A Simple Map for Innovation at Scale

Case study profile

This 100+-year-old company has seven major product divisions, each with hundreds of products.

Questions to ask:

• How do they embrace new technologies?
• How do they convert existing manufacturing plants (and their workforce) for a completely new set of technologies?
• How do they bring on new supply chains?
• How do they become present on new social media and communications channels?
• How do they connect with a new generation of customers who had no brand loyalty?

Wrong assumptions

I understood some requirements were known and immutable. However, when all of the requirements are handed to the action teams this way the assumption is that the problems have been validated, and the teams do not need to do any further exploration of the problem space themselves.

The different parties involved

Deeply understand the problems – who are the customers, internal stakeholders and beneficiaries

The correct approach

when team members get out of their buildings and comfort zones, and directly talk to, observe, and interact with the customers, stakeholders and beneficiaries, it allows them to be agile, and the solutions they deliver will be needed, timely, relevant and take less time and resources to develop. It’s the difference between admiring a problem and solving one.

Terrain walk

A terrain walk often discovers that the problem is actually a symptom of another problem or that the sources see it as a different version of the problem.