Closing down an online innovation platform
The TLDR version (10 minute read)
I deployed an online platform to surface new ideas and closed it down two years later, having appreciated the learnings from hypotheses that were disproved along the way.
I wrote a post, some communications to the business some months ago announcing the closure of an innovation platform I helped to birth. It was a baby that had a challenging persona in it’s teens and was often neglected by it’s relatives but it was my baby and I loved it all the same. Like any loving parent, it was sad, after plenty of trips to the hospital, to go see the doctor and to choose for it to be put to sleep for the last time. I’m thankful I had the opportunity at the end to voluntarily pull the plug on it’s life support in the recognition that it was best for all involved, acknowledging the good times, the learnings and in the knowledge that there would be another time, later on, where the business would benefit from it’s investment if those learnings were retained.
Is this thing still adding value?
Innovation Hub was an ideas platform, a website powered by a company called Crowdicity, that was designed to facilitate conversation around new opportunities and the assumptions that went with them. The call to close it down after two-and-a-bit years came to making an investment decision: Would we rather continue supporting a platform for exploring new ideas or keep the cash associated with ongoing licensing? In consultation with key stakeholders, my decision, despite Innovation Hub being my baby was to go with the cash. Given the strategic decisions made adjacent to the innovation platform, it was clear to me that the ability of conversation on the platform to translate to valuable outcomes exceeding the value of investment was becoming very limited. The return on investment balance in a financial and non-financial sense just wasn’t there. Did this mean that Innovation at this company was dead? Certainly not but we had to recognise where it was still happening and that was now at the ‘tribe’ level rather than on this increasingly orphaned online platform. The innovation platform had done it’s thing and the organisation had now evolved, meaning ongoing investment in a sentimental thing would have been self-indulgent.
This time, I had data to support the conclusion and it told me that the platform had already really entered in to a coma. The value proposition wasn’t the same as the last time we made the investment decision. It was time to acknowledge the sunk cost fallacy and move on.
So, what learnings could be taken away from this? What additional value might be extracted from the initial investment and should we have closed the platform down earlier?
Learnings
These communities only thrive when a path from idea to prioritisation and implementation is clear to those who invest their time in to the process (closed loop feedback). This was proved over two hackathons that I planned and facilitated where the feedback was awesome and the outcomes of progressed initiatives were clear! The only time feedback turned the other way was when people interested in the idea lost transparency on the next steps on the idea or felt it had 'fallen in to a black hole'. Used properly, platforms like Crowdicity enable an ‘open by default’ conversation about next steps for new ideas. If there was more of an opportunity to do so, being able to define expectations from platform stakeholders before ‘go-live’ announcements would have been beneficial. For the hackathons, this was done to great effect with stakeholders appreciating a funding and incubation pathway and understanding their accountability at each step. For the long-term ‘ideas for today’ campaign, it was not done as effectively with wide and nebulous stakeholder groups and responses to ideas in different contexts and I think this correlated to dwindling engagement.
Shiny things yield short attention spans. It’s hard for enduring change to exist without reinforcement and a commitment to consistent messaging. The ADKAR model is a helpful framework to forecast how well change might go by identifying choke points in engagement. In this case, Awareness and Desire (the A and D of ADKAR) for employees to engage in different approaches to ideation and problem solving were kicked off with platform launch communications and engagement with stakeholders who were involved with the preceding platform which made it easy to start on the front foot. Knowledge was built through campaign launches and through ongoing engagement with community participants but when it came to Ability to role model change by participants and Reinforcement of that behaviour, the change was less sustainable. Without a consistent top-down message of enablement for front-line and bottom-up problem solving and innovation, ideas would start with support and would hit a wall with a particular leader or an opaque governance mechanism elsewhere in the organisation and idea proposers would loose enthusiasm over time. Without support of strategic connection (and following a decision to focus on top-down major initiatives over exploration of an innovation strategy as a way to enable the strategy with a more diverse palate), the shiny innovation platform would be hamstrung and attention spans would wane. Without an ability to engage, supported by an aligned culture and without reinforcement of that innovative muscle, the community died due to limited ability to deliver.
Sometimes you’ve just got to kill your own baby. No body wants to admit defeat but what is defeat in this case? Once understanding a root cause for decline in community engagement on this innovation platform, would it be right to keep keep applying electric paddles to jolt it back to life? I chose to consider the data, to step back from ego and choose a different narrative. One that could celebrate the good that came from an investment in an experiment and focus on the learnings that we could apply and were already applying elsewhere in the organisation. By considering the change and comms strategy for closing the platform down as an opportunity, the most could be made of the learnings to date and we could benefit the business by reducing noise and expense despite the easier decision being to continue with the status quo.
Don’t loose sight of your next highest risk assumption or hypothesis. I remember raising a risk early on that without senior leader buy-in and wider strategic messaging (regarding the framework that supported the platform) that ideas would continue to hit road blocks but the instruction at the time was to continue on the basis that innovation strategy work to follow would clear the way. Unfortunately, that scenario did not play out as expected 12 months later when that innovation strategy work was paused to allow for renewed focus on wider corporate strategy efforts. I take away the learning that it pays to keep an eye on risks that mature and that our ability to realise outcomes from products we deliver is only as good as the next riskiest hypothesis. When a hypothesis is disproved, the investment can be reassessed earlier and it is easier to course correct. In this case, when the decision to pause innovation strategy work came through, it could have been an opportunity to surface the risk to the innovation community and either persevere, pivot or pause engagement on the innovation hub platform.
The software or process is just a tool to support alignment. The outcome of applying that tool only benefits the business once behaviours change. It is people who ultimately deliver value for the business and this is an early experience that lead me to driving pursuit of business outcomes over the delivery of ‘stuff’ without it being directly connected to a business strategy or desired business outcome, measure or verifiable hypothesis. I remember that when I picked up this opportunity, the decision had already been made to invest in the website product but no investment had been made in the thinking or characterisation of what good looked like. Little thought had been put to the design and or to the way our people would think and feel after using that product, supported by a broader innovation framework. I gained an appreciation for discovery, earlier on in the process to ask “what problem are we really trying to solve here?”
I consider Innovation Hub to be one of my first org-wide software platform deployments and continue to be happy with it’s genesis from an execution point of view having entered the scene when I did, within my first couple of months at this business. Having now seen the lifecycle from inception to winding-up, I appreciate many of the triumphs and mis-steps in retrospect. I now ask this “what problem are we trying to solve” question much earlier. It’s not just answered with “we need this software” but it goes much deeper to why we need the software and what business problem are we trying to solve to deliver something valuable to our end-use customers. I try to ensure customers and architects of a solution are connected much earlier to avoid the sort of anchoring that occurs when we get caught up in ‘delivering stuff’ without understanding if the deliverable is of value to a customer.
I take these learnings with me as I’ve been deploying an online whiteboarding platform called Miro as an enabler to our ways of hybrid working. Having been granted the opportunity to define ‘the why’ behind this platform with a community of users, the approach has been different and all users are aware and connected to the value-add of their licence as an enabler for them to deliver value to their customers through more effortless online collaboration and co-creation.
