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Innovation and the Future Proof Bank: A Practical Guide to Doing Different Business-as-Usual
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Product Description
Innovation, the conversion of the new to business as usual, is a very special business process. It is the business process able to reprogram all others. Creating the practices that make this process work is a key challenge for all in financial services that are worried about responding to the future. When an institution can identify things that are outside its present practices and convert them, production line style, into products, processes, cultural changes, or new markets, it will never be outpaced by internal or external change again. The institution becomes “FutureProof”.
This is a book about those practices in banks. It explains, using examples from institutions around the world, what it takes to create an innovation culture that consistently introduces new things into undifferentiated markets and internal cultures. It shows how banks can leverage the power of the new to establish unexpected revenue lines, or make old ones grow. And it provides advice on the social and political factors that either help or hinder the germination of the new in banks. Moreover, though, this is a book about the science of innovation in a banking context. Drawing from practices already highly developed in financial services – managing portfolios of assets to mitigate risk - it explains how practitioners can run their innovations groups like any other business line in the bank one that delivers a return on investment predictably and at high multiples of internal cost of capital.
For leaders, Innovation and the Future Proof Bank provides the diagnostic tools to guide benchmarking and investment decisions for the innovation function. And for innovation practitioners, the book lays out everything needed to make sure that converting the new to business as usual is predictable,
measurable, and profitable.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #296299 in Books
- Published on: 2009-10-26
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 334 pages
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Innovation is the process of converting new things into business-as-usual. There are few banks today that fail to recognise the capability to do this is a key way of sustaining competitive advantage. Many, however, have little idea of how to go about building such capabilities. By so doing, they expose themselves to uncertain futures, as other players enter and out-innovate them in core markets.
There are some banks, however, who always seem to be ahead of the curve. They have created capabilities that enable them to out-innovate the innovators. To do so, they have established a set of practices that allow them to future-poof themselves.
This is a book about hose practices in banks. It explains, using examples from institutions around the world, what it takes to create the business process that introduces new things and makes them business-as-usual. It shows how to do this with reliability and certainty of return. And, in the process, it illustrates what your institution can do to be as future-proof as the most innovative banks in the world.
About the Author
James A. Gardner, (London, UK), is a career innovator that has worked in multiple industries including financial services, technology and the public sector. He is well known in the banking community through his writing (bankervision.typepad.com) and has spent two decades working in and around banking. Originally from Australia, he now resides in London, but spends a good part of eveey year travelling to banks everywhere else.
Customer Reviews
Building an innovation program in a bank
Some subjects are simply too large and encompassing for a slim volume. Some subjects are simply too broad and have too many facets for any author to capture fully. Innovation, by its very nature, has spawned a host of new books which provide the "secrets" of innovation success, or a helpful twelve step method, or insights into "disruptive" versus "incremental" innovation.
In his book Innovation and the Future Proof Bank, James Gardner attempts to set the record straight. While ostensibly writing to the financial services industry about innovation, he's created a book that is relevant to any innovation team, and which addresses a number of the intricate components and definitions of innovation, as well as defining an innovation process.
Gardner advocates a methodology he calls "Future Proofing", which is really a consistent innovation program scanning for new opportunities and introducing a defined innovation process that operates continually and consistently over time, creating new ideas and unveiling new products and services over time. To accomplish this "Future Proofing" status, he breaks down the elements of innovation chapter by chapter.
He first considers innovation theories and models, providing the "backstory" and the rationale for many of the approaches and tool sets innovators use successfully, starting with the Diffusion of Innovation and S-curves, and indicating the attributes of successful innovations in the past. Given that this chapter is intended to establish the models and intellectual history and rigor of innovation, he reviews Christensen's models from the Innovator's Dilemma as well.
Once he establishes the intellectual rigor and methods behind innovation, he then turns his attention to innovation in financial services firms. He examines the opportunities for innovation across five factors: products, markets, experiences, channels and business models, and finds significant opportunities for innovation across many of these features. Based on those opportunities, he also creates a maturity model for a firm that is growing in its innovation capabilities. The phases of growth include inventing, championing, managing, futurecasting and venturing. This maturity model ties nicely to one we've built and others we've seen previously.
In the next few chapters he investigates the phases of an innovation program, including "futurecasting" or what we'd call trend spotting and scenario planning, idea generation and scoring, and "execution" or the process of piloting, prototyping and launching a new innovation. In these chapters he does a good job of identifying the tools and techniques to conduct these activities and in each case provides a case study from a financial services organization.
The last sections of the book deal less with the innovation process and more with the leadership of innovation and innovation teams and the skills and capabilities required on an innovation team. These chapters are useful for individuals who need to understand how to lead an innovation team or need to attract and recruit people to an innovation team.
The Future Proof Bank, while written ostensibly to a financial services audience, can be read, understood and implemented by innovators in any industry. It is a good handbook - written much like a textbook with many footnotes and examples - for innovators of any stripe. It is a fairly exhaustive book and references many of the tomes that define innovation and establish its intellectual bona fides.
While I like the book and know that James is an excellent innovator, there are two items that seem to receive less focus than I would have expected. They are qualitative insight tools such as ethnography and voice of the customer, to acquire more insight into unmet or unarticulated and the issue of corporate culture. In our experience we've found that many firms rely far too heavily on existing quantitative research and fail to understand customer wants and needs, since qualitative research like ethnography seems a bit uncertain and difficult to quantify. My second quibble, about the cultural enablers and inhibitors to innovation, is both more obvious and more problematic. Every organizational culture has some barriers to innovation, and if they aren't adequately addressed, will hinder or block innovation. Gardner addresses some of these factors but I would have liked to see more examples of actions taken to change or impact a corporate culture. I know we get asked that question quite a bit.
If you are in the financial services world and are contemplating an innovation effort, run, don't walk, to the store and buy this and read it carefully. Even if you aren't in the financial services sector this is an exceptionally thorough and complete book about structuring an innovation program. I highly recommend it.
Cross posted on my blog Innovate on Purpose ([...])
