Situation
The Japan Country Manager of a health sciences company wanted to drive more innovation in the organisation, in particular the IT and marketing functions. Sales and customer service teams were heavily reliant on manual and inefficient processes, which were constraining growth as well as the overall customer experience. Project teams focused on problem-solving rather than implementing new ideas. Collaboration between the marketing and IT teams was also low.
The Leadership team had tried to address this by investing in a new “experimentation room”, giving the IT department a list of new project ideas to implement, and shifting to an open-office environment in an effort to drive cross-department collaboration. However, they found no significant changes in the behaviour of the key parties.
Intervention
Working with the Country Manager, we held sessions with the Leadership team to define and agree on how they wanted to leverage innovation to support their strategies to drive increased growth and operational efficiency. We then introduced a lightweight repeatable innovation process. We taught the leadership team and key management and delivery teams how to use it to rapidly generate, assess and ultimately launch new ideas.
The process incorporated innovation practices such as experimentation, short iterations to test and validate assumptions, and cross-functional delivery teams. The focus was on helping participants understand the reasons behind each part of the process rather than mere compliance.
We trialled the process with a single project first, enabling us to refine the process before launching it more widely and developing grass-roots advocates and enthusiasm for the process.
Outcome
The organisation used the innovation process to develop a new digital marketing tool that enabled its sales force to interact with doctors faster and more efficiently. This has generated incremental revenue from both new and existing customers, as well as increased overall customer satisfaction.
Cross-department collaboration on projects has significantly increased, as has the speed and throughput of project ideation.
