Managing Innovation as a Service
Being innovative and managing innovation are very different skills. To succeed at either, you have to be good at both. In my experience, innovation-as-a-service basically falls into 4 buckets: business, creative, technology and data. Surely there are others. These are mine:
Business innovation: The agency business is a fast moving train. You have to be an entrepreneur everyday, imagine how to relieve your client's pain points then making it happen – it can be a lifesaver for them, and a new revenue-generator for you. For example:
A few years ago, when legacy news brands were being upended by pure-play digital start-ups and hadn’t yet landed on a solid revenue play, I was running the agency (and the team) behind the campaign to launch a common paywall/subscription model across every one of Gannett’s 92 local market news publications. Shortly thereafter, having seen up-close my client’s titanic challenge with revenue, I created a think-tank/incubator, called Revenue-Lab, to imagine and incubate digital news products for large news publishers. I staffed it with senior (revenue) executives from other news organizations, successfully pitched it to Gannett’s CEO, and proceeded to work with their Product and Sales teams for the next year, as a narrowly focused and highly credible entity fully apart from the original agency.
Creative innovation. This bucket of campaigns, design, channels and partnerships is an agency’s lifeblood and measure of success. So fundamental and precious that it needs its own post soon. Suffice it to say, no management of creative innovation, no agency.
Technology innovation: You don’t have to own innovation in order to offer it as a service – that is especially true of technology. There are all sorts of supplier/vendor/frenemies in adtech, marketing automation, blockchain, AI, VR, programmatic, etc. that are all too happy to join your team, help pitch an innovative technology as part of a larger campaign. They are the technical experts, of course, so you do risk being upstaged if the success of the innovation overshadows your own work. But that is just part of managing technology innovation as a service.
Data innovation. Managing Data Innovation as a Service is all about the insights. For example, I became fluent in Google Analytics to converse, create and strategize directly with clients (in marketing and sales) in real-time about what content or media is working or not, where traffic was originating, where we were losing visitors and why, and what to do about it. Innovative media companies like Dstillery and their 23(!) data scientists innovate by triangulating huge data-sets to let marketers know much more about their customers' interests. Managing these insights-from-data into a separate revenue-stream is challenging. However, data insights and capabilities do win pitches and reliably improve engagement, traffic and conversion – so, it is invaluable to manage well digital innovation.