced by customers (e.g. mobile phones, tablets, cameras), thus opening up completely new areas of applications.

“Open Innovation is about letting others create on top of our technology, thus helping us to add sparkle to people’s everyday lives” concludes Hannes.

image credits: Swarovski

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

François Jullien is a brilliant French philosopher, professor at Paris Diderot University, and heading the chair for Alterity: he likes to take one step back, immersing himself in a different culture, and then come back to his initial matter. That’s what he did with China, adopting Chinese point of view before coming back to Europe, identifying gaps, and questioning back European way of thinking, raising the ‘unconsidered’, what is not currently being thought over. He just published a ‘Lexique euro-chinois de la pensée‘, a short opus that will enchant your evenings!

Last March 20th at Transit City Conference, he explained in what ways innovation perception differs largely between China and Europe. To tell the truth, François does not ‘explain’, he ‘tells a story’, and he’s a master storyteller. I will try not to betray his thoughts, and style of words.

First he shared his faith on transformation rather than on cultural identity: François Jullien believes in gap, distance, rather than differences. Differentiation is separation, while a gap keeps both parties in relationship, in tension, which products a better effect. Gaps unveil multiple resources: the modern citizen can discover them along his journey, exploring gaps to produce commun parts, the ‘conceptual commons’, that he can mobilize.

Then he explored the innovation-related gaps between China and Europe.

While European innovation is disruptive, China thinks about continuous flows

Innovation stands nowadays like a life-saving myth. From the days of Galileo and modern astronomy, innovation is a symbol of rupture, of discovery, where something else is unveiled. There is a Before and an After.

China is not about Apcalypse: the world is made of continuous energy flows, a stream that renews everyday.

European innovation brings up a revisted method (Descartes’ Discourse on the Method), or logic (Novum Organum by Francis bacon), inventing a new knowledge. Progress implies criticism of the past, and revolution. European painting is a perpetual revolution. One must fight the pats: ‘Lets’ burn Le Louvre’ said cezanne who was visiting and working there everyday…

Chinese painting is a continuous transition: there no milestones or manifesto, this comes beyond that. There is not rupture in the course of events: one warms the past up to produce newness. It’s about transmission says Confucius, and walking in the tracks of those who came before.

European innovation seems to make a clean slate of the past. It’s more a myth than a reality: after revolution comes restauration.

Another feature is the focus on the perfect model, without necessarily questioning what’s needed to achieve it. Galileo presents a model that explains universe rules with geometraical figures and equations, as if God were using Mathematics to create the world. But things never happen in real life like in the model… With galileo, engineers are replaced by pure mathematicians, we move to an infinite world, governed by universal laws.

Chinese concepts with regards to innovation

1. Silent transformation

Chinese innovations unfold this way: it’s an underground move, no one talks about it, it’s silent.

While Greek thought is based on visual perception, looking head-on and in a glimpse, for Chinese, hearing is primary. It’s global, you can hear wherever it comes from, and it’s continuous, you can close your eyes, not your ears. Chinese thinking is about processus, continuity, no rupture or sudden shift. Sound notification is perceived as the result of a silent transformation: thus, while we get older ‘silently’ day after day, looking at a picture from 20 years agos is a shock!

Make no mistake: continuity does not mean there is no creativity! Reality is made of flow in perpetual mutation.

2. Discrete starter

Chinese are not interested by world’s creation. They believe in a fuzzy nebulous beginning, a starter, something which starts to walk through, testing the possibility of achieving something real. Better initiating quietly silent transformations and taking care of them, than loud innovations!

China is a master in strategic thinking since Sun Tzu. Europe had to wait for Clausewitz for a similar thinker on war. At war, things never happen as planned, the model is overwhelmed by circumstances. Europeans then mobilize theirs will to force reality to compel to the plan, and introduce the heroïc vision. China thinks of war as a couple, a bipolarity, Ying and Yang: we are cooriginated, the opponent is not second.

3. Letting mature

China is a country for seeds, not for breeding. It’s not spectacular, China has no great epic, it’s only about maturation, letting go and help mature.

‘What new potentiality can be unveiled?’ is the constant question.

While inventing is a super active verb, Chinese doesn’t conjugate between passive and active. European are not at ease at ‘letting’, while Chinese develop the art of maturation. It’s not drawing sprouts out of the soil, neither watching them grow: one needs to be hoeing, weeding, turning the ground soft, making the environment suitable, and supporting the processus: it’s not heroic, it’s about walking along so that something possible comes out of it.

Ideas come from far way, and one day they emerge clearly in our mind. Chinese detect weaknesses, and let them mature. Think of the harvest, think of cob and scythe, rather than to the goal. China is starting to harvest, having taken advantage of its situation’ potentials. Chinese detect a potential, and let it mature quietly.

