Or “the one-pager”
Innovators often have difficulty to convince business teams/leaders of the potential value of their innovative idea, because they “don’t speak the right language”. This is especially an issue if the innovator is in a non-commercial role like IT, finance or manufacturing, as these colleagues may not be familiar with the priority business challenges and strategies. Sometimes innovators create a long story with lack of focus and lose the interest of the busy marketing sponsor. Excellent solutions can be unnecessarily missed this way. Many vendors have developed programs and tools to help innovators with telling a convincing story.
Training all employees in these techniques is a challenge and expensive. To address this, we developed a simple one slide story template that can be created in about 15’. We asked the innovators who had a new idea to fill in the form and guided them to ensure the story was rational, impactful and in the appropriate “business language”. The format also helped the innovator to focus on and think through the key elements of the story in a disciplined way. Once told, every element of the story could then be discussed and expanded upon.
The (yes: PowerPoint!) template has a title and 3 fields. The title indicates the code name of the innovation, the relevant brand, the area of innovation covered (we had 3 “around the brand” ones: access, adherence, engagement) and the country where the experiment will take place. The 3 fields include the problem that is being addressed (for the customer, stakeholder, brand), the innovative solution (a few bullet points with the description) and the qualitative value this innovation could generate (typically for the customer, stakeholder, brand).
An example:
- Title: Twitter – anti-inflammatory brand – patient engagement – Mexico
- Problem: Patient with knee pain stops taking drugs after multiple treatment failures. New research demonstrated efficacy of the anti-inflammatory brand after other drugs failed. The brand team cannot reach patients efficiently (the traditional way, advertising, is too expensive).
- Innovative solution: Identify through Twitter posts patients and caregivers that discuss knee pain and it’s impact. Tweet to these patients a recommendation to see their doctor, as a new drug could help them.
- Potential value: For patients: no more pain. For doctors: can help relevant patients better. For the brand team: efficiently reach the appropriate target population and generate sales for the brand.
This kind of template is very easy to use: no or limited training is needed. This tool helps any innovator clearly communicate with the business teams: through a focused story about how a relevant business problem will be addressed and what potential value could be generated. As the innovation experiment then matures (or fails), this template remains valuable to tell the story of the original assumptions and how they were validated (or disproved).
Sometimes, an innovator was not able to develop this. This typically happened because the idea (although very innovative) did not address one of the priority business problems or no clear potential customer or business value would be created. In those cases, I considered the innovation of insufficient value to retain in the innovation portfolio and to provide further support.
As Peter Guber said:
“Purposeful storytelling isn’t show business, it’s good business.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I asked every innovator who came up with a new idea, to take 15′ to create this one-pager. I helped to ensure that the right problems were being focused on and that the appropriate marketing language was used. Then, the innovation journey started!
More about this: Telling a good innovation story, by Julian Birkinshaw from McKinsey
Please share your experiences below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele