For the majority of my career, I have been doing consulting work for Fortune 500 companies, advising them on how to be more innovative. I based my whole livelihood on the fact that I knew how to add value by coming up with interesting new ideas and showing companies how to make those ideas a reality. Unfortunately, I soon realized that in order to be truly great at innovation consulting, I would have to stop innovation consulting.
My years as a consultant were exciting and rewarding. I would spend weeks at a time working closely with clients, aiming to understand their situation, coming up with solutions that would solve for current pain points the business was suffering, and identifying potential opportunities on the horizon. Once we had a set of ideas with enough buy-in by the client, we would go about creating prototypes of the ideas so that the clients could understand how they and, more importantly, their customers would experience it. I loved doing this work. I was exercising the analytical and creative parts of my brain to come up with innovative solutions for companies, and every time I was excited for all that would come next. Unfortunately, what most often happened next was nothing: the project would come to a crushing halt. And this is where I find fault with innovation consulting.
The problem wasn’t unique to our company. It was something that past colleagues and industry friends were experiencing at other innovation agencies and consultancies, as well. The problem was the reality of what it takes to create these “innovations,” and of everything that can happen between coming up with an idea and building it out. Internal politics, project budgets running out, annual budgets allocated, the time it takes to actually build the idea—these are just some of the roadblocks a project can face, and they are the roadblocks that made me start to think long and hard about my career as an innovation consultant.
What I realized is that I had caught the entrepreneurial bug and was desperate not only to build ideas into real innovations but to turn them into sustainable businesses. To best satisfy this need, I co-founded the Co:venture division of the business, where I would get the chance to work with other people’s ventures and help shape their future offerings and brands. I spent the year advising founders, watching companies begin to enact my recommendations, and seeing success from them. No more bureaucratic and political nonsense—just getting done what needed to be done. The problem with this entrepreneurial drug is that I wanted more. I wanted to get down in the weeds with the founders on all the day-to-day issues that consume startups. I wanted to feel real (and financial) ownership of the businesses I was helping craft. About a year after working with Co:ventures, I would get my chance.
Along with investing in external startups, Co:ventures was incubating it’s own ideas, and there was one such idea bouncing around Co:collective that I believed should deserved special attention. The idea came about when we were brainstorming ways to make clients innovate more and better. Then someone asked, “Why don’t companies have a Kickstarter to fund their employees ideas?” That simple question would be the beginning of a six-month process of auditing current solutions, refining details around the concept, and creating the business plan. With all of this settled, I went and tried to secure investment from the leadership of Co:collective in order to build the Doable platform. I was excited. I thought I had done all the work necessary for them to give me the money I needed the fund what was obviously a good idea. I went in to the leadership meeting, pitched the idea, and was meet with doubt, a lack of enthusiasm, and, ultimately, a rejection.
I was deflated for a couple of days before I went back to the drawing board to address all the questions and fears that the leadership team had raised. What followed was a series of meetings with similar outcomes to the first. I continued to answer the questions posed by leadership, but I couldn’t seem to sway them or move them to invest. It wasn’t until the fifth meeting that my CEO, Ty Montague, pulled me aside and asked me to team up with a senior designer, Sheena Livingston, to “bring the experience to life.” Sheena, a few interim strategists, writers, and designers, and I worked tirelessly for the next few weeks to create a paper prototype of the experience to show the leadership team. The presentation we delivered was part strategy deck, part theater, and part beautifully designed concept. We took leadership through the experience as if it were real, acting out the different scenarios and demonstrating how users would interact with the product. By the end of it we had the leadership team on their feet, pointing to screens with approval, adding features to enhance the experience, and, most importantly, finally agreeing to fund the development of the Doable platform. It’s worth noting that we got the investment by getting the investors excited about what the product could be. Ty was right. What won them over wasn’t flashy decks, potential revenue numbers, or peer validation, but creative thinking, designed pieces of paper, some magnets on a whiteboard, and our own enthusiasm.
With our budget approved, we set off to begin building the product that can be viewed at doable.com. The ride from idea to innovation app was both trying and thrilling. Most importantly, I realized that I had successfully adopted my own venture and was now a co-founder of a software and, at last, entrepreneur!
With that realization and milestone out of the way, let me breeze over the last couple of months. At a high level, we found a great development company that worked collaboratively with us for months to get a version of the app that we could dog-food at co:collective. Shortly after the deliverable of the MVP, our development partner was acquired and we had to build our own development team and transition the code in-house. This was a time-consuming affair, transitioning capabilities and getting the platform to a state at which it was stable enough to launch with our clients. It wasn’t until holiday season of 2015 that we pulled off our biggest deployment, with A+E Networks, giving access to over 1,600 employees. Over the next months we would sign more clients, work closely with them on building a culture of innovation, and see their success first hand. We are still a young startup, with a lot more to learn and do, but we have grown to over 200 businesses in under a year have started to realize our true value in the world.
During the last 16 months, I have learned more about innovation and what it takes to do it day-in and day-out than I learned in my five years as an innovation consultant. I believe that the main reason for this is because innovation consultancies only go as far as ideation—they can’t carry the ideas all the way through to implementation. The very best innovation consultants create “looks likes/works like” prototype with a business case of how the idea will play out in the future. Unfortunately, most innovation consultants only produce PowerPoint presentations with a 2D mockup of an idea and some vague details about how it could work.
This is not enough to get a company to be truly innovative, and it doesn’t give consultants the chops to call themselves innovation consultants. Important learning and real innovative thinking come when the idea is produced so that customers can really use it. It is through the building and refining of the idea that true innovation is achieved. I often tell people that anyone can have a good idea, a smaller group of people can actually build those ideas, and an even smaller group of people can build and evolve an idea into something that delivers value to customers and shareholders. For me, the journey from innovation consultant to innovation entrepreneur has pushed me into that final, elite community who have the skills and experience to consult companies on new ventures and innovations.
Some things that I know now that I wish I knew when I began my journey.
- POWER PITCHING: when selling in a new venture you need a prototype. Something that will make them understand what it will be like for the user/customer
- INFLUENCER TARGETING: figure out who the key decision makers in achieving your goals and spend all your efforts winning them over. The rest will follow.
- MVP ONBOARDING: when creating an MVP make sure that their is an easy and intuitive way for users to signup and begin playing with the product. It will make for faster product refinement and evidence of market traction for the venture.
- TIRELESS TESTING: make sure you measure and test as much as you can. From new interfaces and features to overall value proposition and marketing. You need tangible evidence to direct the future of your product – plus investors will love it.
- GROWTH BUILDING: Build with growth in mind. How can you modify the product to allow users to share your product and advocate on your behalf
- TEAM INVESTING: it is extremely important that the team behind the venture are invested (financially and emotionally) as there will be a lot of work that needs to be done and if they aren't, nothing will ever get done at the pace it needs to be.
I'm going to continue to document my journey and the things that I learn from growing a startup to consulting enterprise clients on how to best implement innovation programs within their organization. For anyone who reads these posts, I would love to hear your feedback and personal experiences about the topics being discussed. Feel free to reach out to me at jonathanrobertchia@gmail.com