 Wow, i am so incredulous that so many people have turned up for such an early start on a Friday morning. I can see some familiar faces in the audience and it's absolutely lovely to welcome you back. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Wendy Kerr and I have the absolute pleasure and privilege to be the director for the Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Auckland Business School, which is obviously part of Auckland University. Aotearoa mezi at Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is to unleash the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship across all staff and students at Auckland University. And we do this because we want to transform their mindsets so that together they can build a more prosperous and creative New Zealand economy. We have had an astounding feedback and an astounding result today to get so many people in the room. And clearly the topic is hitting a chord with all of you. And I know that we've gone to many conferences and panels and discussions about disruption, uber this, airbnb this, and I think some of us are a bit tired of the same old rhetoric around what innovation and disruption is. So today I hope that you are enlightened by a gritty panel discussion from people who have been there and done it. So I'd love to know, Shoa of Hands, how many of you are working in corporates who are struggling with innovation? Okay, just a few. And how many of you are working in firms that want to help corporates about innovation? That's more like it. So we've got a good blend of people who need help and people who want to help. If we're thinking about innovation, how do we do it? Do we bring in some consultants and they do innovation for our company? Do we make everyone an innovator in the company? Or do we buy some groovy start-up and just hope that that vibe spreads through the organisation and that's our innovation solution? So today we have four panellists who have been experts in the field of innovation and made some significant changes in all of their organisations. And you're going to hear from them today about how they've done it and what they've learnt from it. So every panellist will speak for five minutes and then after they've spoken we'll open up the floor for questions. So first of all we have Lee Angus and she's the head of innovation and commercialisation at ASB Bank. She has a stellar career of really innovating globally. She's worked with large corporates with research labs, universities and commercialisation units in Israel, China, Australia and now we're lucky enough to have her in New Zealand. So we've all seen the innovation that ASB has done and Lee's going to share with us her experiences there and around the world. So thank you, Lee. Thank you. Good morning everyone, so can you hear me alright? I'm a little croaky in the voice, you'll have to excuse me. I commute back and forth between Australia and New Zealand so every time I get it on plane I tend to bring the Australian kind of strain over here and then the New Zealand one back over there so you'll have to excuse me. I guess it's a rather strange and wonderful last 15-20 years in innovation and to have done it in all sorts of environments Wendy's alluded to a lot of it in terms of research environments as well as corporates but I also bear the bruises of having start-ups of my own and have one at the moment that's been going for about three years now and it's reasonably successful but it's taken me about the fifth one to get there. So I have a rather empathetic heart for start-ups and entrepreneurs and founders trying to get businesses off the ground because essentially it's hard work. So in terms of corporate innovation I'm on I guess my third gig of corporate innovation. I did take transfer for a university for about four years which was in licensing research and new intellectual property and emerging technologies into large corporate environments and then on the other side I did a period of time with Domino's in Australia which is the ASX listed company that has multiple territories across the world. I did seven months there in what is the quick service industry and it was brutal in the sense of just how fast they operate how quick they need to go to market and also I guess just as a culture and technology industry and then more recent times now almost a year in with ASB in banking and finance which is a completely different kind of sector again so it's been a really interesting journey and I guess I'll just talk to a few of the differences perhaps around what I've seen from say a Domino's environment to an ASB environment and some of the things that we've done really well to perhaps some of the things where we've kind of tripped up and need to learn from them so Domino's is an intriguing company in the sense that it is a five billion company the share price dropped recently so I suspect it's down to about four now but a five billion company that is still run by one of the original founders of the Australian Territories so Domino's is a US brand and then it's licensed out as a franchisee but the original Domino's person in Australia Don May who's probably I think he's sitting around 25 years of age was originally a driver a pizza driver flipping the pies getting them out from the door so it comes from grassroots and he's built that business up from in the Australian territory to New Zealand, Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Germany and the principality of Monaco which is quite intriguing I'm just not quite sure what their pizzas look like they're a bit gold crusted but they're from one store working as a pizza delivery guy one store to now what is 1700 stores and inherently operates like a founder of a start-up you know it gets a flash of an idea from an instinctual stomach you know in the gut got to do this and runs hard and fast for the opportunity and the whole business runs with him really really quickly and they pride themselves on first first on everything first to pizza tracker first to autonomous robotic units first to drone deliveries first to everything so they really really run fast it's a hard-paced environment it was a great experience in the sense that Don when he wants the business to move the business moves moves really really fast so if you want something done and it ignites his interest and his passion it gets done immediately you know I think that's half of the success of the