Innovation Sprint
Between April and July 2018, I was part of a global innovation program at a leading pharmaceutical company. The program was designed by Strategyzer with the objective to help the company develop and manage its innovation portfolio.
A series of innovation sprints were run in parallel to take a cohort of “intrapreneurs” from a new business idea to a tested business model in 10 weeks. Greg Bernarda and I were assigned 5 teams located in South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. After 2 weeks of online training for the teams, Greg and I facilitated a 2-day ideation and business model design workshop in Seoul. Then we coached the teams remotely through 8 weeks of intense testing of their idea. Finally, their innovation sprint concluded with a 1-day results workshop in Singapore where we helped teams make sense of the results of their testing, assess their overall progress towards de-risking their business idea and get ready to pitch for additional funding.
From the leadership perspective, the objective was to develop the innovation portfolio with more transformative innovation, and learn how to make the right decisions on the innovation portfolio. Leaders wanted to maximise chances to invest on the right projects. Innovation sprint outcomes enabled leaders to easily identify projects where the idea had a good enough potential, and where teams showed strong progress after 10 weeks. Lastly, this program helped the leadership team make difficult “kill” decisions after only a limited financial and time investment. Indeed, after 10 weeks they could already identify many projects where the idea - even though promising at the start – couldn’t translate into real potential, or where the team couldn’t bring evidence to the table and progress at the expected pace.
Out of those 5 teams, only one secured funding for the next stage of their entrepreneurial journey. It is always tough for teams that worked hard for 10 weeks not to get access to further funding. But this ratio of 20% makes sense from an overall portfolio management perspective. Killing 80% of the early-stage projects in your portfolio is in contrast to portfolio management practices that we (Strategyzer) still observe in many large organisations where executives tend to focus on a few big bets. But finding a new growth engine is a volume game, so we advise our clients to invest in a large volume of ideas at the beginning, kill quickly those with limited potential, and only release further metered funding on the most promising ideas, based on evidence not fantasies.
You will find below some of my favourite pictures from this project.
