Giving Birth
to Innovation:
The Brainchild of
Out-of-the-Box Thinking
Strategic Alliance Magazine — Q4 2017
Cover story by Cynthia B. Hanson
Innovation. The process has radically changed the plight of mankind, altered history, eliminated diseases, created the A-Bomb, built pyramids, increased food production, inspired music, blasted rockets into the sky. Glass, engines, printing presses, robots, machines, musical instruments, appliances, architecture, frameworks, public policy. Ad infinitum. As the brainchild of out-of-the-box thinking, innovation fuels humankind’s progress; catalyzes problem solving (including solving problems caused by progress itself); ideally, creates greater ease, health, safety, and social benefits. Certainly, this is the meta-narrative of the past few centuries.
With the entry of the Internet of Things, multi-industry partnering, and high-tech co-creation, the processes of innovation just got a whole lot more complicated, bigger, and faster. And with increasing complexity, scale, and speed comes the need for alliance managers to bone up on how—with mastery and aplomb—to orchestrate multi-party collaborative innovation, creativity, and problem solving.
A good way to start is to ask the question, “What do we mean by innovation?” says Lorin Coles, CSAP, CEO and managing director of Alliancesphere, a professional services firm specializing in collaborative execution. “When we co-create, we are aligning to each other’s business models and leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of each other’s parts. Co-creation means you are building something that has never been built before from each company and their ecosystem. The intellectual property is comingled and owned by both parties. … What’s different today, however, is that partnering has much more design thinking, pivoting, faster learning—and we need to bring partners together in the same spirit. ‘Build it and they will come’ is a horrible framework now! Things work way too fast today.”
We need to pay attention to the speed, scale, and scope of partnering today, he continues. “A company needs to keep the positive energy [flowing] to drive breakthrough innovation. The reason this is so applicable to the alliances space is it’s one of the most difficult jobs in the world. You are being asked to run an operation as an initiative that cuts across all functions and levels. You have to be that much better as a persuasive leader. A lot of alliance managers are not up to the job,” he adds. “Sometimes I don’t know if people have the stomach, tenacity, and creativity required to do it because it’s hard and selfless work. They are the orchestrator of all this, and they need to have the ability to drive people to the vision.”
A pioneer in the field of collaborative execution, Coles saw a gap and need as far back as 2002 for innovative practices and out-of-the-box problem solving in partnering. Since that time, he has consulted for some of the largest and most influential companies in the world, such as Microsoft, Red Hat, Cisco Systems, and The Coca-Cola Company.
In 2005, Coca-Cola was looking to build their next series of billion-dollar brands and seeking new ideas to grow their business during a time when carbonated beverages were declining in sales. “Consumers were evolving to more health and wellness and becoming more environmentally conscious. Having a stronger connection to the community was becoming stronger than ever,” Coles explains. “It was a huge strain on their business. The challenge was how to innovate within a system that was highly focused on carbonated beverages and high volume to non-carbonated and low-volume with changing consumer preferences.”
After defining the problem and applying several problem-solving tools, he designed eKO Company, (the first four letters are “Coke” backward, and KO is The Coca-Cola Company stock symbol) as a play on words to incorporate progressive concepts such as sustainability, innovation, and transparency. The challenge was to create new beverages in new categories that align with that progressive vision. “We came up with the idea of a 21st Century beverage company that was green from the ground up with a series of beverages that are good for you, the planet, and the community. It has a lean-and-green supply chain that would be continuously making the optimal “build, buy, partner” decisions creating alternative routes to market and new, positive customer and consumer experiences. That led to what Coca-Cola has today, which was coined in 2007 VEB—Venturing and Emerging Brands, a very highly successful business model,” he says. “This allowed them to identify, invest, and incubate into new categories, new brands, new capabilities, and new channels through a ‘separate but seamless’ model.”
VEB’s new model started with strategic investment with a partnering strategy at the front end, and they eventually acquired Honest Tea, which opened up access to the organic channel. Partnering with Coca-Cola gave the entrepreneurial start-up company the fuel to grow, he explains. “That was very pioneering to be able to incubate new products and capabilities within a company structure that financed their venture but left them alone to fulfill their goal regardless of the headwinds or tailwinds of the parent company. … So they created this new group, and they are still doing well to this day.”
Core Power is another example of how VEB is innovating to get into the value-added dairy category to reach new, active consumers. In 2012, Coca-Cola partnered with select milk producers to form Fairlife, LLC, which creates, markets, and sells Core Power.