business is the sense that you do have this really entrepreneurial person at the top of it driving the business so you know when Don wakes up and says we are going to do autonomous deliveries make it happen it happened within months and actually drew which was the robotic unit that we put on the ground first ever in the industry we had that project built delivered prototype it wasn't a full one delivered working through all of the legislative problems and challenges within about three and a half months so it was a remarkable speed and he just kept the accelerator going going going going so on that side you have this really really fast moving environment excellent fun but really taxi within seven months burnt out cannot live like this this is not a world that I can kind of keep up moving to ASB you have a far more traditional business a far more reserved and conservative approach but in the same sense you also have this beautiful kind of considered way of thinking about our customers and our markets and where we're delivering in the strategy sometimes it gets a little frustrating because it's much slower the wheels turn a little slower but you know that it's not a flash and the pan idea from someone morning and said we are going in that direction you know it's a considered direction where the whole ship is going and it's moving at a reasonable pace to get there and it's taking into account all of the people on board of that boat that need to be involved with it so a very different experience and then of course run by a CEO who has been born and bred in a corporate environment and understands the frameworks that she needs to work in is the boat in a really well considered manner so very very different environment but not any less with any less appetite for change and innovation and speed as dominoes just a very very different kind of approach so I've actually I've had more success and have been well received within ASB than I ever was in dominoes because innovation isn't a flash in the pan idea it's a full comprehensive strategy it's cultural change it's a mindset that needs to be kind of filtered out right across the business not in pockets of one or two people you know people have to kind of appreciate that if a business is going to be innovative it's the whole of the business that's innovative because innovation doesn't happen in isolation it doesn't happen in pockets it's not individuals it takes a whole tribe to get really good game changing ideas from a thought bubble to implementation so we're developing in ASB a number of strategies to kind of continue our journey of being front foot on innovation and to continue the proof points that people associate with the brand as being innovative and those strategies range from anything from programs for entrepreneurship and education and training for our people to outreach to universities and to start ups and engagement models that make sense for all the parties to funding mechanisms to making innovation transparent and also to make it profitable so you know I'm currently now putting ourselves in as a P&L so that anything we put our hand to over a period of time three, four, five years we can point to the returns of our investment early on in the stage to say well we you know that's where we contributed to where now the returns come back to us that we are almost becoming a self-sustaining machinery within ASB itself and also we've got the legs to stand up and say well actually look at the dollars it's not just the pretty ideas we don't just do sticky and post-it notes on walls we actually return investment off our activities in our effort over time but it's a long-term play so as you can appreciate all of you or some of your corporates, quarterlies matter for everything you know every three months everyone is kind of under pressure on delivering on numbers so anyone in innovation you know has to kind of hold solid because it is a long-term and it means a bit of rusing it means being kind of tough and robust and kind of being prepared to be questioned and challenged constantly because a lot of the work that we're doing now we may will not see any effect for another three, four, five years because innovation takes time, takes a lot of people particularly the innovation that I like which is really the industry changing the game changing stuff and when you do that it's not just employees involved it tends to be governments involved because there's policy changes that are needed in place there tends to be capital involved in some way in terms of someone who's putting in significant investment if it's not the corporate it's someone else there tends to be entrepreneurs involved around it as well because there's this spark of new ideas coming in from other people there tends to be good solid research science technology underpinning it as well that's the fundamental innovation that I really, really love and that's one sort of I kind of grapple with on a regular day to show how it's sort of delivering off on what is it bank delivering quarter by quarter year by year I'll leave you with that Next we have Chris Quinn who is the CEO of Foodstuffs North Island Limited and in fact it was a conversation I heard Chris having at the Icehouse board meeting of which he and I are both on the board of Chris is the chair around corporate innovation and what is a different way to do it that really sparked this idea in my mind to have a panel discussion about it so thanks for that Chris before he joined Foodstuffs led a very successful rebrand of Telecom to Spark and I think we can all see what an incredible rebrand that was and what a massive success that's been in July 2010 he also received the Emerging Leader Award at the annual Sir Peter Blake Leadership Awards and he's also received the Chairman's Award of the 2010 Two Amps Innovation Awards and as I said he is the chair of the Icehouse Board a role that he really relishes so thank you Chris Thank you Wendy and look good morning fascinating listening already to the stories around the room you know after 24 years in an industry that was forced to innovate very very often because there's not many industries where you spend $500 million a year in capital to have your revenue go backwards slowly every year you know and Telco is an incredible you know in some ways value destroying industry I think what rival airlines in many ways so you go from there to an organisation that is now 95 