Failbook E-Book

VNTR

• Herausgeber: Haupt Verlag
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 82

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

74 failures, 10 key learnings and 1 mission: promoting a positive culture of mistakes in business. The innovation team at a major Swiss corporation reveal the things that others might want to keep secret – with charm, courage and humour, plus an ironic series of images from daily working life. Instead of glossing over mistakes, the book demonstrates how to draw valuable insights from failed projects and then use them to make progress in an innovation environment.

Leseprobe

Failbook

When Innovation goes wrong: failures, errors, business mistakes - and what you can learn from them

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Content

How It All Began

Where It All Began

Four Kinds of Failure

No-Need Failures

Happy Failures

Failures by Following Management

Epic Fails

Key Learnings

Final Words

Glossary

Index by category

Index alphabetical

Impressum

How It All Began

At the end of 2018, we held a self-produced and printed copy of the previous version of this Failbook in our hands for the first time. Within two weeks and over two weekends, we had compiled the failures from the last five years. All the new ideas and potential business ventures that had emerged, come into being, developed or even just been discussed in the innovation process of a financial institution since 2013 but were ultimately terminated and buried again very early – or sometimes late.

Learning from Failure

As is always the case with innovation, the number of abandoned projects and failed ideas far exceeds the number of successful ones. We asked ourselves what «successful» actually means, which developments in the innovation process are to be evaluated as successes or failures and whether perhaps failure also plays a significant role. We examine the topic of success in the pages of our own book, the Successbook, which was also published in 2021. But in this book, the Failbook, we want to focus on the failed ideas: the aborted projects, the failures and also the lessons we were able to learn from them.

The Birth of the Failbook

The original book was born at a moment when we were asking one another: What do we have to show for ourselves? Fails and flops? Stalled ideas, abandoned projects, unrealised innovations – in other words, more «nothing» than «lots»? We all agreed that we had also learned a lot from the failed projects in the previous years, yet this «added value» was not all that tangible to us. It was only when we consciously looked back, revisiting all of our ideas and innovation projects and examining what we’d learned, that the added value became clear. Things that we would do differently in the future, procedures and processes that we had to adapt or develop further. So why didn’t we talk openly about it? After all, the insights gained could also be of interest to others. The answer was simple: It’s just not something you do! You never talk about your mistakes. Who even makes mistakes, anyway? You never talk about failure - certainly not as a company - because it might damage your reputation or give the wrong impression.

Biting the Bullet

Occasionally you’ll hear about «fuck-up nights» where entrepreneurs talk about their failures. The point is not to praise the mistakes that were made, but to understand the big picture and see what’s behind the failure. The point is to use «quick failures» to glean quick insights and thus accelerate learning. To rapidly achieve results with little time, few resources and as little effort as possible, thereby avoiding considerable, vain investments. How do you do this? By understanding people’s problems and challenges, by integrating these insights into initial prototypes and then showing and testing them. In other words, continuously engaging with potential customers generates feedback. This method allows for rapid validation of the hypotheses posed at the beginning. If they prove to be untrue, you then have to bite the bullet and stop the project.

Failure or Coincidence?

It isn’t always the customer, the person or the project idea itself that forces you to give up. Sometimes it’s also because of internal processes, lack of understanding, wrong decisions or simply (un)fortunate coincidences. So there are different kinds of failures. You can find out more about the different kinds of failures we discovered on the next pages.

Successful Experiment

So there we were with our homemade book and we started talking about it within the company at the welcome event for new employees, elsewhere at presentations or failure events, etc. We were really surprised by the positive response and the massive interest in it! Our small print run was simply not geared towards such high demand. What started out as a small, quick experiment to record our knowledge about failures, failed ideas and projects in condensed form and make them accessible to others had suddenly become «successful»! So it’s now time for the next stage and the next experiment.

Happy Failures

We are thrilled that, with vatter&vatter, we have found a book publisher who will venture on this journey with us during this rough time for publishers. Thus, this here is the first real Failbook to be officially published by a company and its innovation team. Whoever reads it will learn about which ideas and problems can arise in the innovation process of a service company and why these projects go wrong, fail to be realised or are terminated. We also provide insights into the lessons we have learned. With this in mind, we wish you lots of inspiration and many happy failures, but hopefully no epic fails!

