A 10-point checklist for running a challenge campaign

You can solve a tough challenge by working alone in your garage or attic for years like how Prof. Andrew Wiles worked on Fermat’s Last Theorem for several years. Alternately, you can throw the challenge to a group of people and solve it collectively. The group can be a couple of friends or a large organization. The challenge could be an urgent challenge like the iPhone multitouch keypad accuracy problem to be solved in a matter of days. Or it could be an automation challenge Tanishq, the jewellery division of Titan, launched in 2008 which might have run for a few months resulting in inventing the diamond-bagging machine over the next few years.

I have been participating in the design of challenge campaigns in the organizations for over a decade and consider them to be a key element of innovation initiatives. Some of these challenges were more urgent like the iPhone multitouch challenge while others were closer to Titan’s automation challenge. Over the years I ended up preparing a checklist that I use when I participate in a challenge campaign design. Not all items in the checklist are useful in all challenges. Nevertheless, it helps to go over them to check if they are relevant in that context.

1.       Identify a challenge sponsor: It is important that a challenge campaign begins with a sponsor. In case of iPhone multitouch, the head of engineering was the sponsor while in Tanishq perhaps the business head of the Tanishq division was the sponsor. 

2.       Identify a challenge theme: The challenge theme may come from the sponsor. Alternately, he may invite challenges from his peers/team members. The theme can be loose like “simplify and automate” or it can be sharper like “get keyboard accuracy to 90%”. I remember themes like “half the time” for reducing the delivery time to half, “single-click cloud migration”. These days Zomato’s “10 minutes delivery” is in the news. The most important characteristic of a theme should be its business relevance. A good metaphor helps make the challenge concrete, enhance its emotional appeal and provide hooks for imagination.

3.       Prepare a project plan: Is the challenge expected to run for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months? Whom should we invite? Will there be one round, two rounds, or more? Will there be help in terms of resources for prototyping? Will there be mentoring for idea authors for clarifying their ideas and preparing a business case? Will we have a panel for the final round? How will promising ideas go forward? It helps to discuss these questions and possible options with the sponsor and create a project plan.

4.       Know Your Challenge (KYC) workshop: For a “simplify and automate” challenge you don’t need a workshop to explain it. However, for challenges related to emerging technologies or business challenges that are complex or nuanced, it helps to have a workshop where the sponsor and perhaps a few experts articulate what the challenge means to them. They may provide starting points for those interested in studying the topics further. These could be department heads such as sales, marketing, finance, R&D giving their perspective on a challenge area.

5.       Announce the challenge and invite ideas: This is the step where challenge is announced and ideas are invited. This could be done in multiple ways. If it is a small team, like in iPhone multitouch challenge, you could announce it in a team meeting. If you want to invite experts or members from outside your team or business, you may want to announce it to your team first so that they get some lead time to submit their ideas before others. If you feel subject matter experts (SMEs) from within the team can come in a week or two later that’s fine too. In the case of iPhone multitouch challenge, this step merged with step 7 of prototyping. Team members didn’t come out with ideas and waited for a go-ahead for prototyping. Ideas were demonstrated through prototypes. In most challenge campaigns I have witnessed, idea generation and prototyping were separate stages.

6.       Helping idea authors to clarify their ideas: When people get ideas, they are raw and many times unclear. If you ask clarifying questions it helps them to expand on their ideas. Sometimes people are not sure if their ideas are worthy of submission. Encouraging them helps. When one is playing this sounding-board role, it is important not to be judgmental at this point even if you feel the idea may not work. This is easier said than done and needs alertness. For a large campaign, volunteers may be needed to play this role of sounding board or catalyst.

7.       Idea selection:  If ideas are posted on a wall in your office, idea selection could mean just doing tick marks. Depending upon the number of ideas, idea selection may go through two or three rounds. For example, ideas posted on a portal may go through a social selection process similar to likes on a social media site. One could also invite a panel to select ideas. 

8.       Prototyping/experimentation:  Authors of the selected ideas are invited to build low-fidelity prototypes. This is a tricky stage because idea authors may not get time to do this work. One way to overcome this issue is by organizing an event such as a hackathon where the idea authors work individually or by bringing collaborators to build prototypes. Prototypes may also include storyboards, wireframes, paper models, CAD models, 3D printed models, scrap material demos, etc. This stage may require organizers to make relevant tools available to the idea authors. I typically get pushback from manufacturing companies saying that this is not practical. However, in most cases, this can be done with some preparation.