years old in New Zealand that you could argue easily the last innovation foodstuffs did was the establishment of the pack and save brand in New Zealand and that's quite exciting when you think about it until you remember that it's 32 years old you know so the organisation has been incredibly successful by changing very little and being very careful for a very long time and when you stand back and look at an organisation that turns over $7.5 billion a year in the North Island alone has 1.3 million customers a week going through the stores and in fact we're thinking about as 500,000 transactions a day so anything you plan to do you sort of have this little thing at the back of your mind that says don't screw that up because the multiplier effect is rapid and you know so you look at all of that and go how do you think about innovation on that and how do you pull some of the learnings together I think the subject which was why do corporates find innovation so hard is fascinating in itself because I think it has a bias in it that assumes corporates find it hard and I'll talk a little bit about observations between startups and corporates and the attitudes actually one overriding thing for me is it's not innovative, no one buys it and I think that's a really there's a lot of innovation and a lot of tension around innovation that people have in their minds because they just go I love my idea and that's cool as long as you're not the only one and that's the thing that we just keep thinking about in terms of innovation is how do you make sure there is a customer base for it that is valuable for someone when I stand back and go what's hard about innovations particularly in larger organizations and corporates the first one is if you've got no system, no framework of innovation, it's great hearing about the extent to which ASB are thinking about that and I think many of us would say that's probably being the technology brand lead bank in New Zealand for a long time you can see why no courage no courage to stand up and have something fail and be okay about that no crisis it sort of goes with the other one which is if you are too successful as an organization innovation is hard because there is this serious overlay of don't fuck it up and that slows people down a lot around innovation the other one is you don't know your customers organizations that don't deeply know and understand their customers and the insight find innovation very hard because the innovation comes from customers customers will force innovation far quicker than any technology and just deeply understanding not only what customers do in your organization or your value chain but why they do it and what is driving them is the critical thing any organization with a below the line culture or blame culture, innovation is really hard because everyone is hunting for someone to fail and pick them out real quick and the last bit that I think is hard about corporate innovation is many startups attitude to corporates working, being on the team at the ice house has been great because you are reminded weekly about what it's like to run a business that is struggling to pay next week's wages bill and go back to the safe blanket of decent revenue and decent earnings and it's just a nice dichotomy to keep working with I've seen several startups every organization you go to you get them chasing it and presenting their idea and going your company is dead if you don't buy my startup and you go well maybe and I saw one on social media leading into a thing we had where they said I'm sick of these corporates that is full of fat lazy middle aged managers who have never worked a day in their life before to your perch you know and when they pitched I said just tell me a little bit about that you know and it's just there is we see it all the time right so food industry I have New Zealand fantastic clever interesting New Zealand startups show up with products and they show up and they sort of go I've got this thing and it's amazing and it is and they go my problem is I just can't get it immediately ranged into your stores and I think for a minute when you're turning over what we do a year when you have 450 stores it probably needs to go into a system so it goes bleep at the checkout and I know that sounds frustrating to you as a startup but if you want the big price you know you've got to actually understand your customer and one of the biggest pieces of advice to try and give them is think about the time you put into pitching for investment would it be worth putting about the same amount of time pitching into a big customer because they generally are massively out of balance on that the most powerful thing any startup to sell up potential investor is we've got this customer so observations or things to get right about innovation and larger organisations the first one is strength of customer insight you've got to know it regularly update it talk about it all the time and have all of your people spending time out in front of customers now we did a little thing where we rebranded our private label stuff and I spent about 10 days 2 hours a day in stores talking to customers who had the previous brand stuff in their trolleys and just going oh tell me about that you know it was a thing called budget and you found out that customers would only buy it if it was buying for a church event a social event a school event a sports event they would never buy it for their own cupboards because it made them feel bad it wasn't hard to work out what to do so innovate the brand fast understanding that 50% of our revenue will come from millennials in Gen Z within 5 years and you stand back and go how many of them watch TV or read our newspaper ads so just really understanding customers intimately and talking about it a lot the second thing is having owners mindset in the business so the domino stories fantastic in terms of the owners mindset living through quite a large organisation we have it we have 450 of them they would call themselves innovators I'd call some of them off the planet but you know the everyday innovation that goes on you know when you have a model like a co-op or a franchise everyday they can walk out and make a change in store try it measure it try again so that very fast cycle innovation is actually core in the culture it's just how do you bring it right up through and diversity in teams is critical absolutely critical I mean proper