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Adopting innovation

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Shishir Choudhary
Shishir Choudhary

How can you adopt innovation at your company ? Why should you bother ? How can you do it ? What matters and why ? Here I share my learning from starting and running a startup and building data science products in thomson reuters and other organizations

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Building an Innovative Product Shishir Chandra Choudhary
Why Innovation ?
Amazon, Google, Microsoft are close by
 Innovation today is rewarding Apple hits trillion dollar market cap Innovation guided by greed would lead to short cuts, local maxima
Shrinking Time to Market Innovation Market Adoption 10+ years Innovation Market Adoption 2+ years Google, AirBnb,
 Uber, Dropbox, Technology, Business Model, Solutions Technology, Business Model, Solutions
Those who execute well, do wonderful in short run Those who explore well, do wonderful in long run
Software Scales Distributing the innovation costs
Big tech companies don’t know your business, but startups will, so you need to start innovating Business Model, Solutions and Technology Innovation are not just for big tech firms
How to turn your company into an innovation powerhouse ? Execution Powerhouse Innovation Powerhouse
What’s Innovation ? 1. Problem you care about 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User
What’s the outcome ? 6. Insights Other’s Don’t Have (Problem and Solution) 7. Successful Idea -> $$$
Detour - What Innovation is NOT Keep the innovation map we saw in mind. We will come back to it shortly.
It’s Not Eureka ! Best of First Ideas Do not Survive Impact of Reality
Neither is it careful planning You don’t know what result of your experiment would be. You don’t know the learning you would have after next experiment.
Innovation is this, 
 but how to scale this economically ? 1. Problem you care about (and potentially financially rewarding) 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User
Some parts of this are familiar ! 1. Problem you care about (and potentially financially rewarding) 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User This is a central Agile Principal This is Agile / Lean This is Agile Dev Ops AGILE ≢ SCRUM
 The spirit of Agile vs Form of Agile
Innovation •People Aspect • Problem you care about • Empowered people who love what they do and care about the problem a lot • Being very close with user • Small team that’s self sufficient and aligned with common “why” •Mechanics • Low cost, high speed iterations of idea generation and idea validation (experiment and build) • Commitment to invest to enable such infrastructure to allow such speed and cost effectiveness • Sufficient runway
It’s not the particular technology Start with the problem you care about first. Figure out the right tech to apply.
 Never the other way around ! You can’t “experiment” with outcome in mind already. Also, If you don’t care about the problem, you would not survive the initial failures.
Short Runway Before innovation flies, it crawls, walks and runs. Too short a runway and no idea will fly.
Not a work for large team You need small, self sufficient, fast moving team. Large team is only needed to scale the final solution.
$$$ $$$ You don’t check success rate of innovation ideas One in ten may succeed financially, but rewards would be large, specially if digital solution which can scale easily. Each idea should be tried in a lean way.
Why Bother ? Innovation is tough and time consuming, why bother ? Execution is fast. In shorter run the better executing team wins. Exploration is slow and wasteful. 
 In long run those who explore, leapfrog Digital solutions scale well distributing the cost of innovation So you need both
Back to innovation map
1. Problem You care about • Innovation is a winding path • People put more effort for things they care about • How to enable this ? We’ll see
What’s your company’s / team’s DNA ? • Selecting the problem you want to innovate on is “the most important first step” • What does your company/team really excel in ? • If problem you pick is one you don’t really care much about at team and company level, you are unlikely to succeed.
2. Idea Generation For idea generation you want to do following • Improve quality of ideas • Improve quantity of ideas
Idea Quality & Quantity •Be cloooose to users • Ideally - be your own target demographic • E.g. if an investment product, be user of that investment product to invest • Entire team should feel as close to users as possible • Otherwise, you solve the wrong problem or fail to learn
Idea Quality and Quantity •Explore • Experiment a lot (cheaply) • Have a long term process
Idea Quality and Quantity • Be aware of and leverage Open Source • Explore open source • Be aware of what is possible
3. Idea Validation • Never drive blind 
 Build analytics into your product • Talk to users who used your new idea • Take your product for test drive yourself
4. Rapid Cheap Experimentation • Each experiment should be fast and cheap • Invest in building infrastructure to enable rapid experimentation
5. Empowered People Who love their work and care about the problem • People are very important component of innovation • Hire people who just love what they do. People who do work just to pay bills never build ground breaking products • Empower them, trust them. Use agile approaches where you don’t stand behind the shoulders or try to control people. • Agile daily stands should be just 5-10 min of what each person is doing today and not a question and answer or control system. Note this requires people who love what they do. • Teams should be small (5-10) and self sufficient
Selecting Good Ideas • Management can’t be bottleneck for innovation • Allow in company anyone to start a cheap experiment (infra) • Easy approval for 20% time • Simple approval for dedicated time based on results of easy approval • Sufficient runway for failures and retries
Comparison Proble m you care about Problem company cares about Idea Generatio n Idea Validation Fast Iteration Infra People who love work and the problem Closenes s to users Hackathon Yes ? Yes ? ? Yes ? Hackathon with Sufficient Runway Yes ? Yes Yes ? Yes ? Distributed Experiments Yes Yes Yes Yes ? Yes ?
For DataScience Projects
All previous still applies Problem You Really Care About Empowered People Who Love Work & Care about The Problem Being Close to User Generating Ideas -> Validating Ideas -> Quick Iterations Learning and Sufficient Runway
Adopting Latest Innovation Research In House Using Open Source Models, Libraries & Platform Early on concentrate on learning from each small project, not success or inevitable failures As you figure things out, scale and execute You must do a bit of this to develop appreciation of nuances & solve problems not yet solved Identify core pain of users/ customers and focus on each of those with research too (longer runway) Small self sufficient and multi disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI, Devops etc) teams Small self sufficient and multi disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI, Devops etc) teams
2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway Get This Right Tools to speed up experimentations
Start with simple solutions Start with simple rules Once you have lot of data, introduce ML Replace any complex rules with ML
Open Data 
 Wikipedia, Wikidata, Twitter etc Apps and API 
 Your own UI, API etc would provide data DS Strengthens With Data Data Augmentation 
 Use Sensible Augmentation of Available Data
Summary
Why Bother ? Innovation is tough, why bother ? Execution is fast. In shorter run the better executing team wins. Exploration is slow and wasteful. In long run those who explore overtake So you need both

