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Innovation doesn't just happen.
Large companies are pursuing success with innovation teams and labs, while many others seem to take an ad hoc approach. So what are the strategies and processes for innovation that business leaders should apply? How can treating innovation like sales lead to better business outcomes?
Join host and Cofruition founder Sam Floy in conversation with innovation expert, CEO of Curvestone, Dawid Kotur.
If you've listened to the episode and would like to find out more Dawid and his work, visit curvestone.io or connect with Dawid on LinkedIn.
If you are keen to learn more about innovation, Dawid's recommended resource is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
Sam Floy
If you're anything like me, you've probably been thinking about how to ensure your company is innovative. There's clearly more to innovation than just coming up with ideas on a whiteboard. Some huge companies have innovation labs and dedicated teams. Others seemingly take an ad hoc approach or don't have anything formal in place at all. What are the best strategies, or rather processes for innovation that all business leaders should know about? This is Better Business Radar, a practical and, dare we say, inspiring podcast about smart ways to grow better businesses. I'm Sam Floy, a B2B entrepreneur and founder of Cofruition, the company behind this podcast, bringing you weekly insights from interesting thinkers, doers leaders and experts. Today's guest, Dawid Kotur is CEO of Curvestone. Dawid's company supports clients to innovate and build ideas that produce successful business outcomes by following a process and philosophy that they fine tuned since they started.
Sam Floy
Dawid has long worked innovation, leading accelerators at GKN and PwC, as well as the development of Metro Bank's first mobile banking service. To start the conversation, I asked Dawid how he defines innovation and how innovation differs from other concepts such as research and development.
Dawid Kotur
Well, it probably depends what words you're comparing to. So, for example, I think there is a big difference between innovation and research, and it also really depends how the company understands it. For us, innovation is essentially iteration of an idea to test and find out if this is something that can save cost or produce extra revenue or improve a customer service. When it comes to research, you're probably looking at something that is quite hard to understand, quite hard to build, and you're researching if it is even possible. Research is a pre product step and we won't always have to do research. So, for example, we will go and do research in Chat GPT product that recently was recently released. We do lots of research on use cases and we're researching how the APIs are working, what the risk implications, et cetera. That's research. If you're innovating, you're saying, this is the use case that I think I will chat GPT to solve for me, and then we're trying to solve that to build the product.
Dawid Kotur
Whether it works or not, the evidence will show, but it's a different mindset, it's a different goal from the start.
Sam Floy
Yeah, lots of companies say you want to innovate. What is a common misconception perhaps people have when they think, oh, now we're going to start innovating?
Dawid Kotur
Yeah, there's a very good question. I think probably the most common misconception is that innovation is some a mystical process that only the creatives can do and they have to be in core offices and wear trainers and T shirts. I'm probably pushing that but I think a lot of people think that it's not for them. We personally have seen some of the most innovative ideas coming from people who do not think of themselves as people who can innovate. I think the people who are the best innovators are people who are actually trying to solve the actual problem of their work. Now that's one type of innovation. That's innovation through kind of an employee led or Doers led. You've got other types of innovations of, I don't know, Elon Musk who is trying to build a rocket to go to Mars. Most companies don't have to do that.
Dawid Kotur
Most companies have a lot of really good innovative ideas at the doorstep. They just need to know where to look.
Sam Floy
It's not always obvious that people want to share these ideas or they might almost feel like they don't have permission, let's say, to share ideas. How do you find that process of collecting ideas? I imagine there's some prioritization or how does it go from telling employees or what to do is you have permission to come up with solutions or do you just say come up with problems? How does that typically work?
Dawid Kotur
It's really interesting that you use the word permission. It's something that comes across in our line of work quite a lot. The kind of a lack of permission culture is something that really holds people back. I think that one of the most important thing is that the culture need to be set by the leadership. If the leadership are seen to be saying, we really need to innovate, and they not just stopping there because then people are confused, they don't know what this means, then this craze, this oh, I don't have a permission to do that because I'm not an innovator, I'm not a creative. I'm just doing my job. I should just say what I am. If the leaders are saying we need to innovate and here is a process of how to do that and here is a guide how you think about an idea, how you get an idea submitted through our process.