diversity diversity of style and thought and mindset as well as gender race culture but if you've got that then you're going to get ideas that you would not have thought of because of your context so constantly finding that diversity and tapping it and leaders really matters you have to have leadership tolerant and tolerant of failure actually that goes with it you've got a partner or acquired disruption I know Wendy you mentioned should we just buy a start-up to work with and I agree that's a dangerous thing to do because quite often you just kill a start-up but what you should be doing is working out how to partner with how to be challenged to buy and example Wendy mentioned so we recently the meal kit category has gone big in New Zealand my food bag and others have done a fantastic job they've established a category and a need so we decided we needed to play hard into the category you know the normal process in our business 9 to 12 months at least to get out so we partnered through Ice House with an entrepreneur basically set it up that way where we gave them an allocation of cash and said you've got this much cash to get to this point in terms of market development and then if you're on target we'll cash flow you again if you're not we'll stop and that gave them the permission to do it all the ways that made sense and to try stuff that we would not have naturally tried inside the organisation the team was made up 50-50 so 50% of people who knew how we worked but had the right mindset 50% of externals and they just go at it and come back to us about once a month or an update to an advisory board right and it's worked we've now got a product market shifting about 500 units a week across six doors and we're ready to sort of go bigger so it's been a nice example for us you've got a budget to fail so you have to fund innovation somehow right it has to have a return and what we're trying to get to is a mindset that basically says we need to save twice as much as we spend on innovation so just constantly thinking because innovation is risky not everything is going to work and pay off so we just try and think about that and Fresh Collective which is a brand we just launched you know if you followed the little innovation path overseas research understanding your customer insight deeply open the first one on the North Shore on Constellation Drive change it about 100% for the second one in Elburton and the third one will sort of be better again and this is happening in about 8-12 weeks cycles which is quite different for us and it's off customer feedback so it's just constantly asking customers what they think being in store with them listening, watching and the original prototype of that we did in an old Foursquare and Panmure by the roundabout where we stripped the building out and basically built polystyrene store inside it's like walking on the moon and there it's weird but we had hundreds of people go through it and just go what do you think this where would you move that and that was the sort of design process it wasn't 2D drawings it was a 4D experience that we learnt from and you could change quickly the last thing I'd say about success is you've got to harness the organisation somehow any attitude that says you're in the non-innovative part of the company you know it's a really cool conversation to have with people right so you've just got to say everybody can contribute everybody can chip in you have to have a framework for gathering their ideas and quickly responding and the response quite often will be no not right for us or doesn't fit or yes we're going to get behind it this is what we're going to do but you've got to have that framework so a few thoughts on how to make it work Thank you very much Chris that was absolutely fascinating now we have Dawn Namo and she is the Director of Innovations and Ventures at PWC now Dawn calls herself a self-disruptor now I've not met anyone who's called a self-disruptor but she has a lot of experience of start-ups and corporate businesses and certainly moving into PWC she's seen a whole different culture in terms of how they're innovating and what they're doing with their clients I don't actually remember calling myself a self-disruptor but I guess that lends to my personality which is as I get different information and inputs then I am a person that will change and so as I'm talking I'm going to be looking at your faces to see if I'm hitting the point or not and we've had some really great points about innovation so far and what I want to do is not re-iterate those but maybe look at it in a slightly different way and if we go back to the subject of why is it hard for corporates to do innovation I think we need to look at corporates itself and I'm going to be very general because I can't talk about specifics we don't have enough time but when we look at a corporate we visualise a certain type of company so it's large it's got a lot of hierarchy in it there's a lot of people involved and I think when we look at that at a level down and understand what that hierarchy brings and what it means to manage so many people they are really internally focused because they've got to get everybody doing the same vision and they introduce hierarchy because they've got to get that communication going in all the different levels and what that does is it creates a really big challenge for somebody or creating innovation internally because you've got a set of people who are absolutely amazing at what they do on a daily basis and you're asking them to change you're asking them to do something different what they do every day and they've been told in the past you have built our success you have made us be the large corporate that we are today but now I need you to change that I need you to do something different that's super frightening that's really scary for those people and so when you go to them and go okay we're going to be an innovative company now that has little meaning to them what will happen is these barriers will come up and they'll be like oh my god I have to stop doing what I do what do I do now and so when Chris was talking about how you need to have it in all parts of the business that's what it is you need to not only have an amazing strong vision like the dominoes guy but you also need to have the outcomes that you want but the path in between and that's where people get lost we can talk at this really really high level