More Related Content

Adopting innovation

  • 3. Amazon, Google, Microsoft are close by
 Innovation today is rewarding Apple hits trillion dollar market cap Innovation guided by greed would lead to short cuts, local maxima
  • 4. Shrinking Time to Market Innovation Market Adoption 10+ years Innovation Market Adoption 2+ years Google, AirBnb,
 Uber, Dropbox, Technology, Business Model, Solutions Technology, Business Model, Solutions
  • 5. Those who execute well, do wonderful in short run Those who explore well, do wonderful in long run
  • 7. Big tech companies don’t know your business, but startups will, so you need to start innovating Business Model, Solutions and Technology Innovation are not just for big tech firms
  • 8. How to turn your company into an innovation powerhouse ? Execution Powerhouse Innovation Powerhouse
  • 9. What’s Innovation ? 1. Problem you care about 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User
  • 10. What’s the outcome ? 6. Insights Other’s Don’t Have (Problem and Solution) 7. Successful Idea -> $$$
  • 11. Detour - What Innovation is NOT Keep the innovation map we saw in mind. We will come back to it shortly.
  • 12. It’s Not Eureka ! Best of First Ideas Do not Survive Impact of Reality
  • 13. Neither is it careful planning You don’t know what result of your experiment would be. You don’t know the learning you would have after next experiment.
  • 14. Innovation is this, 
 but how to scale this economically ? 1. Problem you care about (and potentially financially rewarding) 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User
  • 15. Some parts of this are familiar ! 1. Problem you care about (and potentially financially rewarding) 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway 5. Empowered People who love what they do and care about the problem 1.1 Closeness with User This is a central Agile Principal This is Agile / Lean This is Agile Dev Ops AGILE ≢ SCRUM
 The spirit of Agile vs Form of Agile
  • 16. Innovation •People Aspect • Problem you care about • Empowered people who love what they do and care about the problem a lot • Being very close with user • Small team that’s self sufficient and aligned with common “why” •Mechanics • Low cost, high speed iterations of idea generation and idea validation (experiment and build) • Commitment to invest to enable such infrastructure to allow such speed and cost effectiveness • Sufficient runway
  • 17. It’s not the particular technology Start with the problem you care about first. Figure out the right tech to apply.
 Never the other way around ! You can’t “experiment” with outcome in mind already. Also, If you don’t care about the problem, you would not survive the initial failures.
  • 18. Short Runway Before innovation flies, it crawls, walks and runs. Too short a runway and no idea will fly.
  • 19. Not a work for large team You need small, self sufficient, fast moving team. Large team is only needed to scale the final solution.
  • 20. $$$ $$$ You don’t check success rate of innovation ideas One in ten may succeed financially, but rewards would be large, specially if digital solution which can scale easily. Each idea should be tried in a lean way.
  • 21. Why Bother ? Innovation is tough and time consuming, why bother ? Execution is fast. In shorter run the better executing team wins. Exploration is slow and wasteful. 
 In long run those who explore, leapfrog Digital solutions scale well distributing the cost of innovation So you need both
  • 23. 1. Problem You care about • Innovation is a winding path • People put more effort for things they care about • How to enable this ? We’ll see
  • 24. What’s your company’s / team’s DNA ? • Selecting the problem you want to innovate on is “the most important first step” • What does your company/team really excel in ? • If problem you pick is one you don’t really care much about at team and company level, you are unlikely to succeed.