Dawid Kotur
If you get stuck, this is who you can talk to or this is what you can read. Also, by the way, let's say in professional services firms, which we're well up with here, is for example, a code that you can put this under when you are reporting on your time on in non professional services firms where people say you can spend up to two or 3 hours a week or month thinking about this stuff. Or there is a workshop that you can come to where you can for half a day play with things and speak to people that have done it before. If there is a person that has worked on some a new product and new service and they have succeeded and they are just a normal person that is working in their job and did this on the side, something that's part of some an innovation program, then you want to shout about that because you then showing that people like you getting these things done.
Dawid Kotur
That kind of gives people more confidence because if they can relate to that's, great. Now, if you're the kind of a company where you only shut about things that this CEO, the CTO, or this partner, or this director has managed to do this, then all of a sudden, it's really hard to relate. Because these people are way more senior. And in a lot of companies. Seniority hierarchy plays a huge role. They will be less confident to come up with things. I think marketing already successful things and then if you don't have any successful things, then what you probably want to do is to have very senior people coming in to departments, talking about it and encouraging people to do it and saying, hey, there is a workshop. No, you don't have to be an innovator. You don't have to be this type of a person.
Dawid Kotur
We really want to have you there.
Sam Floy
For this employee who feels like I'm not creative, I'm not someone who can innovate for them. Do they need to be told innovation is simply seeing ways that your job could be done better and they need to be told that counts as innovation in our setting.
Dawid Kotur
Yeah, it really depends on the strategy of the company. There is lots of companies who want to care about small automations because not what the strategy for the year is or for the five years. Innovation is a scary word and is a very big word and people have a lot of different understandings of it. Being able as a leader to sit down with your people and say this is what we want and if it's small automation, that's great. I've seen people improving and innovating their work by introducing very simple scripts onto Excel that would save them hours and hours work a week. I also saw people innovating by describing a problem and all of a sudden they realized this is a problem that lots of other people have in the company.
Sam Floy
I'm taken by this point you said about the strategy. I can imagine if the company strategy is we need to find new revenue lines, then that becomes the guiding force. The leaders talk to their ways and say look, it's important for us to be able to find new revenue streams. Can anyone come up with any ideas around how to do that? I can imagine that's another way to get people thinking 100%.
Dawid Kotur
I've seen people, this is especially more junior people who would hear that the idea of innovation in the company is to produce new revenue, new products, new propositions. A lot of companies like doing that, especially during times like COVID where comments changes and your old services might be not working anymore or not as much as they did before. I've seen a lot of more junior people who would be pushing for some automations, small automations so they can buy themselves some time to then work on this exciting new products or new services because a lot of junior people would be swamped by work. I've seen a lot of people actually pushing for the automations to be if I can automate part of my job I then get to play with some of the other products. That is actually quite exciting.
Sam Floy
Okay that's all the ways that the ideas basically get collected and let's say for a visualization purpose they've all landed in this spreadsheet which is a big messy document of all the ideas in the business that we think could lead to innovation. If I'm right that this is typically where you and your team step in and you basically say we've got this list of ideas now we're going to make it a reality. Is that right?
Dawid Kotur
Yeah that's pretty much at a very high level. That's pretty much how it works. Let's say you're a company that sits on a bunch of ideas. The tendency there is to go and pick up one or two best ones and go with them and really pull money into it or I've seen the opposite. These are ideas that our employees put on our customers. Sometimes they come from customers put on a list. We should really be investigating them all. It really depends how many ideas you have. If you only got two and that's great. Not so great that you only have two but then that strategy may work for you if you don't have any more. Typically people have way more than that. For your fuzzy 100 company they would be sitting on somewhere between 200 to 1000 ideas in different spreadsheets, different platforms and different documents on a consistent basis.
Dawid Kotur
They will be from a very small innovation idea to big transformative let's build the rocket go to space type of things. The most important thing is to set yourself up for winning and go for an exercise of some prioritization. When we say prioritization we would obviously take into account things like what is your company strategy so what kind of technologies that you want to be getting into? All of these kind of things go in there. The complexity from our experience and the experience of the client. The technologies that you're allowed to use in the company. In the tech world we call it the stack but essentially speaking it's what kind of coding languages and tools are you allowed to use? One of the biggest problems that big companies have when they're innovating is there are lots of things that are possible to innovate with they're just not allowed to use it for all kinds of reasons because maybe they're using Microsoft and Google tools are not allowed.