and we know this is what we want at the end of it but how do I get there how do I go from that to that and that's what my speciality is and that's what we're attempting to do inside the Innovation Hub at PWC and I totally agree that innovation is not for one area and so we've taken that on board and even though we're a single group and I know that in in our area inside PWC they look at us and they're like those innovation people just as well they're doing it we have to focus on doing our daily stuff we have to operate the company we have to get the money in they're just going to spend it so what we do is we are very conscious of that and we try and make our contact points with the other people in the business really human and so we're talking to them in the context of what it is in their role and we show them what's possible and we show them what's possible by prototyping by talking to customers by bringing external views into the company and show them so that they can make a decision they can think about it they're the specialist in their role there's no way that I can come into the business and go this is the way you should be doing your job from now on but what I can do is go hey these are some tools this is a different way to think about it this is potentially a different lens how would you apply it against your job today and by doing that that then gives them a slight jolt but a safe one to go oh actually maybe I don't have to do it in Excel anymore maybe there's another way to do what I do and I think that's a really important thing to note when you're trying to change an organisation and allow it to be more innovative is that you have to take into consideration what the business model is you have to take into consideration the people that are inside that organisation you have to plan for change and Chris definitely outlined that and I just want to underline it and that is you have to plan for it from an executive level from the middle management level to the daily operations level if there isn't a plan all the way through your business you'll just get pockets and you'll end up with lots and lots of ideas but they never get to fruition they'll never see the light of day and so it's really important that if you're going into an organisation to say hey we know how to solve the innovation problem for you we know how we're going to disrupt you you need to make sure that you have the buy-in through the whole company not just one area and I know from my past that I have had some success and some failures where you go in and you know everything and you go in there and you're like I know how to do this this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong and this is wrong technology, it's done sweet, just go and do it now and when you do that you're just handing over a whole lot of stuff but it's not contextualising it to that particular company and that is really important and that goes to understand your client or understand your customers if you're doing it internally so by understanding you can provide the context by providing context and so I would say those are my key points Thank you very much Dawn it was a really interesting lens on it to give us a broader perspective of what innovation can be for different companies and I think there was something on what she said about it it is about change and it's about the people so next up we have Niki Rystrick who is the group general manager of digital at Fletcher Building now she leads a team of 36 businesses across 40 markets globally so you can imagine what it's like to innovate across that span of cultures, time zones and everything else that comes of an organisation of that size in 2015 Niki established a digital innovation lab that creates innovative digital products and has delivered $7 million in EBIT over the last two years so I think there's proof that innovation can be profitable Innovation means a lot of different things to different people I think if I asked each of you what innovation meant to you I think I'd get a different definition for every single person in this room am I right? For me innovation means delivering value but in a bold way but there's a scale right so you've got innovation from the micro innovation all the way through disruption and I think this is why it gets confusing for people around why corporates in terms of a perception because I don't believe that's true I've been involved with corporates that have been innovating right from the very first point in my career when I was a founding employee for extra and that was a massive change not just for telecom but for New Zealand as a whole it was in the early days of putting the internet in the hands of every person in New Zealand and that was really interesting because when we first started for extra was to get 100,000 people online in our first year who knows how many we got in the first year a million people online in our first year and that was the start of a massive transformation for New Zealand in terms of getting online and I've been involved in a few different companies over the course of my career I worked for Canon in Europe and we invested in a little start up that created a technology that enabled you to save photos online so that you would have access to them this was in about 2002 and now look at your photo sharing online it's everywhere and that organisation that we invested in wanted to create a cloud hosting service and we built that and it was fantastic and then Amazon launched into the market so we had to close it down so innovation is also about timing it's creating the value and really understanding what your customers want as well when I returned to New Zealand four years ago I was lucky enough to reconnect with a lot of my extra colleagues who were starting Spark Ventures Rod Snowgrass was someone I worked with at Extra and I joined that team at the start of Spark Ventures and over that course of that first year we established five business in the market of which all are still operating now you can look at that in a number of different ways but for an organisation to spin up five businesses in a year is quite an achievement but the other thing that's really lasting about that organisation is we introduced new ways of working the culture of working connecting with customers, understanding your customers bringing that insight into your organisation and then working in an agile, iterative, lean