Tonight, on Channel 4, there was a programme called “I’m running Sainsbury’s” – and on the face of it, it was an awesome exercise in ‘colleague-sourced’ innovation. It was a showcase for Sainsbury’s innovation programme, that took ideas from the shop floor and gave them the opportunity to be developed and rolled out nationwide. According to the programme, it was the personal brainchild of Sainsbury’s CEO Justin King. But I watched this show, and I can tell you Sainsbury’s and Channel 4 that you have just shown precisely why big companies find it hard to innovate successfully.
I think it’s fair to say that the whole programme was basically a cross between The Apprentice (they even appointed a ‘project manager’), Dragon’s Den (there was certainly a pitch) and finally, the X-Factor (the promise of being lifted out of your humdrum life into a new dream life and job). I hope dearly that this whole thing was architected in this way for the TV cameras, but even if it was, I think it’s important to filter out from it how a ‘real’ innovation process would differ from this – and so in this respect, this should be no reflection on Sainsbury’s, but more a myth-buster based on a TV show.
To tell you what happened:
- Sainsbury’s ran an ideas-drive, where everyone in the company was invited to submit ideas.
- The ideas were assessed centrally, and the ‘winners’ invited to come to Head Office (or as JS call it, the Store Support Centre) and ‘pitch’ their ideas to a panel of around 10 senior managers, or even directors, they didn’t say which.
- The winner this week was Becky Craze, a 21 year old store trainer and checkout assistant from the Watford store.
- She had a great idea, which was related to Sainsbury’s “Feed your family for under a fiver” campaign, where they have recipe cards in store that show you a recipe and the store products required to make it for a family of four, for under £5. In essence she said; why do we make customers walk all around the store for all the different items on the recipe. Why don’t we just bag them up in one place, so they can just take them straight to the till?”. A brilliantly simple idea. Seems like it would be easy to implement.. The hairs on the back of my neck were prickling, so much was my anticipation, so what happened next?
- Well, they took her to Head Office, gave her the job of Project Manager, gave her a desk, and made her responsible for the project. What happened next though was really scary.
- Rather than use one of the 20 or so recipes that already exist in the feed your family for under a fiver series, they asked her to develop a new recipe, that was to be used as the recipe for the pilot they wanted to run in the Watford store. So she developed some recipes, with the help of the Sainsbury’s home economist, and their chef, and then they put them in to test with a customer panel in their innovation centre in the basement of their offices. Oh, the drama, whilst we waited to find out if her recipes had passed the test…
- Hurrah! They all passed, and they picked one and it went into production. Which meant that they created a new SKU (barcode) for the combination of products required for the recipe. They put them into clear plastic bags (rather than the opaque usual bag), and printed a big sticker / label for the bag. They then shipped them to the Watford store and set a target to sell £1500 of them in a week.
- So then the whole of the store team were really focused on making this work, with two of the team manning the aisle end display. After the first day’s sales, they were behind, then after another day, some of the products went past their sell-by date and had to be thrown away. Poor old Becky was so distraught “the humiliation I’ll face when it all goes wrong” she said. She was so distraught that the director responsible for own brand, who was on a buying trip in Hong Kong, had to call her to gee her up.
Now, to be honest, by this time I lost faith with the whole thing and had to go and feed the rabbits to cool off; so I can’t tell you if this ever got rolled out nationwide. Why was I so disturbed?
Well, first, there’s the cost.
- The time of the directors and panellists who heard the pitches : c. £3k
- The cost of the Home Economist and Chef to develop the recipes: c. £2k
- The cost of a consumer panel, cooking of their meals, collection and analysis of the data: c. £5k
- Time taken out of store for Becky: c. £1k
- Design and production of new packaging, creation of and loading of new SKU on to POS system, delivery to store: c. £2k
- Time of Trade Director and Own Brands Director to oversee and coach: c. £2k
So, all in all, that’s a conservative £15k (I think it could be as high as £50k) and lots of heartache, disappointment, and fear of failure and humiliation for the person from whom the inspiration came in the first place.
Blimey, why would anyone put themselves through that? I think if I worked for Sainsbury’s and had a great idea, I would have kept it to myself! After all, who needs the hassle? I work checkouts, I’m not an entrepeneur, I don’t know how to ‘pitch’ to the top brass in the company, what if I fail? The humiliation, the cost, the disappointment from the CEO… what will it do to my future job prospects?
So here’s how it should have gone:
The initial ideas drive : You can’t fault this, every organisation needs to do idea drives of one kind of another. Everyone has ideas, and it’s important to draw them out of people in a way that makes them feel safe and secure so that the idea and the sentiment behind it comes across.
The sieve : Again, you can’t fault this. You need to have the ability to sift through ideas, looking for the ones that are timely, easy to implement, or have potentially high value. i.e. the most likely to achieve.
The spark : Instead of shortlisting candidates and asking them to ‘pitch’ to a big group of senior management, Becky should have talked to a very approachable member of the innovation team. Their job, is to help the idea generator shape their idea so that it can be implemented in some form in their own store, to see if it might be worth pursuing. This is a multi-skilled person who is empowered, and has the resources to help someone bring an idea to life. Either to actually try it, or to help shape the idea so that it can be communicated effectively to senior management. The spark needs to help ignite the fuel of the idea – yes cheesy I know, but lots of organisations have a lot of innovation ‘fuel’ sloshing around inside them, but lack the resources, time or expertise to ignite them. This innovation manager, should have resources at her disposal that allow her to get Becky to focus on doing a simple experiment in her store to test the idea. She should be able to tell the store manager that he was allowed to release Becky from her normal duties with a small increase in the store budget to cover her re-tasking. In addition, she would sign off a temporary re-tasking of an aisle end display for Becky to play with based on a budget for what is an acceptable lost revenue risk to test the idea. So in short, the innovation manager’s job is to remove barriers, and make sure the effectiveness can be measured effectively.