PS: Gender-sensitive language is important to us. To preserve good text flow, we have chosen to sometimes use the generic form, alternating between masculine and feminine.

PPS: For all of our readers who are unfamiliar with the numerous technical terms from the innovation and business context, or who want to better understand the ins and outs of incremental or disruptive innovations, spin-outs and USP, we have created a glossary: www.postfinance.ch/vntr-glossary

Where It All Began

Today, VNTR represents the innovation and venturing initiatives of one of the large financial institutions in Switzerland. Previously, the innovation initiative was known primarily as PFLab – the innovation lab of PostFinance. This wasn’t a lab where chemical elements were mixed together. Instead, experimentation and innovation were carried out on future concepts, among other things. This approach and the corresponding mindset are essential – not only for a bank, but for any company.

Tackling Both Current Business and the Future

While the largest part of a company is usually concerned with keeping the infrastructure running and offering existing products and services, another - smaller - part of the company should be concerned with the future. This modus operandi is also referred to as «ambidexterity»: a dual organisation in which one hand takes care of current business while the other is concerned with the future.

But how do you bring the future into the company?

«Exploitation» has long been the standard practice at PostFinance: Internal product managers continuously monitor «their» market in order to adapt products and services to changing customer needs, taking advantage of any opportunities that suddenly arise. Along with this, a process was put in place before 2013 to intentionally develop offers extending beyond the company’s current strategy period, referred to as the CO-STAR process: an iterative methodology for describing all basic aspects of an innovation: Customer, Opportunity, Solution, Team, Advantages, Results. This process makes it possible to work on new topics and to prepare, present and also implement innovations.

Entering the Next Stage through Two Gates

In the CO-STAR process, ideas have to pass through «gates» to get to the next stage. At Gate 1, a committee meets periodically to decide whether an idea is to be developed further and advanced or whether (or not) it needs to be tested in greater depth. After additional work, the project is then submitted to a second committee at Gate 2.

The Innovation Lab Enters the Scene

In 2015, the innovation lab was founded under the name «PFLab». Since then, its task has been to validate ideas using quick, simple prototypes, and to support the CO-STAR process. Sometimes it advances innovation projects on its own, and sometimes it goes through the process together with employees who have ventured into ideas as champions of innovation. Since the lab’s creation, various innovation projects have made it to the market. Time and again, we recognise the potential for improvement in our approach and are therefore constantly revising (see also section «Our Current Process: How We Work Today»).

Opening Up the Innovation Process

One such adjustment was opening up the innovation process to external parties - in the spirit of open innovation - which has also made it possible for innovations to be brought to us from the outside. Meanwhile, thanks to this, we not only have employees on board, but also universities, colleges, start-ups and other companies and institutions, enabling us to achieve a great deal working together.

Letting Innovations Happen at the Right Place

In 2018, we started to distinguish what kinds of innovations we were looking for based on McKinsey’s 3-horizons model. How close or far away is the innovation from our core business and from our current core competencies – and how low or high is the growth potential and the degree of innovation? Based on PostFinance’s horizon model (see «Horizon Model» graphic), it needs to be possible for innovations to be brought about consciously in different areas of the company – from the core business to future banking, i.e. our sphere of influence.

Horizon 1 involves projects to maintain, adapt and develop the core business (exploitation or incremental innovation); in Horizon 2, digital offers are developed in the areas surrounding the core business (digital transformation), and specific, strategic thrusts are implemented; in Horizon 3, we discover future topics and develop new business models and fields outside of today’s core business (future banking). The goal is to be able to ultimately bring the innovation projects starting in Horizon 3 into Horizon 1 so that they will become the core business of tomorrow. The innovation process is adapted to each respective horizon.

Horizons Model of PostFinance. Source: the «3 Horizons Model» by McKinsey.

Our Current Process: How We Work Today