How to foster a culture of innovation at scale
BetBright CEO Marcus Brennan provides his top tips for how companies with greater scale can still create a pipeline of innovative products
Firstly, a word on the importance of this topic. Innovation has moved from being a luxury to a necessity. Business models and products no longer stay still and they have shorter and shorter shelf lives. Furthermore, this is an accelerating situation and potentially it will be going exponential and, as AI and machine learning, create an explosive change in our world.
Therefore, no firm, team or CEO can rely any longer on having a business model or product suite which will endure – you either innovate in a serious and systematic way or you will become part of the historical record.
The first major point I will make about innovation is that it must be from the top down and be truly believed in. You cannot be a non-innovative firm with a rigid CEO and management team and decide to embrace innovation in a token fashion by creating some low-level think tank or process to do it.
What it takes to innovate
How do you do this? The truth is it is much easier in a start-up because you generally begin with a visionary entrepreneur who is likely a buyer when it comes to innovation. They then persuade people who get the vision and who are also innovative to join them on that journey. Thus you end up with an innovative and, hopefully, disruptive vision, and a CEO and a team who have the power to change and adapt the model and the product suite as they go.
In an established firm which has not been innovative it’s a much, much bigger challenge and I would suggest you need to start with the CEO and the management team. If they are not innovative and the firm needs to be, then they must be replaced I’m afraid. It’s as simple as that. Every other form of initiative is likely to be a token piece of lip service.
I also want to say that you have to be resourced and be bold. If you control your product or service you need to resource change, such as developer teams, and you need to be bold and put it out there in front of customers and be prepared to have failures.
That can’t be a one-off – it needs to be systematic. At BetBright we have a long-term roadmap for product development and innovation. Indeed, 70% of our staff resources work on that and we have a quarterly process where we reimagine and re-challenge that roadmap and our priorities in a systematic cyclical and organised way. That’s your formula folks.
Now, some look-in-the-mirror questions for owners, CEO, senior management and all staff to ask yourselves:
• Is the firm innovative or rigid?
• Is the CEO innovative or rigid?
• Is the management team innovative or rigid?
• And for everyone, am I innovative or rigid? Always be thinking about re-educating and reskilling
Take a step back
Finally, if you are a CEO you must greatly reduce your operational role if you are drowning in it. Everybody else should be doing that but with a polar north and a systematic rhythm.
The whole organisation relies on you to take time out to think more, to step back, to examine the landscape, to use the products, to read, to network and to be on top of the trends and to keep the polar north fresh. If you are not doing that you are failing everyone. Bill Gates took a week a year out where he sat in a log cabin with hundreds of trade magazines and he read them all. Are you doing your job as a CEO when it comes to innovation?
Marcus Brennan is an ecommerce entrepreneur and founder of multiple businesses in the telecommunications, gaming, social and entertainment sectors. In June 2012, he founded BetBright and took on the role of CEO, a position he maintains today.