Corporate Innovation Tactics: When to Cut, Cull, and Create with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper-uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discussed, the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and today we have our co-host, Robyn Bolton, back. Welcome Robyn. 

[00:00:35] Robyn Bolton: Glad to be back. 

[00:00:37]  Brian Ardinger: We are excited to be back talking about innovation. We were ranked one of the top 15 corporate innovation podcasts out there, so I'm excited to continue this journey and helping our audience understand this world of innovation for this new format that we've been trying. Robyn came on as a co-host. Anything new going on in your world? 

[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: I think you're being very humble. You weren't just kind of in the top 15 podcasts by a hair. You were... 

[00:01:01]  Brian Ardinger: I think we were four.

[00:01:02] Robyn Bolton: You were up there. 

[00:01:03]  Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It was a sweet spot. It was nice to be recognized.

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: Well, and they nailed it.

[00:01:09]  Brian Ardinger: One of the articles that I wanted to talk about today, and actually was a newsletter of a friend of mine, and people who've listened to podcasts or know of innovation, might know of David Bland.

He's the author of Testing Business Ideas, among other things. In his most recent newsletter. He had a little article talking about why most execs regret the projects they didn't cut. The gist of the article was talking about how every executive has a few projects that haunt them, and it's usually the ones that drag on too long and consume too much capital.

And we always hear about the winner, so to speak, and or not betting on the winner, but the idea of a portfolio of things that you've got within your corporate environment of things that you should cut or look at. Could it be a big win if we got rid of this thing? How do you prevent that burning capital on projects that you don't want or don't warrant additional investment and time, energy, and money?

I'd love to get your thoughts on what you've seen in the corporate environment and this idea of cutting your bets off or making sure that you don't continue bets down the wrong line. 

[00:02:07] Robyn Bolton: Sadly, I see it all the time. You know, we call them zombie projects. They're the living dead and sadly kind of the people that are staffed on them. Eventually figure it out. And I feel like they become zombies too. Zombie projects eat their brain.

The thing is, they are consuming really valuable resources. They're taking up the time of really smart people. They're taking up the funding that could be used to go to another great idea that has better potential.

I think back to my early days in P & G's kind of new business development group, in just one single BU, and I think there were probably, at one time, eight different projects, all new brands that were in different phases of development, and ultimately only Swiffer launched nationally and survived for several years.

There was another one called Dryel that launched but didn't quite survive the first several years, and then a whole bunch that just petered out, like you kind of had to wait for the next CEO to come in and do the culling that every CEO does. But in the meantime, it was years of people working really hard on things they cared about that just were never going to work. It was heartbreaking. 

[00:03:26]  Brian Ardinger: It's interesting because I think about why does this happen? Because if you're a startup and you're going down the wrong path, you probably don't hear about it because you just kind of run out of runway and it goes away. Where the challenge in a corporate environment is typically you do have some capital that can continue to be funneled in different ways down projects that may or may not be deserving of it.

And so, I think one of the traps that a lot of corporates fall into is this, okay, we've sunk costs into it. Let's just keep going with it. We know the expectations. It's not going to be a big win or whatever, but it's not going to be a loser if we get rid of it and branded as a loser, or a minimal amount of capital that maybe it is bringing in, the revenue it is bringing in. It's like, well, why should we get rid of it? It's bringing some revenue versus thinking about it from the standpoint of what if we got rid of that $30-50 million investment that we're making every year and reallocated that into newer things that could have more explosive growth or more opportunities.

[00:04:17] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I think you're spot on. And it's funny that no amount of mentioning, naming, whatever the sunk cost fallacy will deter people because there's always the rationalization and this feeling like in order to be successful, I need to launch a successful thing into the market. And years ago I was working with a big pharmacy chain, and to try to head it off, we actually created a enterprise wide award for the biggest hill.

It comes down to what we're rewarded for, right? And if you have an award for killing a project to free up the most resources, and of course, embedded in this reward was what were your learnings? What are the resources getting used for? How are they getting funneled back into innovation? It was amazing that first year, how many zombies got put out of their misery. 

[00:05:10]  Brian Ardinger: And I think it's one of those fundamental things that, again, the momentum, it's very easy in a corporate environment to continue because again, most corporate environments are about executing. And so the momentum of execution continues to push you down a path when maybe your customers aren't asking for the thing that you're doing, or the market's switched or changed, or competitors have come in, and it's no longer the path.

But to change that, there's a cultural thing that I think has to be at least thought about. It's not just trying to find the big wins from an innovation perspective. If you're in corporate innovation, you should also be thinking about what can we cut or what can we do to allocate our resources appropriately and not just go down some particular path because it's what we've been told to do.

[00:05:51] Robyn Bolton: A hundred percent.

[00:05:53]  Brian Ardinger: The second article was actually came from your newsletter. The newsletter talked about what chickens and innovation teams have in common.

[00:06:01] Robyn Bolton: Unexpected reading, but the article starts off with a story of a study that was conducted out of P...