BEI

It works! What now?

The Back End of Innovation (BEI) is about implementing successful innovations. A unique benefit of large corporations is that innovations that reach success in one part of the organization, e.g. in one country can be copied, adapted and executed across the rest of the organization. There are many barriers to overcome of course, especially the “not invented here” syndrome: “this will not work here, as our country, customer, environment is very different”. I learned, after a couple of failures, how those barriers can be addressed.

A business team in Asia had developed an innovative solution to help patients take their diabetes medication appropriately and consistently. They first tested this idea in India and later in the Philippines and Australia, adapting the innovation to the different market situations and gathering critical learnings. Once they had demonstrated the value and impact of this program for patients, healthcare providers and the brand, I asked them to share this with the global leadership team. We also provided specific recommendations on the kind of markets this program would work best in. The global leadership then defined the countries in their regions which were most appropriate for this program. Then they asked the management of those countries to implement the program. We (critically) assigned the original Asian business team to support those countries, using their deep learnings from the first iterations. This program has been successfully scaled in over 50 countries.

A few key success factors:

• The global leadership team asked the country managers for regular progress and impact updates. This helped to ensure sustained commitment from the country teams to execute the program and create value.
• The original dedicated, experienced, passionate Asian business team lead the roll out. This Center of Excellence provided credibility to the country teams and accountability for the global execution.
• An IT team was engaged from the very beginning. This collaboration helped to deepen the IT colleagues’ understanding of the business needs. This generated joint learnings and the creation of a proprietary technology platform.
• This platform accelerated scaling and adaptation to country specific customer and business needs. It allowed to easily add “modules” of new, innovative solutions that strengthened the core program. This in turn stimulated continued innovation, based on emerging technologies (chatbots, VR) and based on new business needs (affordability solutions, application to other brands) – all of which could easily be “plugged” into the platform.
• The program evolved beyond it’s original objectives. It added value to tender contacts and some customer groups wanted to buy it, to support patients on their other medications.

As Michael Graber said:

”Do too many ideas stall out innovation? This quandary is rooted in what is known as the “Front end of Innovation,” which is the idea generation part of the process, and the “Back end of Innovation,” which is the strategy and implementation of these ideas.”

So, as Innovation Leader, to support the BEI, I made sure that the innovator had a strong business “proof”, that the leadership team sponsored the scaling and that an experienced Center of Excellence supported the roll out.

More reading: SPARTA & SPARSH and There is No ‘Back End’ of Innovation

Do you have additional thoughts, experience or learnings? Please share below.