9.       Selection and preparation for final presentation: After prototyping, there could be another round of selection for final presentations to the sponsor and his panel. In the final presentation, the panel typically looks at return-on-investment potential for ideas. However, idea authors may not have the skills to make a business case. Hence, the idea authors may need mentoring. The campaign organizers may have to facilitate this process of identifying right mentors for finalists.

10.   Presentation to the sponsor/panel: This is the final stage. The most important aspect of this stage is the nature of sponsorship for the selected ideas. If you give gift coupons and end the show that sends a poor message. As mentioned in step-2, if the challenge is business relevant, then the sponsorship should reflect that. In the case of iPhone challenge, Ken Kocienda became the feature owner for the multitouch autocorrect function and began developing it further full-time. In the case of Titan’s diamond bagging machine, I am sure there was a dedicated cross-functional team that worked on it as a formal project. Note that the sponsorship doesn’t have to be for the complete implementation. Like a typical venture fund, it could be for a specific milestone of validating certain assumptions be it need, technical feasibility, performance, etc.

Hope you find the checklist useful. Happy to hear your input.

Sources:

Image: “Creative selection: Inside Apple’s design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs,” by Ken Kocienda page 147.

Titan’s diamond bagging machine story is also described in “The 9 nuggets of innovation” by L R Natarajan, page 16.

A peek into Bezos’ big bet review: Alexa example

Innovation review has been an important element in my consulting work for the past decade and a half. And I have seen that it becomes trickier when it comes to reviewing big bets. In “Amazon unbound: Jeff Bezos and the invention of a global empire”, Brad Stone gives us a peek into how Jeff Bezos reviews his big bets like Alexa, Go, Fire Phone, AWS, India, and more. I found it very interesting. Here is an example of how such a review went for Alexa.

On January 4, 2011, Bezos sent an email to a few select executives including his technical advisor or TA, Greg Hart, “We should build a $20 device with its brains in the cloud that’s completely controlled by your voice.” By then Hart and Bezos would have perhaps discussed the advent of speech recognition multiple times including once in late 2010 when Hart demonstrated Google’s voice search on Android to Bezos. Soon after the email, Hart was assigned the secret project to build such a device and he moved out from his TA role.

By early 2013 the product codenamed Doppler was in beta testing mostly from a few hundred Amazon employees. The data was noisy and it wasn’t enough. The device didn’t look promising yet. Bezos kept asking, “How will we even know when the product is good?” Rohit Prasad was leading the effort in building a far-field speech recognition engine, a core part of Doppler. Prasad and Hart prepared a graph showing how Alexa would improve as data collection progressed. For each successive 3 percent increase in accuracy, they needed to double the data.

In one of the reviews with Bezos, Hart, Prasad, and team proposed to double the speech science team and postpone the launch from summer to fall. Bezos commented, “You are going about this the wrong way. First, tell me what would be a magical product, then tell me how to get there.” Then the question came whether the team had enough data. Prasad answered that they need thousands of more hours of complex, far-field voice commands.

Bezos factored in the team’s request for additional speech scientists and calculated how long the revised team would need to get the requisite data. He asked, “Let me get this straight. You are telling me that for your big request to make this product successful, instead of it taking forty years, it will only take us twenty years?” His math was correct and the team didn’t have a plan. Bezos ended the meeting abruptly say, “You guys aren’t serious about making this product.”

This review resulted in a serious introspect in the team and they came up with a plan of outsourcing the data collection. The new program called AMPED ended up renting neighborhoods first in Boston and later expanding it to 10 cities and recruiting contract workers. The rented homes and apartments were sprinkled with Alexa devices disguised as pedestal microphones, Xbox gaming consoles, TVs, and tablets. The contract workers worked eight hours a day, six days a week, reading scripts from iPad with canned lines and open-ended requests.

By 2014, the Alexa team had increased its store of speech data by a factor of ten thousand. When all this was presented to Bezos in the review, he said, “Now I know you are serious about it! What are we going to do next?”