  • 25. 2. Idea Generation For idea generation you want to do following • Improve quality of ideas • Improve quantity of ideas
  • 26. Idea Quality & Quantity •Be cloooose to users • Ideally - be your own target demographic • E.g. if an investment product, be user of that investment product to invest • Entire team should feel as close to users as possible • Otherwise, you solve the wrong problem or fail to learn
  • 27. Idea Quality and Quantity •Explore • Experiment a lot (cheaply) • Have a long term process
  • 28. Idea Quality and Quantity • Be aware of and leverage Open Source • Explore open source • Be aware of what is possible
  • 29. 3. Idea Validation • Never drive blind 
 Build analytics into your product • Talk to users who used your new idea • Take your product for test drive yourself
  • 30. 4. Rapid Cheap Experimentation • Each experiment should be fast and cheap • Invest in building infrastructure to enable rapid experimentation
  • 31. 5. Empowered People Who love their work and care about the problem • People are very important component of innovation • Hire people who just love what they do. People who do work just to pay bills never build ground breaking products • Empower them, trust them. Use agile approaches where you don’t stand behind the shoulders or try to control people. • Agile daily stands should be just 5-10 min of what each person is doing today and not a question and answer or control system. Note this requires people who love what they do. • Teams should be small (5-10) and self sufficient
  • 32. Selecting Good Ideas • Management can’t be bottleneck for innovation • Allow in company anyone to start a cheap experiment (infra) • Easy approval for 20% time • Simple approval for dedicated time based on results of easy approval • Sufficient runway for failures and retries
  • 33. Comparison Proble m you care about Problem company cares about Idea Generatio n Idea Validation Fast Iteration Infra People who love work and the problem Closenes s to users Hackathon Yes ? Yes ? ? Yes ? Hackathon with Sufficient Runway Yes ? Yes Yes ? Yes ? Distributed Experiments Yes Yes Yes Yes ? Yes ?
  • 35. All previous still applies Problem You Really Care About Empowered People Who Love Work & Care about The Problem Being Close to User Generating Ideas -> Validating Ideas -> Quick Iterations Learning and Sufficient Runway
  • 36. Adopting Latest Innovation Research In House Using Open Source Models, Libraries & Platform Early on concentrate on learning from each small project, not success or inevitable failures As you figure things out, scale and execute You must do a bit of this to develop appreciation of nuances & solve problems not yet solved Identify core pain of users/ customers and focus on each of those with research too (longer runway) Small self sufficient and multi disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI, Devops etc) teams Small self sufficient and multi disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI, Devops etc) teams
  • 37. 2. Idea Generation 3. Idea Validation 4. High Speed and Low Cost of Iteration and enough runway Get This Right Tools to speed up experimentations
  • 38. Start with simple solutions Start with simple rules Once you have lot of data, introduce ML Replace any complex rules with ML
  • 39. Open Data 
 Wikipedia, Wikidata, Twitter etc Apps and API 
 Your own UI, API etc would provide data DS Strengthens With Data Data Augmentation 
 Use Sensible Augmentation of Available Data
  • 41. Why Bother ? Innovation is tough, why bother ? Execution is fast. In shorter run the better executing team wins. Exploration is slow and wasteful. In long run those who explore overtake So you need both