Dawid Kotur
Or maybe putting a new tool into a company costs so much money in terms of procurement and due diligence that it doesn't make sense for that particular thing. You have to be aware of that. And there are security and risk considerations. You take all of those considerations into account and you try to make a rough cut. Prioritization we're not talking about months of work, talking about days of work here. Once you do that, you don't want to think about, okay, let's say you had 500 ideas and you prioritized maybe 150 that look promising, then what you want to do is to start we call them spikes, spiking them. Doing very short investigations, we're talking two to three days, two to five days to get more context around those ideas. Really rather than look for the winners, what you look for is to look for the definite losers.
Dawid Kotur
Which out of this 150 we should really not be touching. Okay. Because yes, prioritization wise they sound good, but really we want to be killing some of those. So that'll be the very first step.
Sam Floy
Wait, if you've got 150 ideas and each spike takes two to three days, does that mean it's taking that process taking like 300 plus days?
Dawid Kotur
We've got something called the prespike, which is like a few hours per idea, but you do that in places where something doesn't smell so good, or if the client tells what, I know that this kind of looks good, but I have a feeling it's just not going to fly because of X. Let's jump on a couple of hour call with the person that submitted the idea and then let's try to figure that out. There is another exercise that doesn't talk about, which is lumping things together. You have 150 ideas, or even if you have 50 ideas or even 30, guarantee you that there will be overlaps. There will be either overlaps from their output, from the customers perspective or the technology perspective. Solving different problems, but with a similar type of tech. If you build it once, then you can just adjust it a few times here and there and then reuse it for solving different problems.
Dawid Kotur
We would lump a lot of those up and then try to investigate them together. That's one way how you deal with it. Another way how you deal with it is that depending how you do this, you don't have to do this with a company like us. You can do it yourself, but if you're doing it with someone like us, we've got teams of people. You won't take you 300 day plus because you can run multiple spikes. Also if you want to go through 150 ideas, by the way, you wouldn't typically spike all 150 at the same time. You'll probably do it in lumps where you do like 15 and then see where you're sitting on. I'll get to that point in a second, but it's more 150 ideas. It's like a two year plan. It's not something that you can be done with in three months.
Sam Floy
Okay, so it's a gradual refinement of taking this big long list, say grouping them together, see where there's an overlap, beginning to investigate them. Let's say you're just doing this for the first time with a new client. Roughly how many spikes will you do? Obviously continue on the strategy, et cetera. But just roughly, what do you find? A good number to be able to do some experiments and investigations.
Dawid Kotur
I'm probably not going to talk about the number of spikes because that's really relative to the customers. It's slightly unfair for people listening thinking, oh, I don't have 150 ideas total. It doesn't matter whether you have ten or 150. I think what you definitely don't want to do is to try to do short investigations for all of them straight away, because that's just going to take ages, and by the time you finish that, some of the things may have moved on and so you want to take a really good chunk that would yield some results. I'll probably normally say is that if you're in a really high numbers, like 150, you probably want to be doing in the chunks of 15 to 25. If you're the kind of a company, either a smaller company or 50 people startup, and you only have ten ideas, you probably want to tackle three at the same time.
Dawid Kotur
So why am I saying that? I'm saying that because eventually where you want to get to is you have done short investigations on a number of ideas and you're now sitting on well investigated portfolio of ideas because the idea here is not to go with the best one you'll find in the moment. The idea here is to do bunch and choose the best one out of the bunch. It's a consistently kind of evolving process, if that makes sense. Let's say you investigated 15 and then you decided that this one or two are really investigate worth investigated further, and you go to try to analyze and maybe architect some things and maybe even build some now. Then you spike another 15. You've got the 15 that you spiked before, and then you spiked another 15 later, and then you assess that again. The idea here is that you're consistently sitting on a bunch of things that are investigated and the investigations will get deeper and deeper, and at each point of the investigation, you want to have few to choose from.
Dawid Kotur
I think there was a head of innovation at Google who said that the best innovations come from the fact that you don't necessarily go for the one idea. What he asks his employees is which idea died for this one here to survive? So what was the second best? Because if the second best wasn't good, enough if he wasn't like, oh, wow, the second best was really amazing, but you went even for something better, that means that you just didn't have enough candidates in the pipeline to choose something good.
