Corporate Innovation Management: Board Level Commitment Necessary

As I noted in my recent article SaaS Companies: You Have an Unprecedented Opportunity, there is an amazing level of potential for corporate innovation in the current environment, both internal and external.

Look Within

Any company that has built a substantial business in any software category has core competency within its folds. It has highly capable engineers who have developed some degree of domain knowledge in their sphere. It has product managers who are in touch with customers. It has sales engineers who are in regular and even closer touch with customers. It has sales people who know the customers and the competition well.

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You also mentioned that even just in LA there are hundreds, if not thousands, of boutique agencies nowadays that are competing for the same dollars and are becoming much more open to experimenting and spreading the dollars across those different smaller agencies. How do you keep track? What’s your process of keeping an eye on who’s doing what and what’s interesting?

John Deschner: The awards shows used to be the best place. You went to Cannes and you saw the best in advertising and marketing in the world. If somebody made a dent there, you should probably keep an eye on him. That’s a less reliable way now >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Coming back to the micro, I want to probe two topics. One is your internal innovation strategy. The other is your external innovation strategy. Let’s start with internal strategy. I’ll explain to you what I’m looking to understand based on what you said so far. There’s all this stuff going on.

There are different platforms and ad units. Even within the platform, there are different types of ways you can engage with the audience. There is a tremendous opportunity for creativity and innovation using technology and designing interactive programs within your technology constrains. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to double-click down on both of those sectors individually. The first question that comes to my mind is the fragmentation of media attention question. While there is fragmentation, there are also a couple of channels that are hogging attention from a platform point of view.

Facebook continues to be a very big attention hogger globally. You have a much better organized list of who’s hogging whose attention than I do. How do you see this playing out? There is a lot of clamor right now about addictive behaviors. >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 1)

This interview focuses on the Corporate Innovation strategy of a major advertising agency as it navigates the challenges of a rapidly changing consumer engagement landscape.

Sramana Mitra: As an introduction, tell us a bit about your focus, philosophy, or overall thinking at TBWA/Chiat/Day these days vis-a-vis innovation.

John Deschner: I have an interesting role that was purposely designed to be both an innovation role and a more central traditional role in the agency. I’m both the Chief Innovation Officer and Managing Director. For most large creative agencies, >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of areas of interest for these kinds of seed investments, what degree of relevance do you need with SAP’s current technology? Does it need to be built on HANA? Does it need to be built on something else within the SAP stack? What are the constraints?

Max Wessel: There are no constraints from an underlying technology perspective. Obviously, we would love for everybody in the world to build on HANA and on SAP cloud platform, but we also understand that there are plenty of viable open source components and cloud infrastructure providers that startups want to work with. Instead of requiring that technical definition >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Our model is actually complete customer immersion. It’s a one-year program. Each person who gets to be part of the program has one year including side-by-side methodology training, customer immersion, customer validation, and TAM analysis. It’s not in vacuum at all. I’m sure your program is effective. I’m just comparing notes. That’s the whole point of these discussions – to understand the different processes that are working.

Let’s switch gears and talk about your external innovation methodology. When SAP launched HANA we 

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the team comes forward, is it required to present a business case analysis or a hackathon style development first?

Max Wessel: They tend to do a very light back-of-the-envelope business case – nothing substantive. We teach people to think by analogy. If you’re building a tool to get into the recruitment services market or start to automate what recruiters would otherwise do for a large organization, the question is, “What’s the scope of the businesses that have been launched like that before?”

You don’t have to develop an in-depth business plan but you have to have some conviction. We hope that you have some >>>