We all want the latest phones with the latest features, but with so much at stake in this highly competitive marketplace, how exactly does a smart phone company approach innovation?
A fascinating blog for Bloomberg.com reveals how Samsung set up a European innovation team based in London, 5500 miles from the company’s HQ in Seoul. Entrusted with the task of creating new products for European customers, the team also needed to persuade senior management back in South Korea to invest in the new ideas.
In just three years, the team had exceeded expectations and delivered an estimated $0.5billion in profit, and team leader Luke Mansfield gave five tips as to their success.
1. Grace periods and wiggle room
Mansfield was careful to lay down pre-conditions so that management’s expectations were not unrealistic. This included a three-year grace period before results were expected, and a brief that allowed the team a degree of autonomy. In such a demanding marketplace, this was both a bold request and a big ask, but the profits made prove that when managing innovation, good things come to those who wait.
2. Positioning, not pushing
The team understood that in order to create disruptive innovations, they first needed to build up trust in their ideas. By suggesting low-risk projects to senior managers first. This approach led to establishing a great relationship with one such senior manager who was promoted and became an ally in getting more disruptive ideas passed. Interestingly, this was made very clear to new recruits to the team:
“We explicitly tell them that their job is not to push for disruptive ideas at Samsung. Rather, it is to position themselves to create disruptive innovation. ”
3. Positioning the portfolio
This idea of combining low risk and disruptive innovations extended into what the team presented to management. According to team member Jerome Wouters, if the team were to present five ideas, they would be made up as follows:
- 2 x low risk and incremental
- 2 x more ambitious
- 1 x high risk, high reward concept, with elements achievable in the short term
As Wouters explains:
“That way, our stakeholders can select how much risk they are willing to take for their business given their current circumstances, instead of making it a go/no-go decision on specific ideas.”
4. Is the test right for the innovation?
Evaluating a new idea may involve using established methodologies which are nor suitable for the idea presented. The innovation team discovered that the “specific quantitative survey methodology” Samsung used was more suited to incremental improvements rather than disruptive innovations. So, the team devised their own evaluation methodology to run alongside the existing one. This change of assessment process has parallels for every business, allowing a freedom to access evaluation methods not previously employed.
Crowd-sourcing feedback on ideas may be a new concept for many managers, but it lies at the heart of the best innovation management systems, such as TalkFreely. This tip shows it can extend beyond idea selection, and be used in the evaluation of the idea once it has been developed further. This is perhaps the most exciting of the tips so far, in that it allows innovators the freedom to assess innovation through various channels, not just strict metrics and measurements.
5. What the boss doesn’t know…
This is the most surprising tip of all; sometimes you need to ignore company rules and fly on regardless. The team built an app that allowed users to easily transfer data from an older model Galaxy phone to the new models. Having developed the app, they were then informed that a team in Korea were working on a similar app, and told to scrap theirs. However, the Korean app was not ready for release, and the new phones were about to be launched. So the team launched their app anyway, and a million downloads proved that, as the blog’s author Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg says; “A bit of judiciously applied corporate disobedience can be the right way to go.”
As innovation managers in businesses that can only dream of Samsung’s R&D budget, it’s both heartening and inspiring to discover the fundamental techniques that drive innovation – and that these techniques include bending the rules occasionally…
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