Sam Floy
It's the case of at least at this early stage, you just need to have a certain number or a certain volume of ideas to be investigating with, rather than betting it all on something that seems like a good idea but might actually not be.
Dawid Kotur
That's right. Without going to the exactly the opposite of we're going to try to investigate everything to choose the best thing. I've never seen that work because people either run out of money or run out of innovation mode where they lose the steam. What you get is a bit of an innovation hangover where people are bored of the process because nothing is going beyond a certain stage.
Sam Floy
Better Business Radar is a podcast made by us, the team at Cofruition. We offer an all in one solution for high value service companies looking for a simple and effective way to grow. A lot of businesses don't need Facebook ads or drip funnel campaigns. They need to have a systematic way to demonstrate full leadership, expand their network and have the consistent, high quality content to stay on people's radar. This is what we offer with our fully managed company podcast. If you're interested in hiring us for your business, then head to Cofruition.com/bbr where you can learn more and get 10% off the setup of your show. The link is also in the episode description. Now back to the episode. Yeah. There's this constant to and fro of trying to get some positive feedback loops. I imagine in terms of the people who have submitted their idea on a spreadsheet, it's pretty motivating to know this is now something which we're progressing to this next stage.
Dawid Kotur
You want to be the innovation aging for your energy, like whatever you want to call it internally, is that you want to be doing a bunch of those investigations. Remember, a lot of those investigations will be unsuccessful. Killing ideas is more important or as important as progressing ideas further. There will be a lot of people who submitted an idea and they were told that your idea is not going forward. Now there is a way to deal with that in a healthy way, which we're going to talk about later. You want to show that this process works and then some ideas do go further stage to keep the excitement. The people who maybe submitted one and didn't quite work, maybe they retain the idea or submit something else and that's how you get the consistent flow of your ideas and your idea pipeline.
Sam Floy
Let's say that a few ideas have gone through the spike phase. You've had 15, you've now got two or three that you think have got potential. What happens then in terms of validating it that extra step further.
Dawid Kotur
So they should be taking two actions. The first action they should be thinking is let's take these three or four ideas forward and I'll get into that in a second. The second as important is what is the next batch of things. We're going to spike to bring another four by the time we finish with those. Because that's really important, because if you don't have that consistent flow, then you'll find yourself that you would then wait another six to eight months to get enough pipe to work on something it's important to mention because a lot of companies don't do that and then they are surprised that they have nothing to work on. As a result, then maybe choose some ideas that this is all about. When I was talking earlier on about this innovation, energy mode or whatever you want to call it, is that generally companies run out of it in the same way a human can run out of energy.
Dawid Kotur
Organizations also do. You need to consistently feel that and then you feel that by having a healthy pipeline. Going back to your question, so what happens when you've got three or four or whatever other number depending on what size of a pipeline you have in the first place? You went through some a discovery or spiking process where you have very clear next steps. Those clear next steps should be all around assumptions that you need to prove or disprove. What you'd normally do is to go for we think that this idea will fly unless and what you type in there unless is probably a bunch of your assumptions that you take what we called to analyze phase. The next phase for us is the analyze phase. We take those assumptions whether they business risk, security, politics, it could be budgetary or technical problems. We'll take them to analyzed phase, which is much longer.
Dawid Kotur
You're talking of weeks of work here other than days of work. You go on track to dispute these things because those most likely obstacles will be the things that kill the idea further down the line. You want to find out in the fastest possible ways it's cheaper.
Sam Floy
Okay, for the purposes of example, let's imagine it's a company thinking about they want to start using Chat GPT. What might be some of the assumptions that they want to validate?
Dawid Kotur
Yeah. Okay, so let's say you are a professional services firm. Let's say you're a lawyer or a doctor and you want to start using Chat GPT to help you start writing some referral letters or some summaries of judgments or something like that. The very first thing that kind of company should be thinking about is security. Because there is a lot of data that the Chat GPT doesn't necessarily store in a way that a lot of big companies would like. It's not impossible to come across that, but something needs to go in. There another thing you would want to be thinking about, whether the data that you have works. So you probably maybe want to build a very small proof of concept where you take some of those documentations and in a very safe way without sharing the data with OpenAI, which is the company that owns Chat GPT.
