Dave Mankowski, Chief Growth Officer, Bounteous.
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As enterprises drive rapid growth in the digital economy, it’s important to remember how talent sourced externally can catalyze a team for innovation and how a shift in thinking can unbox existing strengths.
To inspire bold decisions, let’s reflect on these two innovation strategies and success stories that set the example for us.
1. External talent can inspire your team’s thoughtful style.
The Ford vs. Ferrari competition in the 1960s popularized the kind of innovations we prize in team growth. The film, based on the heroic true story, “chronicles the company’s outrageous pursuit of designing, building, and racing a car that could beat Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the most prestigious and brutal race in the world.”
This rivalry is a proven example that teams can iterate and inspire as risky innovations are demonstrated rapidly and regularly. Ford vs. Ferrari may not be about digital transformation, but it is a story about brand, continuous innovation and collaborative innovation. Ford couldn’t buy a new brand and couldn’t transform its brand on its own—they had to partner and collaborate with drivers Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles. The maniacal commitment of the Ford-Shelby-Miles team created continuous innovation to transform and win with the GT40.
Sourcing external talent shouldn’t seize the existing innovation energy of your internal teams but rather catalyze and inspire generative cooperation playful enough to result in new creations. When leadership empowers partnerships that uplift and mesh with existing talent, your company can create products and services bearing the particular curated style your customers recognize as unique and worth their ongoing attention. Trusted partnerships like these can enable the iterative risk-taking that resulted in the winning innovations at Ford.
Instead of race-track testing, perhaps a hackathon or some other team-building, demonstrative exercise can create the team energy to create a time-shattering machine. More importantly, your people need to witness the innovations happening so that visceral excitement remains ignited.
Iteration is consonant with continuous innovation. Rapid testing and a team’s capacity to stage (for itself) proof-of-concept are required to share the small but necessary steps enabling change.
2. A realignment can unbox existing strengths.
With stocks outperforming Facebook, Amazon, Google and a host of other successful tech companies, Domino’s is a prime example of a company consistently innovating and enabling revenue increases. (Disclosure: Domino’s is a client of my company, Bounteous.) As a matter of fact, Domino’s stock would have earned you more than Google’s if you invested in their IPOs.
Domino’s proves that innovation doesn’t require a new business model but a renewed imagination of what’s possible. The company creates and delivers pizzas, so how could it co-innovate with meal creation and delivery?
The disruptive shift of their “Pizza Tracker” came about as a result of thinking about how to do things better rather than doing better things. Domino’s used the insights from the tracker to spark a continuous series of ordering enhancements, including more than 15 different ways to order a pizza.
Now, more than 70% of Domino’s orders are processed digitally. Over time, the digital ordering experience has become synonymous with the Domino’s brand itself. (Remember what I noted above? Only your carefully curated team can create something new yet stamped with the style recognizable by customers as your own.)
A pizza tracker is something of a dopamine generator for existing customers, rendering both the ordering and delivery processes even more satisfying for the human brain than they already were prior to its invention. Our brains experience pleasure when anticipating good outcomes—when we “taste” in advance through anticipatory imagination prior to actually having experiences. The unboxing of pizza in the mind literally speaks to human reward pathways.
As Pavlovian as all this is, a closer look at existing data about ordering behavior brought about the unexpected delight of innovating for growth. A strategy of this kind is a less evident route to digital transformation. Rather than being overtly new, the innovations are realignments aimed at unlocking an organization’s existing strengths and a category’s latent potential.
Business growth strategies are often impeded by common mistakes, but if we avoid them and look rather to those strategies with measurable results in digital transformation, our teams will continue to grow ahead of the pace of change.
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