A book about corporate innovation
(that you will actually read)
If you’re looking for more of the same old vanilla case studies, this ain’t the book for you.
The 5 Ways to Innovate is what happens when you get a Facebooker (Amer Iqbal) and a Googler (Roshan Chhotu) to share stories from their collective 30 years of experience in the world of corporate innovation. Through a series of interviews with innovation leaders, stories from their own lives, and a healthy dose of pop-culture references, this is a different kind of business book.
Based on Amer Iqbal’s highly popular keynote that has been presented to over 20,000 professionals at some of the world’s leading conferences, the book contains:
First hand anecdotes and stories from real innovation leaders
A detailed breakdown of the 5 Ways framework, including 20 case studies
A CIO’s handbook with detailed workshop and 100 day playbook
Featuring exclusive interviews with real-world innovation leaders
About the Authors
Amer Iqbal and Roshan Chhotu first met as management consultants at Deloitte Digital, and their collaboration was instrumental in building the business into the leading digital creative consultancy in Southeast Asia. Together they have spent more than 30 years driving innovation at Fortune 500 companies, SMEs, and startups. Currently they are co-founders of 5 Ways to Innovate, a corporate innovation consultancy that coaches organizations and executives on how to reinvent themselves to thrive in a digital economy.
Amer, who splits his time between New York, Thailand and his native Australia, was formerly the APAC Head of Digital Transformation at Meta (formerly Facebook) and General Manager and Head of Strategy at Deepend, a multi-award-winning Australian advertising agency. Over the past 20 years he has also built several successful startups and advised dozens of multinational corporations on their innovation strategy. In 2011 he was a finalist for Young Executive of the Year and has been featured in numerous publications including Australian Financial Review, Economic Times, HRM Asia, Adnews, and WARC. He has lectured at University of New South Wales and University of Technology Sydney, mentored at Sydney Marketing Society, and coached executives across Southeast Asia. He is regularly engaged as an industry thought leader, speaker, and facilitator.
Roshan is currently at Google, where as the Head of Strategy and Operations for News Partnerships APAC he’s helped to start up, build, and grow a new business unit. He works alongside publishers and journalists to build a more sustainable, diverse, and innovative news ecosystem. Previously he led the Proposition Design business at Deloitte Digital, helping companies build new features, offerings, and businesses. He began his career in his native UK at Accenture as an instrumental part of their London innovation center. Over the past 12 years he has helped clients with their customer and innovation agendas.
Roshan channels his inner adventurer through running. He has completed two 250-km, seven-day, self-sufficient ultramarathons in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia, and the Atacama Desert, Chile. Over the last three years he has given several talks at Google on how he implements his lessons from running into the world of corporate innovation.
SAMPLE CHAPTER
Preface
Let me tell you about that time I (co-author Amer Iqbal) told Blackberry how they could save their business and they chose to ignore me. But before I get to that, let’s address the elephant in the room: this is a book about corporate innovation. Probably the most cliche examples you might expect to read in these pages would be Kodak, Blockbuster, Toys R’ Us, and of course Blackberry. These are the cautionary tales of innovation taught in business schools the world over, the stories told and retold so many times that they have become assumed knowledge, completely bland, meaningless and without a hint of controversy. This makes them safe and inoffensive enough for MBA professors to generously dispense out to their students like a bowl of hard candy. The difference with this particular Blackberry story is that it actually happened to me. I lived through it and survived to tell the tale. As a wise man once said “Nothing is a cliche when it’s happening to you.” 1
In 2012 Blackberry was a giant of the corporate world on the decline. After their meteoric rise and dominance of the global smartphone market, by this stage they were down but not quite out. There were still two countries on the planet where they held the top spot. One was their native Canada, which wasn’t surprising given their national pride in the brand. The other, curiously, was Indonesia. My team and I were approached to unpack this strange phenomenon:. to do market research to understand what was driving the enduring success of Blackberry in Indonesia to help Blackberry replicate this success across the rest of the world. It was a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate the business and breathe life into an ailing brand.
Our research uncovered a multitude of reasons for Blackberry’s success in Indonesia, but at the center of it was their obsession with Blackberry Messenger (BBM), a free messaging service available only on Blackberry devices. Especially in a country where network coverage could be patchy, BBM provided a reliable, free messaging services that included advanced features like group chats. These features had taken off like wildfire in Indonesia where the value of sharing real-time information in curated social circles was baked into the fabric of their culture. In short, the popularity of BBM was an indicator of the swelling cultural phenomenon of social messaging, a growing trend that was about to explode out of Asia onto the global stage.
On one of our market visits, we’d set ourselves up in a large mall in an affluent area of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital. Spying from a distance, we observed a well-dressed man in a tailored suit and designer loafers take a seat at a table in the upscale food court. As he sat down, like businessmen in suits all over the world, he removed his mobile phone and placed it on the table. Of course, it was a Blackberry, the latest model. A “Porsche Design” logo was proudly embossed across the bezel, catching the warm glint of the overhead light at just the right angle. We silently smiled and nodded knowingly at each other. Suddenly, our smiles faded as he pulled a second phone out of his jacket pocket and lovingly wiped the screen with a small cloth. He then proceeded to swipe, scroll and pinch for the next 10 minutes on this second phone as he waited for the server to take his order. From a distance, I could have sworn the glow of the screen illuminated a hint of a grin at the corners of his mouth as he stared into the screen, engrossed. My heart sank as I realized what was going on. While the mandatory Blackberry sat neglected on the table, Indonesians were proudly and visibly using the latest iPhone as their primary device. During our research trip this same scene played out again and again. Sales data confirmed our hunch: Indonesians weren’t buying Blackberry handsets because they loved them, they were using them purely as a utilitarian BBM access device.