Sustainability also became important to businesses in the mid-2000s. Today, Coca-Cola is one of the leaders in the world around practices and innovation with water. “It’s all heartfelt and true. They had to figure out how to form partnerships with the World Wildlife Fund and other NGOs and stakeholders,” Coles says.
Uber, AirBnb, artificial intelligence, “all of these next- generation ideas are absolutely going to create business opportunities and a better world. But are businesses agile enough to evolve? The only way to do it is partnering. One company cannot figure it out,” he adds. “If you grew up in the generation of the command-control model and operate that way, it’s very different than the generation leading today. … That’s what’s really changing in business, that is the biggest change in the 21st Century?” The key, he says, is to ask the following questions with the evolving multi-partner ecosystem:
Visual media, such as video “virtual prototypes,” can be very helpful in sparking creative thought, says Michael Moser, global alliances network collaboration manager at Dassault Systèmes in Vélizy-Villacoublay, Paris, France. Dassault Systèmes is a leader in three-dimensional design, visualization, and collaborative solutions that help customers define, simulate, and demonstrate their products in the virtual experience space. Visual media can serve as a powerful communication vehicle “to propagate value within the team and the partnering companies, and also toward customer audiences. It becomes a manifestation of the alliance value proposition—applied to real life challenges,” Moser points out. “With this setting, alliance partners can unleash their full creativity for defining, developing, and marketing this joint solution.”
Moser is also quick to point out the value of old-fashioned conversation for jumpstarting out-of-the-box thinking. Seek out places where you can exchange stories and ideas with others “at high emotional bandwidth that enables creativity and innovation,” he advises. “Nothing can beat a meeting at the bar, or a face-to-face conversation at a physical event. But if we talk about worldwide alliances with dispersed teams, a digital community … can emulate that personal ‘bar talk’ atmosphere in the virtual world.”
Don’t get lost in communication silos, such as individual mailboxes, he warns. Propose a platform-based communication/collaboration hub, and work in digital communities where exchanges are logged and can be found and retrieved by all participants.
Digital communities and communication apps are becoming popular avenues for collaboration and problem solving, agrees Mike Leonetti, CSAP, president and CEO of ASAP. The Slack communication app has skyrocketed in popularity in a short period of time because it’s user-friendly and specific to collaborative group communications. So has another tool called Yammer. “Cisco’s CHILL (Cisco Hyper-Innovation Living Labs) is a tremendous innovation model that tackles large industry problems by co-innovating with a large cross-section of industry participants all at once. The players collaborate to build a new, and often successful, start-up,” he adds.
For all the buzz about software modeling, apps, and other electronically based tools, Jan Twombly, CSAP, president of The Rhythm of Business and a member of the executive management committee at ASAP, recommends a good old-fashioned book from the innovators at Google Ventures: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. Worth noting, the landmark innovation manual also is available in audiobook and has a companion volume, Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products.
In an effort to address the ever-changing business landscape, SAS has taken a more collaborative approach with their partners through the creation of the Managed Analytic Services Provider (MASP) program. “This program affords partners the opportunity to create a truly differentiated solution for the marketplace,” offers Wayne Kennedy, principal business development specialist at SAS.
The key requirement of the program is the partner’s ability to bring significant IP or value-add to the table. “We don’t just say, ‘Here’s our software, do what you want with it.’ We want them to meld our software stack with their IP or value-add to create a truly differentiated solution for their customers,“ he adds.
For Lorin Coles, innovation tools are key to 21st Century out-of-the box business problem solving. Partnering executives should ensure they have thinking, decision, and action tools at their fingertips that explore novel frameworks and models and quickly determine their commercial viability. “There are a lot of things you can use to have people digitally think in the same way, and then do breakthrough innovation,” he notes. These tools “provide us with common language with shared meaning to help clarify the ambiguity and help people think about something quickly,” he adds.
One of our thinking tools is called the Six Cs, where the big C is “Context,” and everything is built on and around it. Another thinking tool is the Value Trinity, which helps companies view the problem from a holistic approach. The company, customer, and collaborator are positioned within a triangle, and their purpose, strengths, and weaknesses are identified. “We try to hone in on the value creation of those three entities,” he explains. “It’s impossible to truly partner if you are not clear about what you want and need. … Everything should be designed and built with the end-consumer in mind. It’s a combination of really looking at the business problem, consumer, and market opportunity, and thinking about maximizing leverage and influence.”
Ultimately, you need to be centering in on one key question with any innovation, he concludes: “What is the art of the possible?”
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