But they know how to use models too. Akin to balancing Chinese and West medicine, one can combine models and transformation.

4. Seizing the moment (kairos)

This is where Greek and Chinese thoughts converge, in ‘kairos’: making every moment an opportunity. While Greeks capture a furtive opportunity, a passing instant, almost nothing, that will further change the world, Chinese think of the seeds that you will bring to maturity, leveraging any possibility to improve the context, a progressive potential that one supports so that it turns to reality.

To sum up, there is a gap between innovation presented as a loud rupture by Europeans, making a clean slate of the past, and silent Chinese transformation, with a quiet starter, and nimble support to let the sprout mature. But nothing prevents us from keeping both in tension,  combining the idea of the model, which can motivate by designing an ambitious vision, a disruptive goal, and the progressive still path that takes advantage of situations’ potential along the way, seizing every opportunity to turn the odds in our favour.

Author notes: with Clayton Christensen and its disruptive innovation (The innovator’s Dilemna in 1997), we have examples of innovators acting in the Chinese way: changing attributes of a value proposition, detecting potential, and slowly putting the former leader out of business.

Similarly, taking advantage of situations’ potential is something we find in Effectuation, an entrepreneurial approach for innovation: seizing opportunities to produce entrepreneurship, taking advantage of surprises instead of avoiding them.

Chinese smartphones have made their way to genuine originality: “OnePlus is the best smartphone in the field, and it’s made in China

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Innovation management in France has two pillars:

• one is Marc Giget, a real well of science in innovation approaches, and a relentless evangelist through his Innovation Tuesdays and Paris Club of Innovation Managers;
• the other one is a fiery duo, Sihem Jouini and Christophe Midler, heading the PIC Master at Polytechnique Engineering and HEC Business School, and publishing regularly on innovation management, encompassing the research work and internship experience of their students in their books.

Their latest opus ‘Innovation management and globalisation‘ draws sharp learnings related to capturing and rolling-out innovation worldwide, balancing roles between central and local organizations. Invited by Thierry Bardy at Orange Lab Innovation Gardens, Sihem and Christophe completed a powerful presentation of the main highlights of their book, going through many corporate case studies:

1 Innovations based on global applications can find their market with local adaptations (at Air Liquide):

• To support the roll-out of a given innovation globally, one needs an innovation’s champion, who litterally embodies the innovation’s outlines: a true evangelist;
• The essence of the first subsidiary in charge of rolling-out the innovation is of major impact.

2 E-health solutions are emerging, involving partnerships with Telcos or Google at Sanofi:

• One difficulty is to scale from pilot to deployement phase;
• By separating the core ‘platform features’ from outskirts (linked to geographical areas and interfaces), modular design facilitates innovation propagation.

3 In the automative industry, more than a product, customer expects an ecosystem: Renault had to bundle an electromobility system with its electrical car, covering electrical batteies, electrical material suppliers, upgraded dealers, and so on, on national scale.

4 How to explore disruptive innovation, and understand emerging markets trends?

• Design Thinking helps to articulate local needs with centrally-based innovation;
• Local exploration entities, with R&D and marketing skills are in place at Valeo, to understand specific needs and capture weak signals, generate creative concepts, and scout jointly with an OEM.

5 How to cooperate across geographical, and cultural boundaries?

• We’ve seen that achieving ‘Creative cooperation across borders’ requires a specific mindset of trust and networking: explicit knowledge is not always on the shelf for sharing!
• Christophe reviews the example of Renault R&D cooperation across French and Corean entities: while a French innovation demonstrator will create desire, a Corean one will stress on the features;
• At Ubisoft, the management of an international network of studios might foster internal rivalries; to turn competition into copetition, strategic innovation labs, and an idea box have been set-up, with a strong emphasis on social features: exposure of idea’s owner, comments, etc… (akin Imagine with Orange crowdinnovation platform!). The idea box collects new products ideas, tools and organization improvements, and explorative concepts. In addition, collective intelligence benefits from differentiated roles: contributors are not the same as activators, the latter sustaining ideas’ flow.

Champion,  Modular Innovation, Ecosystem, Design Thinking, Cooperation acros Borders, all these concepts sound familiar in the digital industry environment where they are named: Evangelist, API, Ecosystem, Design Thinking & Lean-Start-up, Participative, Open, and Crowd-Innovation.

And now, what about applying these precious lessons, and sharing all this terrific material, that Sihem and Christophe keep naturally enriching with the help of their yearly batch of students, on an international, and social digital platform for innovation?

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