We shared our findings with Blackberry’s leadership and stressed that rather than seeing this as a negative, the potential of the growing social messaging opportunity could actually hold the key to reviving their business. We also shared market intelligence on a handful of small startups like WhatsApp, Viber and Line that, while nascent and struggling to break the stronghold of SMS, had clearly identified the opportunity and were capturing growing attention from the tech world. We raised the looming threat of these newer players, but also stressed that the installed user base and brand credibility of BBM gave them a huge advantage.
Our proposal was to spin off BBM as a standalone service, an advanced messaging app that would work on any device. While the debate surrounding blue bubbles and green bubbles on iMessage today 2 make this seem an obvious solution, at the time the concept of a universally accessible social messaging app was somewhat unorthodox. We understood that a hardware company might think it radical to put their software on other people’s devices, but we also had historical evidence on our side; after all, hadn’t Microsoft dominated the PC era with this strategy? Weren’t Google pursuing a similar strategy with their Android OS? BBM hadn’t begun with the intention of being a standalone app, but some of the greatest innovations in history had been a case of accidentally stumbling into a solution in search of a problem.
We felt it was an opportunity to explore an entirely new business model for Blackberry in a space where they could legitimately claim universal appeal. Unfortunately, their leadership team didn’t feel the same. Meeting after meeting, we faced pushback on why this wasn’t a viable way to move forward. If BBM was the only reason people were still buying Blackberry handsets, wouldn’t it be suicide to put this app on other devices and hand the advantage to Apple and Samsung? My analogy of a slow, prolonged death being worse than pulling the plug and rolling the dice for reincarnation didn’t quite have the persuasive effect I’d hoped.
In a last-ditch effort to plead our case, we set up a meeting with a senior Blackberry executive. We met at a hipster cafe, the oppressive heat and cacophony of traffic of the outside world muted behind the immaculately clean floor-to-ceiling glass wall panels. The low hum of shop talk, arctic air conditioning and an indie hits compilation was interrupted only by the occasional sound of grinding coffee beans and hisses of steam. A tattooed barista took our order and we crossed the polished concrete floor to a plush leather booth.
The crux of our discussion was that if Blackberry didn’t seize the growing opportunity of social messaging, then WhatsApp or one of its competitors soon would. The executive calmly took a sip of his latte, smiled and explained that WhatsApp couldn’t possibly pose a threat to BBM as they had the superior product. The explanation was long and technical, but as an example he cited the fact that BBM provided its 15.8 million U.S. users with two blue check marks or “ticks”: one for when a message was sent, and a second blue tick once the message had been received by the recipient. At the time, WhatsApp only provided one. In his reasoning, this feature was a prime example of BBM’s superiority. Incredulous, I asked whether this was a feature that might be replicated by others, but he remained adamant that technical complexity prohibited others from offering such a functionality.
Despite my best attempts to argue to the contrary, the conversation ended soon afterwards. The executive looked at his wrist, the expensive watch catching the eye of the occupants of the next table. He stood to leave, explaining he had to run to another meeting. All very civil. We shook hands and said we'll be in touch. The executive gave us a recommendation for a great local restaurant to try while we're in town. We exited the building, stepping out into the scorching mid-afternoon heat, our voices drowned out by the noise of traffic. We never heard from him again.
Of course, we all know what happened next. WhatsApp quickly introduced the two-ticks feature, along with many others, quickly growing their user base across the globe. This led to WhatsApp’s acquisition by Facebook just over a year later for $19 bn. Today, WhatsApp is the largest messaging platform on the planet with almost 3 billion users. Indonesia is consistently one of the heaviest users of the service in the world.
What happened to Blackberry? They have lost 97% of their market cap 3. They have been trying for decades to reinvent themselves, so far unsuccessfully. BBM was eventually spun off as a standalone app for iOS and Android, but it was too little too late.
This is where most MBA versions of the Blackberry case study end. Blackberry were caught in a cycle of operational inertia, preferring to defend their existing business model instead of attacking a new opportunity, and as a result were disrupted by a younger, more nimble competitor. Replace “Blackberry” with “Kodak”, “Blockbuster” or “Toys R’ Us” and you have a neat little template for how innovation goes wrong.
But what might we learn if we ask the question “why”? Why were Blackberry caught in such a tailspin? They had plenty of viable opportunities to invest in - our research project was just one of many similar ones going on around the world. They had resources to invest in new ideas, at the time they were still generating significant revenue that could have been diverted into building new business models. They had some of the best talent in the world, many of whom have since gone on to senior leadership roles at Samsung, Apple and other top performers in the industry. The truth is, Blackberry’s leadership probably did believe in our recommendation. However, when you have sales teams who need to meet their quarterly targets in order to take home their bonus, it can be hard to convince them to rock the boat in the hopes of future success.
I’m reminded of a quote from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” 4 Blackberry didn’t fail because they were dumb. They failed because they didn’t have the necessary innovation systems in place to build the business of tomorrow.
My co-author Roshan and I have spent most of the last decade thinking about this. The result has been the development of The Five Ways to Innovate, a framework that helps companies get the basics right. In that time we’ve helped dozens of Fortune 500 companies implement the innovation systems they need in order to reinvent themselves to keep pace with a rapidly changing digital economy. Lots of people can talk about why Blackberry failed at innovation, or why Meta, Google, Deloitte and Accenture are succeeding. The difference is this: in those cases and so many others, we were there to see it. This book is a summary of what we’ve learned along the way.
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