Goooooooooooooooooooooood day folks!

Planbox CEO Ludwig Melik was recently interviewed on School For Startups Radio, where he shared some amazing behind-the-scenes insights on the extraordinary world of innovation, like how we at Planbox often see innovative organizations outperforming their counterparts by whopping 10 to 15% margin! Crazy! I know! Read some of the transcripts below to learn more, or listen to the interview in its entirety at the bottom! The choice is yours, friend!

Scaling and Commercializing an Idea:

“The world has changed a lot so you can’t really depend on the heroics of a few to sustain a business model because whatever you do, someone ends up doing it better, cheaper and faster eventually, so you have to keep coming up with new ideas and changing the way you work. So we’ve essentially introduced a software platform that allows you to connect with people inside your company, or work with people outside your company and then think about what are the problem areas that are worthwhile focusing on that could bring about breakthrough opportunities that transform the way you work, or just an interesting, novel idea that could potentially be worthwhile investigating, and the go through a process of working with the right people and subject matter experts to develop that idea, and then be able to scale it and commercialize it inside your business. So we essentially manage that entire process online with our solution.”

Aligning Your Innovation Goals with Business Strategy:

“The first thing you’re always trying to think about is what is the strategy of the company, what are you essentially trying to achieve, what are your corporate objectives, and the moment that conversation gets started, there’s a bunch of challenges that an organization is facing to try and make those things become a reality. So then our software serves as the solution that allows you to define the challenge and then invite the right people to try to submit solutions, and then work through the process of creating the right ideas and the new products and services you need to introduce to be able to meet your corporate objectives–but the premise is to always make sure that whatever you’re doing around innovation and new ideas ultimately aligns with the strategy of the company, so that you’re able to get the stakeholders’ and executives’ support to be able to obviously have the right funding and ultimately, you’re not doing work that would potentially be for nothing because it doesn’t meet the corporate objectives for this year so it’s just a bunch of ideas that kind of go no where fast. So we try to very carefully understand and configure the software to work in and around the challenges the organization is trying to tackle so these could be enterprise-wide problems that the company is experiencing and they want to find solutions for them or it could be specific problems that a business unit is trying to address.”

Expected Business Outcomes:

“When you think about a solution like ours, you’re not doing it for a meager outcome, you’re looking for something quite substantial, so often times we’ll see organizations look for ten times of an ROI on a solution like ours and that would be just for a very basic continuous improvement initiative. If they’re really looking to do the real kind of innovation where they’re trying to change their business, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see a return on investment that is really a multiple of a hundred, or a thousand times what they had essentially looked at investing in a solution like ours, and of course this really means that they’re introducing some pretty interesting new revenue-generating solutions in the marketplace, or they’re really optimizing their business by finding some really interesting cost reductions So that’s kind of the range of outcomes we would be looking to achieve, but they would always be fairly significant in nature. This kind of solution isn’t about ‘well you know, we’re running payroll, how do we make it a little more efficient and maybe take one person out of the equation so that this way we’re kind of saving the salary of that person.’ It’s a much more lofty goal of really sustaining the business and growing the business over time, so we often see innovative companies out-do their counterparts by a significant margin of anywhere between 10 to 15%, and a lot of that is essentially tied back to the kind of thinking that goes into a software like ours.”

Building a Sustainable Innovation Model:

“One of the first things an organization should spend a lot more time on is identifying the right problems to solve, and by doing that you’re either getting to the root cause of a problem you should be addressing, or you’re potentially finding this very interesting opportunity that could generate significant revenue for the business. […] We also noticed the nature of work had changed and obviously the world is changing, because companies can’t stay on course with existing products or services because they will eventually face disruption, so you have to have a second act, you have to continue to think about how you’re going to be dealing with shrinking product lifecycles, and that’s basically the premise of Planbox; it’s building a sustainable innovation model where you can continuously face transformation or technology change and proactively take advantage of them to better your business.”

Ludwig also explores Planbox’s history and founding, and effectively explains the FORCE of AGILE innovation, which in case you forgot is a methodology that is highly correlated with higher financial performance and increasing product profitability, as recently revealed in our Study of Product Team Performance and Innovation Processes.

You can listen to the the entire interview below.

Til next time folks!