customer-centric way to bring those ideas to life and then I moved from there working for a bank and looking at how can you innovate in a bank and actually bring that customer insight into your strategy and we worked for four months to understand what should the future branch footprint look like based on the changing natures of customer needs what should the interior of that look like and how do you integrate the online world within a branch footprint and that was a really fun piece of work and then at Fletcher's now there's a very kind introduction around what we've achieved at Fletcher's but you know the thing that's really made a difference at Fletcher's is the cultural change when I started there two and a half years ago and I started talking about digital I may as well be talking another language so what's all this stuff you're talking about how is this relevant how are you getting your orders into your business oh well 50% of them are coming in by fax or on a piece of wood or on a piece of jib or they just come and rock into the branch and say I need this how is that really helping you be efficient in having the right conversations with your customers when you're just dealing with this huge wads of paper everywhere and you get your cement dust and your rain and you can imagine what that's like and it's been a fantastic opportunity to be working at Fletcher's it's built in ecosystem of businesses 36 different businesses all doing different things going in different directions trying to achieve different things trying to get people who are used to digging up holes in the ground and putting in pieces of jib in the wall to understand how digital can really enable that business has been quite fun and quite challenging but you know what really works is getting out in the business with your hard hat on and talking to the people on the shop floor or talking to the customers that are rolling in in their truck and you know what are you doing here you don't look like you should be on the floor having conversations with people and understanding what they're trying to do and it's not just wanting to know who they are but it's really understanding how we fit into their work and their life and what it is that we're doing that's helping them or hindering them and one of the applications that we created was a specification tool for one of our Australian businesses. They're an insulation business and they had a team of four people who would create the specifications for insulation for their architects and specifiers who wanted a specification to put into their consenting process and it would take them two or three weeks to create this specification. It's really complex a lot of maths, a lot of standards, a lot of information that has to come into it and we managed to boil that down into a very simple app that they were able to download themselves from the app store they are now able to do all of those specifications themselves instead of doing four or five specifications a month we are now doing 400 specifications a month and that app which cost is about 70 grand to make has generated over a million and a half of EBIT in the time that it's been launched and it's continuing to add value but what we did differently was that application, we didn't just put it on the app store and say you go download it, here you go we actually went and engaged with our customers and said well we've got this new tool that can probably help you and here's how it works and here's how you get involved and here's some training for a lot of people in the building community technology can be quite intimidating they don't necessarily use technology in their day to day it's not true for everyone but for a big chunk of ours the people that we engage with so we had to hand hold them through that process and really manage the onboarding of the people onto that technology we had another example where a customer said we want an app because our competitors have got one so oh that's great so we went out and we talked to their customers and said what are you trying to do how would this kind of technology work for you and by the way how is this technology that our competitor is using and they said well I know they've got that app but we don't use it because if we send in a fax and if there's an error the company takes accountability for that if I use this tool there's no question about whether I made a mistake or not so I take accountability for it so we don't use it and I said well how do you get around that you know it's really about understanding what it is that's getting in the way of that adoption as well and how you can incentivise people to actually use the innovations that you're creating and on that no I'll hand back to you Wendy applause okay so now we get into the really part of the conversation so I'll sit down so I don't think being too school marmuch I'm going to start off with some questions I'm sure you've all got questions as well in fact I know you have because I saw them when you RSVP and it was wonderful to see the level of interest in this topic so the question I have is you know we hear a lot about innovation and then we hear about not wanting to ruin the business Chris you use much more colourful language than that so how do you balance the need to keep on I guess growing testing things out, risking failure but ensuring that the solid business stays solid so who'd like to start with that again we can give it a go I think it's really important to test so don't do a really big test do a really little test and figure out what your objective is of course in your hypotheses and then make a little test and then see what the feedback is so an example of that would be we're working on something at the moment around helping people with retirement for example instead of building the software from end to end and then doing the bigger unveil what I did is I did some sketches using a very basic tool and then started using that to start a conversation to be able to get people to think about it and also to get end user feedback on whether or not it's a good idea by doing that I know okay does it have legs or doesn't it have legs if it doesn't have legs it's probably a sure path to failure if it does have legs then wow what I'll do is I'll grow it a little bit more I'll invest a little bit more time around that and so then in each stage I do it like a layering of a cake and as I build it up it gets a richer