The early proof of concept : Instead of developing a fully-formed ‘product’, the innovation manager should have helped Becky find a way in which she could test this idea out without a lot of investment. She could call on design resources and other expertise, but would set a low budget for this and would be constantly encouraging Becky to keep things simple. In this case, maybe nip out and buy some clear plastic bags, print some barcode labels on the store printer, that were simply all of the individual barcodes of the products inside the bag. In this way, the checkout could scan all the products without removing them from the bag (yes, it’s 5 scans, not one, but it’s still very fast). The innovation manager would work with the store manager to ensure that this was a sensible test, and that the data required to prove the success or not of the idea was captured. Throughout the test, she would work with Becky to help her adapt quickly if something didn’t seem to be working.
The analysis : the innovation manager would get down to the store at some point to observe and capture images, and possibly vox-pops with customers. Once the week’s trial is over, she’d bring together the data, and the ethnographic responses of customers and evaluate the success of the initiative.
Then… the pitch : but instead of Becky, who decided university wasn’t for her after 1 year, and was less than confident in front of 10 senior execs, the innovation manager puts together a pitch for her. She calls on resources she has at hand, like sketch artists, graphic designers, and financial analysts. She can create a story not of simply how the trial went, but how it should be implemented in the long term. Using the ‘cardboard and string’ trial, with slightly scruffy packaging, and bags put together when needed with a lot of manual labour required in store as evidence, she then creates a pitch that projects forward and implements the learnings from the trial. Becky can pitch it if she’s confident enough, and her passion for the idea would potentially really make the difference.
Total cost? Mostly less than £2000; but more if the concept had been harder to do quickly in store of course. Time taken? 3 weeks. Worst case damage done? Lost sales from their best promotional area for one week.
At the end of this stage, you’ll still need to go into a product development cycle, but because you’ve proven out a lot of the concept, you can now safely 'bet’ more investment to make this a realistic proposition. Plus, you’ll take fewer ideas through to this stage, so your investment can be more focused and ultimately more successful.
What would happen if it didn’t go ahead? Becky gets a serious reward for having tried. She also gets some really good reasons why this won’t work or isn’t a priority; and her store get to know this too. They all get to know that it’s innovative thinking and passion like Becky’s that will make the difference to Sainsbury’s. If it succeeded, then every store who gets the new initiative gets to know who invented it. She may also find herself up for a few company dinners and knee’s ups, and possibly even take some form of financial stake in the success of the idea.
All in all, the process is safe. There’s no down-side for anyone involved. It can only end well. That’s the prime requirement to have an innovation culture. An environment within which anyone is prepared to put their thoughts and ideas on paper, and is prepared to work at making something work.
Most big organisations over-think. The whole beta culture of the web was borne out of the acknowledgement that things didn’t need to be perfect to try them out, and that in fact, the process of trying them out ‘in the raw’ allowed them to dynamically re-engineered as customers started reacting to it. The best innovation cultures have the attitude that things can be tried initially in a ‘cardboard and string’ fashion that is fast and ‘dirty’ but based on good experimental science. And that this evidence is critical in helping establish not only which ones are the right ones to pursue, but how best to shape them based on really good and real customer feedback.
The only rules for a cardboard and string proof of concept are:
- Set the trial up for success – provide support, advice, and positivity and a framework for measurement
- Do deeply involve the originator of the idea – Ideas need passion to help them be executed well, and if your idea originator has this, then let them have a go at making it work. But don’t see this as ‘giving them enough rope’…
- Spend just enough to make it a viable test, but do be prepared to spend something – make it credible but it can still feel experimental, certainly doesn’t need to be polished. Ultimately, customers like the idea of local innovation and the fact that companies are prepared to involve them in innovation.
- Make provision for failure – define an acceptable level of risk that you are prepared to take and then take it. Don’t punish the store manager for this. i.e. it comes off their targets
- Measurement and analysis – including getting down and talking to customers how they felt attitudinally and what would have made it work better. Get as much data as possible, including pictures and video.
- Provide reward for failure – as Bill Buxton would say, you need to not hold onto your ideas, just be good at having lots of them. If someone comes out of this process still positive about ideas-generation and innovation, but a little wiser on what it takes to execute ideas well, then you have a much more valuable asset in an innovation culture than if you’d devastated them and humiliated them in front of their colleagues.
And if say, Becky had the skills and will to play a part in the product development and pilot stage, then sure, take her up to a new job at Head Office to help the project forward, but do that on a case by case basis. Not everyone wants to be ‘promoted’ to a desk at head office. Becky had deliberately chosen a career in Sainsbury’s in Watford whilst many of her friends went off to become managers. It’s not a guaranteed that she wants a head office desk job… that needs to be assessed on a case by case basis.
All in all, Sainsbury’s and C4 cherry-picked one idea from thousands. They spent too much on it. They placed too many ‘hurdles’ (their words) in the way of the idea, and spent way too much on it, and they exposed the originator of the idea to too much pressure and risk. The consequences of this are that they will not progress enough ideas, they can’t adapt the execution if they designed it wrong in the first place, innovation is too hard (particularly for the senior management team), and having ideas is discouraged.
Doing innovation well does require investment, but not as much as you think. Done in the right way, there’s a progressive process that proves the business case and customer adoption, and mitigates risk over time.
More on that another day.