Topic: Marketing
Some final thoughts on the CMA Digital Marketing Conference. Yes, it wrapped up almost two weeks ago now, and yes there were as usual at this kind of event a few weak brag-and-boast sales pitches (come on down Facebook and Heavy), but some of the sessions are still reverberating in my mind.
The clear buzz generator of the conference had to be the keynote, titled “Innovation in action,” from RBC‘s Dr. Anita Sands. I didn’t speak to anyone who was not excited by it. I suspect the reason is her refreshing real-world view of and advice on how to drive innovation in environments that are not Google or Cirque du Soliel-i.e. where most of us mortals have to get by day to day.
Dr. Sands knows of what she speaks. As “Vice-President, Head of Innovation & Process Design, Global Technology and Operations” –now there’s a mouthful- at the country’s biggest bank, her mandate is “to ensure that innovation is core to everything at the organization – from new product development to the introduction of new technologies and business processes.” Easier said than done in an organization with 70,000 employees operating in the highly conservative, highly bureaucratic and highly regulated financial services industry.
Dr. Sands is not a marketer. She is, as she matter-of-factly put it, “a rocket scientist.” (No kidding: Her bio says she earned a Ph.D. in Atomic and Molecular Physics from Queen's University of Belfast; and she’s got a host of other science, math and management and public policy credentials too). Frankly at times, her talk made my brain hurt. But it was definitely stimulating and challenging… and in the end pushed a very simple message.
Essentially it was this: the most useful innovations are most often the small and incremental ones. Innovation and invention are often confused. Marginal improvements that add real value to an organization, and ultimately its customers, are more realistic to implement and can mean more to the bottom-line than more ambitious (and costly and risky) totally new and transformational innovations. (OneDegree has posted a short video interview with Dr. Sands taken right after her talk that sums this up nicely.)
One simple example of this “power of small improvements” world-view in action: Heinz‘s move a couple of years ago to turn its catsup bottles upside down. It made the product more useful to the customer and pumped sales volumes up with just a small change to the package that cost next to nothing to implement.
In the case of RBC, Sands says, the bank is trying to drive its “client/customer first” positioning through every aspect of the organization. So when it comes to any innovation, it is looked at through the prism of “how does it add value for the customer.”
For someone who professes not to be a marketer, Sands does speak the language. Communications, customer empowerment, transparency are all among the tools to developing an innovation culture she says.
The biggest key to getting an innovation culture rolling, especially in large organizations, is building cross-functional communications. Sands notes RBC is trying things like wikkis, peer-to-peer intranets, internal blogging and videocasting to get staff in different silos communicating and cross-pollinating ideas. It’s a big job. Sands admits that RBC is still only taking baby steps on most of those fronts. But that fits with the “do-learn-do” model of continuous incremental improvements on the fringes she champions.
Sands argued that getting lots of new ideas isn’t –or shouldn’t be- the challenge. It’s actually implementing them and then measuring their impact that is really hard. RBC has set up an “Innovation Lab” under her direction where every major innovation idea, whether proposed internally or externally, is tested and explored on two fronts: will it work, not just anywhere, but within the RBC environment and; can a real business case be made for implementing. In that sense, she defines the essence of her role, and innovation itself, as the “art and science to connecting what’s possible to what’s valuable to the customer.”
The ultimate benefit of an innovation driven culture, argues Sands, may well be in attracting and retaining talent. A bank, for instance, needs to be able to “execute flawlessly” and you need good people to be able to do that. A culture that empowers and encourages its people to be innovative in all they do is definitely going to have an edge over a closed command and control culture.
Innovation does not happen by accident, Sands said at one point. It is hard slogging. But really I think her evangelical enthusiasm for the almost Sisyphean challenge of instilling innovation into the DNA of a company like RBC was what was most engaging and inspiring about her talk.
