Since 2016, rready (formerly known as GETKICKBOX) has helped businesses of all shapes and sizes and from vastly different sectors, kickstart an innovation movement in their companies.
The Beginning of KICKBOX
Four years ago, Dave Hengartner (CEO & Co-founder of rready), adapted the Adobe Kickbox program which was originally invented by Mark Randall.
The team started out with the Swisscom Kickbox program based on the open source material of Adobe Kickbox and developed it into a bottom-up intrapreneurship program.
The goal? Empowering innovators (or intrapreneurs) to create the next disruptive business case and equipping their employees for the digital age.
The intrapreneurship program which has since been further adapted by rready, involves a three-stage innovation process that allows all employees to contribute to company-wide innovation. Via an online platform and with other helpful tools, including a physical innovation toolbox, the intrapreneurs can use 20% of their working time to validate their ideas. Following the initial 'RedBox'-phase, provided the innovator can convince other stakeholders, the next step is the BlueBox phase, in which the innovator can conduct a pilot project. In the final phase (GoldBox), the idea will be implemented within the organization or a spin-out will be potentially formed.
Since implementing it initially at Swisscom, rready's co-founders have learned some valuable lessons along the way. While the learnings are multiple, here are 9 of the most important ones.
1. Be an Enabler, Not a Gatekeeper
Despite the fact that our job titles might include the term 'innovation manager', innovation is not manageable. Therefore, we realised the need to create space so that people can follow-up on their idea and explore its potential. This is not possible if us – C-level, Managers, Coaches etc., - act as gate-keepers. Instead, it is important for these groups to rather focus on giving people the chance to prove themselves and their ideas. The process should be seen as employee motivation, empowerment and education.
2. Don't Judge Raw Ideas
Even if you were Steve jobs himself, it is impossible to judge raw ideas. Sadly, this is exactly what happens so often: An idea campaign is launched, ideas are submitted by employees and the management board decides which idea is 'good' or 'bad'. The employees behind the 'bad' ideas experience rejection and the minority are given generous budgets to start validating their ideas.
This process is expensive and it is based on subjective assumptions. All while the most important actor involved in the process – the champion behind the idea – is not given any chance to prove themselves.
Instead of judging a raw idea, let the market decide: Give everyone the chance to validate! If the idea still does not look to be of much value after two months of validation and gathering real customer data, the idea might not proceed into further stages, but the innovator learnt a lot for very little monetary investment.
3. Strong C-Level Support is Key
For people to be willing to go the extra mile and submit an idea, they need to feel supported and experience the freedom to make mistakes. They also need to be sure that they are participating in something which is seen as valuable by the company.
Therefore, visible top management support is crucial. The roles who should ultimately become champions of the KICKBOX program are Chief Digital Officers, CEOs, and CIOs (because of the potential to generate significant business impact), Chief HR (because of the educational and transformational impact of the program on the employees).
4. Don't Talk Methods, Create a Brand!
Methods such as 'Lean Startup' and 'Human Centered Design' are crucial when it comes to innovation, and it is important for innovators to apply these to their work. However, these methods also have certain disadvantages: Firstly, methods come and go. Usually, it isn't very long before another 'new' method is trendy and companies and coaches don't hold former methods in such high regard anymore.
Secondly, some employees might get put off by these methods since they don’t want to learn something new; are convinced that the method they're using at current, works just fine; or, the fancy English titles deter them.
At rready, we've learned that we'd rather communicate a brand (such as KICKBOX) instead of a method. The brand will last longer, people will resonate with it and promote it more and more as times goes on. It is not important that employees know which method they learn as long as they apply it. That's why we wrote the KICKBOOK for innovators, without any technical terms and innovation buzzwords.
5. Involve Everyone, Not Only Idea Givers
They exist everywhere! Every company has plenty of them: The driven intrapreneurs – the people that have ideas and are willing to follow up on them. However, the KICKBOX program is much more impactful if you also include the employees who are interested in innovation and willing to support with their expertise but don't have any of their own ideas they want to submit (just yet).
The innovation platform which forms part of the KICKBOX program is therefore key to success: Here, not only the ideators who have submitted their ideas can get access to various innovation resources, but experts which are automatically linked to relevant projects based on their interests and skills, can also deliver valuable input on these projects.
6. Everything is Digital, Except for the Method Toolbox
The method toolbox which forms part of the KICKBOX program makes innovation tangible and gamified. You'll probably not see your employees happier, than the innovators who receive such a toolbox to kickstart their intrapreneurship journey.
A strong connection to the online world is important though: The physical toolbox has many elements that link to the online platform, where visibility for the project is created and extra educational content can be accessed.
7. Assess People and Ideas Before You Invest
As we said before, our experience in innovation has taught us that people are more important than ideas. However, not every employee is an intrapreneur or wants to become one. Therefore, we designed the RedBox phase to be highly automated so that it can be opened up to as many intrapreneurs as possible, and in order to use it as a sort of 'employee assessment': Who is motivated enough to go through an intrapreneurship journey with lots of ups and downs? Who has the skills to do so?
The people who prove themselves will find a sponsor for the next phase. For the organization, this means that it can start investing more money, time, and coaching into the champions behind the ideas.
8. Peer Exchange and Co-creation
Intrapreneurship can go beyond your company's boundaries. In our opinion, it even should! We opened up the program under the brand of GETKICKBOX and companies such as SBB, CSS, Implenia, Roche, and many more are now using the online platform and the toolboxes to drive innovation forward.
Additionally, we hold regular meetings with the people who are responsible for KICKBOX in their companies to exchange thoughts on how to innovate and transform using KICKBOX.
We also further co-create the program with our peer community - and a result of this is the KICKBOOK.
9. KICKBOX Can be for Everyone
We know: every company is different. However, KICKBOX Intrapreneurship is a great tool which can fit into the existing processes of many different organizations.
Decentralized ideation with a gamified process and high automation and visibility provides value for the organization. Therefore, we'd love to help you grow your intrapreneurship movement with KICKBOX.
If you would like to get more information about the KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program and enable your team to unleash their creativity and contribute to innovation across the company, contact us to arrange a free demo today.
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