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Innovation Marketing

Why innovation in large organisations should be a SPRINT, not a marathon

By John Newbold, strategy director

383 Project

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December 14, 2016 | 5 min read

The last 10 years have seen a number of technology startups transition from small disruptive teams into established global companies with thousands of employees.

383 Sprint Design collage

The Sprint Design process can help established companies innovate like a startup.

Companies such as Spotify, Netflix and Slack have experienced exponential growth, with the media frequently charting their progress through revenue, valuations or head count. However, perhaps one of the most remarkable successes away from the numbers has been the ability of these companies to not only grow ‘big’, but to maintain an enviable cadence of innovation and iteration whilst doing so.

As large organisations seek to be both ‘big and fast’, they have often looked to the startup world for transferable processes and ideas. One process that has emerged as being executable and effective within a large organisation is the ‘Design Sprint’.

Originally conceived and popularised by the team at Google Ventures, the Design Sprint began life as a focused five day programme of work designed to help startups solve big problems, fast. The idea was to quickly move from problem discovery through to hypothesis, prototyping and testing in only five days. Despite being designed by Google to help startups, the Design Sprint has quickly morphed into a key method for some of the world’s largest technology companies to innovate quickly while at scale.

At 383, we have also adapted the Design Sprint process to help large organisations (including British Gas, Hilton Worldwide and Jaguar Land Rover) hypothesise and validate new business models and product ideas. In our experience, one of the key reasons that the Design Sprint works within large organisations is because of its focus on isolating small teams around specific problems, and providing the framework and autonomy to prototype and test in a closed environment.

The Sprint Design 5-step process.

The process we have adapted is designed to work with the customer to validate a business opportunity first, before thinking about how (or if) we work with the business to assess the technology, governance or risk involved. Here are just five reasons why we believe Design Sprints can be invaluable to CEOs:

Running a Design Sprint at the earliest opportunity in a project can significantly reduce the overall cost. A pure five day Design Sprint typically has a tiny impact on the overall timings of most large scale projects, but can shave weeks off the total development timeline by forcing teams to validate hypotheses and prove desirability before any significant investment has been made.

The five step Design Sprint process will help your organisation to value simplicity. The discipline of having precise phases and clear goals helps teams see where other business processes are convoluted and over-engineered. It is often the case that within large organisations the most valuable output of the sprint process is not always the prototype itself, but the new perspective participants will have on existing business processes.

Your innovation budget will go further as your organisation gets faster. The Design Sprint process will have a healthy impact on any innovation budget. Due to the efficiency of the process, the Design Sprint enables large organisations to both ‘place more bets’ by creating more prototypes overall, and move more quickly by increasing the amount of things that can be achieved in a specific window of time.

Sprints allow you to explore the future before the future becomes a problem. Recent years have shown that even the most established companies are rarely shielded from the effects of technological advancements and market disruption. The Design Sprint format provides a process to allow the board of an organisation to quickly explore possible futures and understand disrupting effects to the core business model before they have been felt.

Small teams can think big and big teams can scale quick. The Design Sprint is a compelling tool for large organisations as it allows them to leverage the best minds in their team, and leverage the scale of their organisation. Firstly, mobilising small multidisciplinary teams means that organisations can tackle big problems, fast. Thereafter, large organisations can then leverage their size and infrastructure to take proven sprint ideas to market quickly.

John Newbold is strategy director at 383

This is an excerpt from a new ’10 Minute Guide’ paper from 383 - SPRINT: Innovating fast in large organisations – which also features case studies on Spotify and Jaguar Land Rover.

Innovation Marketing

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