Working for a leading personal financial services company in the UK, the newly appointed COO wanted to break the trend of traditional product development in order to find ways to challenge and keep up with the “challenger banks” such as Monzo, Starling, N26 and Revolut.

Recognising that if the company doesn’t adapt to newer ways of working and experimenting with products and services that are Useful, Viable and Feasible there is a very real chance that “traditional” banks will become a thing of the past.

The COO sponsored a pilot scheme for 40 participants over a 6 week period that would encompass the use of innovation techniques that would ultimately lead to the participants pitching to the board for funding to develop their product/service.

The board were looking for participants to demonstrate their understanding of innovation by showing evidence based pitches, for example they would like to see a prototype that has been created and tested with potential customers along with the back story that generated their idea.

As part of the COO sponsored Innovation Challenge, our initial task was to design and deliver a one day master class on Innovation with an introduction to some tools and techniques.

We were soon asked to also provide mentorship and additional coaching support to the 40 participants over a 6 week period.

Helping the organisation firstly to understand that innovation and entrepreneurs aren’t made over night and require the opportunity to embrace learnings, we set to work to design a learning experience that would combine the perfect balance of theory, practice and case studies.

With the limitation of one day to introduce participants to innovation and help them learn and experience some tools and techniques, we took a deep dive into some topics and a lighter touch on others.

As we had the opportunity to support the participants beyond the one day training, we knew that we could provide more depth to those topics that got a light touch in the future.

With this in mind some of the tools and techniques we covered were;

Design Thinking

Lean Start Up

Lean Canvas

Customer Feedback through interview techniques

How to collect and use data

Hypothesis Writing

The most important element was to help participants understand that innovation is not a linear process. Some of the tools and techniques on the face of things will look this way, but it was important to understand that you shouldn’t be constrained by these tools and to embrace your creative nature.

The pilot was not only to design a learning experience that facilitated the development of products being developed in a more innovative, incremental manner whilst being customer centric. It was also to understand whether the organisation should further investment into the “innovation” process.

After 6 weeks, the candidates presented their ideas to the board, where they were pitching for additional funding in order to turn their prototypes into reality.

10 teams ended up being successful with their pitches. This has created 10 new unique opportunities for the bank to explore.

Not only did this process create 10 new unique ideas, it provided a platform for 40 members of staff to experience innovation, growing the companies knowledge and skills.

It has also drastically reduced the time and cost involved at the exploratory stage of their product development cycle compared to their “traditional” methods. Typically this can be anywhere from ~3 months to +1 year and in this particular case it was reduced to 6 weeks.

The organisation has requested 2 further days of training to assist the teams in their next steps, where we will go further than “experimenting with innovation” to some more concrete actions and hopefully end up with real products in the market being used by customers.