Dawid Kotur
See if it would work with maybe ten or 15 examples before you start going into further stages. That'd be more like a technical or data assumption proving in this brewery.
Sam Floy
That something that companies typically do in house? Will they say, okay, we've now want to create this little pilot version of Chat GPT to read these documents and come up with a summary. Would they then go and speak to their tech team to do it? How does that typically work when you're work with your clients?
Dawid Kotur
It really depends who you're working with. If you're working with someone like Google, then when you engage with Google, you probably engage as a specialist and you would only help them with things that they really don't know how to do. With most companies, they don't have this kind of type of people in house. We have a lot of data engineers, AI engineers, all kinds of technical people and technical consultants that deal with those kind of things. And they have different specialities companies. Big companies tend to outsource the moment it gets outside of general things that the It departments can do, and that usually happens pretty quickly. However, there are companies that do have quite sophisticated innovation houses and the way we work with them is by, hey, we're specialists in this Chat GPT for example, and we're going to come and help you with this specific thing.
Dawid Kotur
So it really depends. I would say that most companies work with some a consultant or agency or something like that simply because they can't follow all of the latest trends in technology. I'll give you another example to bring it to life . One of the very typical things, we will do quite a few AI things, quite a few AI ideas or ideas that will in some way use AI to our speciality Is. Often when you get to the analyze phase, it's very clear that the business case is great. If you can make it happen, then yes, it will be useful. The customers will use it even though you haven't validated it, all the evidence scream that you'll be, especially if you're already a big company and you've got a bunch of customers and you're already solving a problem that maybe you're doing in a different way, but you solve it with AI, so it makes a lot of sense.
Dawid Kotur
So then the problem is the AI. One of the ways to deal with that is to build a very simple proof of algorithm. So I'll tell you the straight. Any AI work, it's expensive for two reasons because it takes a long time and the people who do it are very expensive and there is not enough of them on the market. Every time you try to do work in AI, it will be more expensive than any other part of the tech or modest, maybe a part of web three. What you want to do is as cheaply as possible to find out. First of all, even if you need AI to do this. During analyze we'll probably do something like that. We will look into AI could solve this problem. But does it have to? Can it be solved by already an existing product on the market or existing algorithm on the market?
Dawid Kotur
We call this build versus buy. Can we go and buy something that solves the problem here or solves majority of the problem and then maybe only build a bit on top? During the analyst phase we'll do that. We actually call it build by enhance. You build it custom or you go and buy it, or you've got some tools already, or you could buy some tools that you could get enhanced to get it more cheaply or faster.
Sam Floy
This stage is basically it sounds sexy to say we've got this custom AI solution, but really if you're focused on we're trying to solve a business need, you can often get away without needing to invest all that in AI.
Dawid Kotur
Our whole mantra is that we really get excited to work with very complex technical problems and we get to do that on a regular basis, which is refund. We're really lucky like that. When we solve customer problems, the whole idea is to solve it in the simplest, fastest possible way. Because remember, we're not only building one thing for our customers, we're usually sitting on a bunch of ideas. The faster we get to the second one, the better our customer feels about our services. The whole idea here is to do it in the most simplest way. It's not just in the simplest way from a perspective of solving it today, it's also the simplest way of maintaining it in the future and making sure that in two years you don't have to rebuild something or it's somehow obsolete. Because maybe that type of technology that you have used for this, let's say Microsoft or Google will stop forging it has happened before.
Sam Floy
Okay, so we go through this analyzed phase and I assume you're saying at this point it begins to become apparent that there's going to be value or not. It then basically a case of rolling out this solution throughout the relevant departments of the business? Or is there another validation step that needs to happen or that you find it useful to have?
Dawid Kotur
It really depends. We've got another. Stage called architect stage. Once you went through all the major assumptions, you probably have a few small assumptions left, but then it's up to you what type of risk you want to take. We would normally advise customers to go forward with things that have slightly smaller risks. Yes, sometimes it doesn't pay off, but also keep digging until you find out. Absolutely everything takes time and money, so it's sometimes cheaper and faster to put some of the smaller things on the side. You then go into architect phase. An architect phase is usually very technical phase where we are designing the system for the future. We're making sure that whether we end up building this or someone else ends up building this, they know exactly what they're building. They have requirements, they have technical considerations, they have data considerations, security risk, stack, all of the kind of stuff.
