“Why did our innovation efforts fail so badly?”
It’s a question many companies are asking themselves today, at the height of the innovation hype, when so much work has failed to generate the desired ROI.
I was asked once again by a major European bank that brought me in to conduct a postmortem of their digital suggestion box initiative. They’d been looking to reinvigorate the business through innovation. Everything they’d done had actually resulted in the opposite: Instead of growing the business and engaging employees, the bank had wasted a lot of energy and ticked off the people who worked for them.
What went wrong?
The bank’s employees had submitted ideas about how to improve the business to the digital suggestion box in droves. Unfortunately, of more than fifteen hundred submissions, only two were considered valuable enough to be implemented. Hundreds of employees took time from their busy schedules to submit their ideas, yet almost none of those ideas were put into action.
No wonder the innovation program negatively affected morale. The bank shut down the program and fired the entire innovation team.
This situation is common. I’ve seen hundreds of companies get similar, less-than-stellar results with the suggestion box. What can we learn from them?
First and foremost, asking for ideas is a bad idea. Everyone has an opinion, suggestion, or idea—but that doesn’t mean they’re any good.
On March 19, 2008, Starbucks launched a collaborative website called “My Starbucks Idea.” The goal was to get customers to submit their ideas about how to improve Starbucks. In late 2012, they released an infographic indicating that, during the first five years of this initiative, 150,000 ideas were submitted, but only 277 were implemented. Fewer than 0.2 percent of the ideas saw the light of day. Before retiring the site in 2017, Starbucks had received approximately 400,000 ideas and implemented about 800 of them.
Of course, this is great on some level. Eight hundred new ideas were implemented; that’s nearly a hundred innovations per year! But think about the 399,200 other ideas that were not implemented. People took time out of their busy days to suggest various innovations—like a spinach-flavored latte—that Starbucks did nothing with. Is that good for the morale of the customers?
We strive for quantity of ideas when, in fact, we really should be striving for quality. Quantity drives waste; quality drives value.
One issue with asking for ideas is that it is difficult to find the good ones buried amongst the duds. It has been suggested that voting becomes a key part of the innovation process—but voting doesn’t always lead to the desired result. For example, in 2016, the British government spent nearly $300 million building a polar research ship. They turned to the citizens of the United Kingdom to name the vessel, creating a poling platform that allowed people to submit and vote on their favorite name.
The winning name was Boaty McBoatface.
When hearing this story, people often assume that either 1) not a lot of people voted, or 2) the second most popular submission was close in the polls.
Incorrect. In the end, 124,000 people voted for Boaty McBoatface. The number two submission, Poppy-Mai (named after a girl who died from a fatal brain tumor and captured the hearts of the British), garnered just a small fraction at 34,000 votes.
Among my favorite submissions that landed in the Top 10:
- It’s Bloody Cold Here was #4.
- For Olympic fans, you had Usain Boat coming in at #6.
- And, fans of American hip-hop music will love #10, I Like Big Boats and I Cannot Lie.
As it turns out, Boaty McBoatface was clever, but not wise. In the end, the government decided to use a different name for the boat, David Attenborough (#5), after the famous explorer.
Are crowds really wise?
As it turns out, many crowdsourcing initiatives, when they are done incorrectly, suffer from something called mobsourcing. This is when the vocal few crowd out the rest of the responses. Popular does not always equal best or correct. Consider this the next time you ask people for their opinion or when you conduct customer surveys.
Adapted from Invisible Solutions: 25 Lenses that Reframe and Help Solve Difficult Business Problems by Stephen Shapiro. Copyright 2020 Stephen Shapiro.
