During the 15 years I’ve been at Widen, we’ve always discussed how to be more innovative. Until recently though, we mistook invention for innovation and limited our potential as a result.
Like many software companies in the Midwest, Widen looked to Silicon Valley for ideas on innovation. We allocated 20 percent of our time to work on personal ideas, just like Google. We launched 48 Create, a 48-hour hackathon during which development teams could work on anything they wanted. Neither produced the ‘next big thing’ for Widen. Our teams tended to fix problems from our world, not our customer’s.
Two years ago, we acknowledged our shortcomings and embraced the challenge of rethinking innovation. I’d like to share what it took us many years and failures to learn. I’d also like to illustrate what changes when a brand invents less and innovates more.
Confusion About Innovation
Widen was founded in 1948 and transitioned from engraving to print to software. Historically, we evolved because customers told us about a new problem, and we solved it. However, after evolving from print services to cloud-based DAM, we became insular. Like many web companies, we increasingly explored our market through screens.
Four years ago, we realized that we were out of touch. So, we created both a Product Management and UX team to send into the world, where they could speak with customers and observe live work. These teams began to seed ideas, but something was still lacking.
The blind spot became clear in mid-2017 during a conversation with our new UX manager, Leah Ujda. She said, “Deanna, we have the word ‘innovate’ as one of Widen’s cultural characteristics. But what does it mean here?â€
To me, innovation meant one thing. To our CEO and other VPs, innovation meant something else. Perhaps we created things that were interesting but impractical for our company because no one worked with the same definition of innovation.
Invention Versus Innovation
There was a contradiction in how Widen innovated. On the one hand, we spent most of our time on immediate, small-return projects. On the other hand, we implicitly believed that *real* innovation meant introducing something new to the entire world. With our hackathon, for instance, we expected to invent something transformational in 48 hours, which was unrealistic.
Leah encouraged me to read Ten Types of Innovation, written by Larry Keeley and three colleagues from Doblin, the Deloitte-owned innovation consultancy he co-founded. They helped me diagnose our problem.
Keeley argues that invention is not innovation. Invention means creating new products or processes that do not already exist. “Innovation is the creation of a viable new offering,†he writes. It’s a process that could include invention but need not.
Consider the Apple iPod. Mp3 and AMP, the technologies that made the iPod possible, were invented between 1989 and 1998, the year the Korean company Saehan introduced the first portable mp3 player. The next player, Diamond Rio, one-upped Saehan by adding a digital music service. Napster made mp3s mainstream and desirable but created a legal mess.
Apple simply bundled these technologies better than anyone else. The iPod, the 50th mp3 player to hit the market, launched in 2001. It had a superior user interface, larger screen, more storage, and an edgy aesthetic that soon defined Apple. It also had more storage and came with iTunes, the software package that made it legal and easy to buy mp3 music. The iPod wasn’t an invention, but it was an innovation.
Three Innovation Horizons
From Keeley’s book, I learned that Widen was stuck because we conflated invention with innovation. A year later, 25 colleagues and I did a workshop with ExO Works, an innovation accelerator, and discovered the cost of misaligning on innovation.
ExO Works carves innovation into three Horizons. H1 is about maintaining and defending your core business in the next year. H2 is about nurturing emerging businesses over two to three years. H3 is about creating genuinely new businesses over five or more years. Keeley used roughly the same structure and time horizons with different names: Core, Adjacent, and Transformational.
The further a brand moves from H1, the higher the risk, but the greater the potential returns. Whereas competitors can imitate what you did in H1 quickly, they’ll struggle to copy H2 and might not have a shot at H3.
Widen had a deficit of H2 innovation. To solve that problem, we didn’t need to change the world. We needed to change someone’s world — our customer’s world. We needed to apply existing technologies to marketing problems that we and our customers understood better than anyone else.
80 percent of our time was going into H1, and the other 20 percent was going nowhere in H3. We needed an innovation game plan for H2, so we created one (and no, I’m not giving it away to our competitors).
What Changed In Innovation
Back in the late 90s, Widen’s Chief Architect, Uriah Carpenter, was sitting with our contact from Edge Advertising, the in-house agency of Le Mans Corporation, the well-known power sports company. Edge was having a hard time managing all the merchandise images that go into a motorcycle parts catalog. Uriah started sketching up ideas on a napkin. What he sketched became a new product that has served Edge for more than 20 years.
Today, we’re back to napkins. We’ve returned to our roots of talking to customers, sketching ideas, and running inexpensive experiments that can validate H2 innovation.
When we interview clients, we don’t ask for opinions anymore. “Would you†and “Do you think†questions inevitably lead to ideas in H1 and cast doubts on H2. Rather we go for the facts. “Tell about a time when…†and “When is the last time…†draws out memories and events. Similarly, asking people if they’d buy solution X or Y is misleading. Instead, we focus on the problem. “What is the most important…†produces answers that keep us sketching in innovation mode.
Whereas invention requires a bit of arrogance and rebelliousness, innovation requires humility and reverence. It embraces existing technologies and applies them to new purposes. Companies that endure do invent things, but they spend much more time innovating.
I no longer worry about what Widen can invent in 48 hours. We have an innovation intent that is woven into how we work every day. It serves our company and its customers extremely well. What more does a martech brand need?