Bezos’ comment, “First tell me what would be a magical product, then tell me how to get there” would get repeated in different forms. For example, in the review of another of his big bet, India business, Bezos would ask Amit Agarwal, Head of Amazon India, “Tell me how to win. Then tell me how much it costs.” It reminded me of George Day’s innovation portfolio management framework, “Real-win-worth it” (HBR Dec 2007).

image source: amazon.in

3 flavours of innovation strategy

For a business, does it matter what the innovation efforts are led by? I feel it does. For example, is it led by technology creation? Or is customer experience primary and technology an enabler? Or is the primary focus continuous improvement? I feel there is no right or wrong answer. However, having clarity on this aspect makes a difference in the design and execution of innovation strategy. Here are 3 flavours of innovation strategy depending upon what it is led by. This view may be a bit simplistic but I feel it gives a good starting point in establishing clarity on the design of innovation strategy.

Customer experience-led: Amazon spends a lot of money on R&D – both in absolute terms and as a percentage of its sales. In 2020, in SEC filing it reported an expenditure of $42 billion (11% of sales) which includes both technology and content (such as films and web series). Amazon also filed 2244 patents in 2020. However, innovation strategy at Amazon seems to be customer experience-led. Every concept proposal starts with a 2-pager “press-release” describing how the product/service would be useful to the customer. Even the CTO, Werner Vogels says his main job is customer pain management. Even a futuristic fully automated grocery store such as Amazon Go had to go through several iterations of the “press-release”. For Echo/Alexa Amazon did significant idea testing with potential customers to determine which features to be included and also launch worthiness. After having launched the product in the market, Amazon updates product roadmap based on customer feedback.

A. G. Lafley led P&G’s innovation strategy during 2000-2010 was also customer experience-led. As Lefley wrote in “The game-changer”, it meant strengthening the design capability, launching programs such as Living-it and working-it for teams to spend time with potential customers to gather insights, creating structures such as Clay Street and innovation gyms to prototype ideas quickly and get customer feedback. Technology development continued to be an important element of the innovation strategy. However, customer experience was clearly the driving force.

Like Amazon and P&G, if your innovation strategy is customer experience-led, then you need to design structures, processes and capabilities that put customer experience at the centre of the innovation process. It might mean design thinking needs to be a crucial competency in the organization.

Technology-led: When Google invests in moonshots like self-driving cars or quantum computing, its innovation strategy is being led by technology development. It shows up in the accounts, the R&D expenses for Google (Alphabet) in 2020 were $27B, 15% of revenue. Technology at the cutting edge is risky, highly competitive, and needs a talent pool that is not easy to retain. When will quantum computing start generating revenue? and when it does will it be significant? Nobody knows. Hence, only companies with deep pockets like Google, technology-focused start-ups, government funded research labs like National Chemical Laboratories (NCL) take up this route.

Many technology-led start-ups like DeepMind eventually get acquired. Companies like Bose Corporation who manage to do technology-led innovation on their own typically remain privately held in order to avoid quarterly performance pressure. To be a technology-led innovator, you need to build a war chest to fight legal battles. This means building a legal team in addition to building intellectual property.  In fact, Bose has been described by the audio industry as a “litigious company”.

Continuous improvement led: I remember one of my early consulting engagements with an R&D organization more than a decade ago. The then Head of R&D said, “We don’t have an insight right now to take a big bet. However, for the next couple of years, we would like to democratize continuous improvement.” And we did and we created a process of logging, selecting, encouraging, helping employees implement ideas. Idea catalysts from various teams met every month to share their experience and learn from each other. We circulated an innovation dashboard every month. And it helped build creative confidence in the organization. After a couple of years, the Head of R&D was ready to build an innovation sandbox around the challenge of cloud migration. 

The point is continuous improvement can be a strategic direction for innovation efforts at least for a while. Creative confidence across all levels of the organization can be a huge advantage. A look at Toyota’s “40 years, 20 million ideas” gives us some idea. Katsuaki Watanabe, the then President of Toyota has said in an interview in Harvard Business Review, “There is no genius in our company. We just do whatever we believe is right, trying every day to improve every little bit and piece. But when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution.”

In a large organization, different businesses may be pursuing different innovation strategies. It is possible that in one business unit innovation is technology-led while in another business unit it is customer experience-led and in yet another unit it is continuous improvement led.  

What is the flavour of your innovation strategy?

Source: 

For Amazon's Echo/Alexa development, check out Chapter 1 of "Amazon unbound" by Brad Stone.