and richer experience around it and at each layer I just keep checking with people internally and externally is this a thing and then with that it means that you're more likely to be able to get the bad ideas out quickly without little effort and then you've got the good ideas you're putting the investment in so you're likely to get some money and some return back for it yeah it doesn't have to be like I can do a sketch in 20 minutes and then start talking to people I think it's when you timetable everything it becomes a very long process I think if you have the room to be able to just do then it can be a very fast process so having that space is really important and having that connection to customers which is what Chris was talking about is super important as well because otherwise who can you ask for the feedback anyone else? Well I guess in my experience another technique you can try is establish it if it's a bigger disruption establishing a completely separate brand that has no visible connection to the mother company can be a good way to start and evolve that organisation until such time as you can perhaps bring it in and perhaps Chris might have seen that happen at Telecom Muka knowing customers intimately testing fast but safely in particular when you think about the food industry getting that wrong is not good and having very good response of feedback loop so for us innovation cycles can be 24 hours something that can go out get a customer reaction, carry on or not carry on breaking it down into little chunks making sure there was a customer reason you tried it at home and being very clear about how you're going to measure success and measure outcome and that you're going to engage customers it's funny Microsoft have done this for 100 years they put out unfinished product we all test it report the bugs and they bring out another one and another one we've got very used to that so I think there's just so much about that customer engagement and beta testing and doing it with them thank you, I never knew that was Microsoft strategy a question everyone's talked about people and culture so how do you inspire your leaders and your organisations to really ensure that their teams and their staff are up for the change I think it's just missing the people and responding to these suggestions from my point of view it's really about a servant leadership style and it's really about being humble and putting things out there enabling people to pull the new ideas and the new ways of working and being very careful not to polarise people with your language some of the language that has evolved from the agile and customer centric ways of working those words in themselves can be extremely polarising because if you're not familiar with it you immediately think I don't know what that means so you're on the back foot trying to dumb down the language or simplify it and stop using weasel words as a really good start I think what's really important is a lot of people have vague ideas what innovation is as we suggested we all have different interpretations often I think people talk a little bit in terms of what innovation is and what it can deliver so in terms of leadership across the vague I think we try to make it as real as possible we have a lot of beautiful process people they love systems they love infrastructure they love a method and so what we've done is really really reinforce the fact that innovation isn't accidental it is can be quite systematic it is quite methodical there are algorithms that make it work and we point out very clearly what those algorithms are so for all of those process people across the bank they go right I get it I can cling to the formula and it's not just a kind of an accidental creative process and if it is there's a system for bringing that creative accidental anomalies into the business as well and capturing them and working through with them I will add one since the other three have gone it's storytelling it's taking people along a journey and I think when we talk to the executive team internally inside PWC we have to realise that we know everything that we know and so it does mean that we need to elaborate we can't just show them something that we actually have to talk them through and explain what the potential outcomes are and I think storytelling is the key Chris the question for me was working in a new culture of a co-operative and I guess the need to create change but at the same time initiate that change across what landscape can you talk a bit about how you brought the co-operative members into the process of having to make rapid decisions look I think everyone says all you work at a co-operative how's that expecting you to declare some new disease two or three observations first one is a co-operative is the ultimate quality filter because there is a danger in co-operates that bosses can say do this because it's their personal belief and people follow blindly whereas in a co-operative you just get a fairly on a good day you get a hand up on another day you get a digit but the co-operative model where people goes I know that's not right for my customers so I'm not doing it is a fantastic quality lifter because it really just I keep talking to my team because I quite often have conversations where they come and say I've got this great idea and how do you know it's a great idea and what's the story you're telling with that and all those things so that's first thing second thing is co-operative is all about just getting two things in perfect balance which we never get perfect but you just got to keep thinking about and the first one is agility of decision making so when is it in the hands of the leadership team I've chosen to appoint and pay to do a job versus depth of consultation when should you slow down and deeply consult and make sure you take the learning review of all of the co-operative shareholders the owners of our company so just getting that right agility in that the number we sell about 30% more per square metre than our main competitor there is something in the intensity of owning a manager that makes that happen Hi fakes, I'm Andy previously worked for Taustra Corporation to paint a picture, it was 49,000 staff it was a true global we ran two internal incubators for our own staff, no own development two of my customers are sitting here Fletcher's and of course the Commonwealth ASB curiously my question to you fakes is