Dawid Kotur
It's basically designing the system that then someone can take and just build it.
Sam Floy
So it's relatively straightforward to build a sandbox environment where the lawyer can test out Chat GPT on documentation summary but if you're actually going to build this properly, you need to have this whole specification on how it needs to be done 100%.
Dawid Kotur
I just want to clarify because maybe not everyone who's listening to this is technical. Sandbox environment, it's the kind of environment which you can quickly play with something technical without too many risk. We do a lot of those because we work with a lot of regulated clients. We can't just drop things in their systems and test and play with them, essentially. We build a lot of this kind of sandbox environments that are very similar to what they've got, so we can see all of the issues that would potentially come up, but they are in a very kind of a closed system that won't cause any issues which speed things up. Like you can play with things in days rather than months, because if you want to deploy something on the client side to play with it just to see how it goes, it could take months to get an agreement from all the risk and security people for the right reasons, which is why you want to do something that's safe.
Sam Floy
The specification has said sometimes you and your team build this, sometimes another dev team or et cetera will another technical team will actually build it. At that point you let it go on its way. Or is there a review process or any thoughts about in terms of what's the best way to introduce a new idea to employees or clients?
Dawid Kotur
I don't want to go into too much detail on this because I'm almost going into development practices and different people will have different ones. I think regardless whether we're building or someone else is building it, I think it's what's really important is to decide how you're building it. Like what is your methodology a lot of companies, big companies would like to build something that is called Agile which essentially means the opposite of waterfall which is very planned and very with very few uncertainties. It takes absolutely just a plan and then if anything changes, they are not able to change anything. There is a lot of considerations for that. Our general advice is that pure Agile doesn't work for really big companies. Neither does pure waterfall anymore. There is something in between and then how much in between it is it depends on the company culture and what they do and how they do things.
Dawid Kotur
What would normally advise is if it's something small, just go with it, build it and get on to another idea. If it's something medium to large you want to split it into phases that make sense and each phase brings value where even if it's a small amount of value, you want to be not dividing the phases by what the engineers would like to divide them by because it makes it easier for them to build. You want to divide them by how he adds value to the business because he would get the business using the tool way earlier, after weeks rather than sometimes after months and then they can spot more problems more often. Business will not use anything unless he adds value. If people building things in a way that engineers want to split it, don't expect or be surprised if the business is not testing them because they will only test them if he adds value.
Dawid Kotur
That's just the way the universe works. Even if people tell you otherwise, it's often not true.
Sam Floy
Very diplomatic. Yes. Interesting. That I assume gets us to the end of the life cycle of these ideas. It's gone from spreadsheet through to some grouping together through to being spiked. It seems like it's worth investigating more and then gets analyzed. Seems like it's something which is worth going with further and then it's architected and specified to then be built. You're saying that the best companies are doing this on a continual basis. They've got a constant flow of ideas that are going through this process so that they essentially don't lose momentum.
Dawid Kotur
I'll give you analogy here is that your innovation pipeline should be treated the same way as your sales pipeline. Most companies are selling something so they will have a sales pipeline. You're probably using Salesforce or HubSpot or any other CRM. You probably have a can ban with stages. If your sales director or head of sales will look at your can ban and you've got nothing in like proposal and negotiation stage and everything in qualification stage. They will be like, oh my God. I am really worried here because this means we're going to have a sales gap very soon. Innovation is exactly the same. You want to have different ideas of different stages on a consistent basis in order to have a healthy innovation culture in your company.
Sam Floy
Do you think most companies do think of innovation like a sales pipeline?
Dawid Kotur
From my experience, the vast majority of them are not. There are some individuals in those companies that do and put a big fight in order to make it happen. From my experience, a lot of companies tend to focus on some of the big hitters and they don't look at it as a structured process.
Sam Floy
Why not? The concept of a sales process is now quite well known. Why do you think people don't see innovation in that way?
Dawid Kotur
I think the first thing is that in order to have a healthy pipeline, you have to kill ideas. You have to have a lot of ideas and you have to then kill a bunch of them. A lot of big companies hate killing ideas. They don't like spending money on something that once turn into a built product or service at the end of it. Now some of our clients that we work with, they really came across, I don't know how to call it this kind of insecurity about it. I don't know what it is. People, when we start working with people, what I see with some of the clients that we're not working with is that they will be saying so what do you mean? You want me to pay some money for you to find out that you're not going to work on this? I'm like, yeah, that is going to save you a lot of money in the future.
Dawid Kotur
Yes, there are some considerations of how you talk to the people that maybe are not going through. There is a real anxiety around killing ideas. I think that's the very first thing. It's so easy in sales process. We almost celebrate killing sales things that sells cards on our salesforce that we're not going to go with because it means that it's not going to consume our time later on. Because in our process, as in most sales processes, the further the sales opportunity goes, the more senior resources it gets, as it should. Innovation is the same, maybe not the seniority of resources, but maybe the amount of resources and as a result the money. So that's difficult and I can see.
Sam Floy
How obviously it depends on how complex your sales process is, but if you're having maybe your sales process involves writing proposals and bringing in resources from other areas. Yeah, I can imagine that there's probably less of a time and financial cost in exploring potential sales prospects as there are to exploring potential innovation ideas. If you're in this mindset of we really need to pick the right ideas because as soon as we start investing in it's going to be difficult to justify why we didn't do it. I think the thing which I've quite liked is this idea of like how do you break it down? And so it's easier to say no. Rather than it becoming we're going to either spend three months exploring this idea to its totality and therefore if we're going to do that, we only have resource to explore three ideas. You can say, well actually we're going to break it down into these mini steps and that means we can do much more of each of those steps.
Sam Floy
That, I can imagine, makes it easier to digest.
Dawid Kotur
Almost like at the portfolio level, the killing ideas decisions makes total sense at the individual. I just submitted an idea and put my heart and soul into this and you're not telling me no. Often for people it doesn't make sense because they don't want to upset people, they don't want to dismotivate employees. That's a big one. Employee retention nowadays especially, it's a big topic and people who put innovative ideas forward are the kind of people you want to keep. There is a whole process which when we work over our customers, we try to get the customers towards it, which is when you say no, you really have to be explicit why that is. It a no or is it a no in this shape? Is it not the right timing? I'm encouraging you to submit more because it's a great idea, just not the right one for now, or we already have one of those.
Dawid Kotur
It's a conversation and when you engage your people into a dialogue and you've got a structured process to give them feedback, from my experience you just see those people putting more ideas forward or if they don't sitting around, they're upset. Some of them will be, but you have to accept that as a company.
Sam Floy
This function that you run, are you essentially an outsourced head of innovation? Was that not the right analogy?
Dawid Kotur
Not at all. Not at all. No. We are essentially speaking a technical consultancy. What we wanted to do is to bring business and tech together to help people decide what the right solutions are and then help them build those what we then realized very quickly as impossible to do unless you tap into the innovation pipeline. Because whether an idea is technically viable at the individual idea level may make sense, but if you look at the portfolio level, it may not. We immediately went into the kind of portfolio level. We don't really work as an outsourced head of innovation. We typically work with people who are head of innovations or head of tech or CTOs and we essentially like a secret weapon in the arsenal we work with rather than instead of.
Sam Floy
You're basically just supporting them on this infrastructure of how to make sure there's a constant flow of ideas to be investigating to them. Because ultimately I assume it's the clients who decide which are the right ideas to explore and then to actually build. I guess in order for you to do your job well, you need to have a constant flow of ideas. I imagine you'll get them to a point where they can be continually serving up ideas in a way which is going to allow them to make these decisions.
Dawid Kotur
That's right. When the best decisions will come from the fact that you're already sitting on a bunch of ideas that have been spiked or analyzed, and then you're choosing the best one and the second one that you're not choosing is also really good, that's the best way to do it. The only way to do it is to have a larger number of things in the pipe. We encourage our clients to do that. Yes.
Sam Floy
Thank you for joining me for this first episode of Better Business Radar. It's been a pleasure speaking with Dawid, and I hope you enjoyed listening in. If you'd like to find out more about Curvestone and how they support successful innovation, visit curvestone.io. The link is in the episode description. If you've enjoyed this episode and would like more insights from leading thinkers and doers who can help you be smart in growing a better business, please subscribe wherever you get your podcast. I'm Sam Floy. This is been Better Business Radar. See you next week.
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