how do your organisations or do your organisations currently mine the ideas of your staff do you mine and catch them and Lee you made a very good point management and leadership and pretty strong corporates tends to be very waterfall top down bottom up and quite restrictive we seem to be cleverer than their manager so how do you your organisations go about that in Taustra we turned it into a game but I'll share that after the discussion of how we actually did that Shall I start? So in Fletcher's we really value the ideas of anyone at any level and when we launched the Innovation Lab it was very much about how do we get ideas from everyone into our pipeline of ideas to process we've processed maybe over 800 ideas maybe more and of that we've only delivered 26 of those ideas into actually working solutions but the way that we do that is in three different ways one we had workshops with all of the general managers to firstly get them inspired and we explained all the different options and the possibilities demos and all of that kind of stuff and at the end of every workshop it was an ideation session so here's a business challenge since you're in the room let's ideate on what you might want to do to solve some of these challenges and then we do those same workshop type formats at every level in the organisation but it's a pool model who wants to us to come and run that kind of workshop we also do strategy sessions where we look at a particular business problem, a business process and look for the opportunities to solve that and we also have the ability on our internet for anyone to submit an idea and we've had a lot of ideas through that channel and then just generally getting out into the business and explaining and showcasing what we're doing is also encouraging other people to put up ideas and some of the ideas are coming from people on the shop floor, people who are just working in a cleaning role, there's all sorts of different ideas that come through and we take every one of those ideas seriously but we always put the question back to them what problem are you trying to solve and what value do you think there is in actually solving this problem and through that conversation you really start to understand more about what the problem is but then we don't take it at face value we then go out and engage with customers or people who are impacted by that problem to really dig into what that is and a lot of times you find the actual problem is quite different to what they thought it was Thanks, so we're trying to democratise the ideation process as much as possible and the innovation process across the bank we do that through platforms and so on so we're using at the moment a tool called spinnets some of you might have heard about it, there's a whole bunch of them we're pretty much the crowd votes the ideas up or down so someone, we put a challenge out to the business and that's usually that challenge is strategically aligned it's come from the leadership but I'm about to present I'm about to go to our leadership today actually to ask for the next challenge to put out to the business that shines a light on a particular area where the bank wants to focus and then we allow the bank to respond right across the business so 5000 people have the opportunity to submit their ideas and then 5000 people have the opportunity to then decide which of the ones that are worth investing and have merit so we try and take panel decisions we try and take middle management decision making out of the process and we let the whole business decide where what gets up in terms of where the light is shining for the bank in terms of the strategy from there we go through a process now we've just kicked off or we're in the middle of a pilot we'll do another one towards the end of the year where we are running a mini accelerator inside the house where people have been selected have put their hands up off the basis that they submitted an idea that was popular in the community that they've gone through a series of hackfests and things to show that they're resilient and they're robust and they're resourceful we've extracted them out of the business and now they are kind of running their own ventures for one of a better word and the first opening statement of their cohort when they're kicked off is I don't care if you're GM you're head of, you're grad level titles go out the door now you are founders of adventure five teams who are running through one of those teams has actually been run by a grad who's just literally stepped out of university she's taken on board that she's the CEO and she's got kind of a senior level manager now that she's sort of saying we're going to do this we're going to do that she's giving the direction to that particular venture so we've taken the height we've attempted we're trying to get through some hurdles with it but we've attempted to take hierarchy out people to actually use their natural skills their resourcefulness their ability to deal with ambiguity that sometimes that wouldn't come through if they were kind of in a hierarchical title position within the bank that's great what great answers thank you so we need to close now because it's 8.30 I appreciate that some of you have probably got 9 o'clock meetings to get back to before we close I just want to sum up we're probably the four things that have really struck for me if you want to create innovation successfully and corporates and interestingly they all start with C the first one is courage and it really is courage to take a new idea to really risk failure and the consequences of that the next one of course is culture and we've heard today how important it is to really get people on board to empower them to have the ideas particularly if you've just heard ASB how they even vote on the ideas that go forward then customers how close are you to your customers what are their problems that you have to solve to innovate and I think we've heard from Chris about being able to walk into a mock-up store on polystyrene that's pretty cool and that is a real 4D experience and then lastly you have to create value we talk about innovation being an idea with impact and I think all of us would agree that New Zealand is fantastic at coming up with ideas and inventions but I think there's a gap to go before we really commercialise at the same rate as we come up with these ideas so please join me in thanking all of the panelists