Do you have the courage to change your business model and strategy? To really challenge the status quo, you need to spend some time and energy on radical areas as well as be efficient with your existing business model.
This episode features AJ Boelens, Managing Director at Innovation Connected and leading practitioner for customer-centric strategy and innovation. Tune in to learn how to create value for your customers by linking strategy, innovation, and marketing, and to learn all you need to know to efficiently bring radical ideas to life.
Do you have the courage to change your business model and strategy? To really challenge the status quo, you need to spend some time and energy on radical areas as well as be efficient with your existing business model.
This episode features AJ Boelens, Managing Director at Innovation Connected and leading practitioner for customer-centric strategy and innovation. Tune in to learn how to create value for your customers by linking strategy, innovation, and marketing, and to learn all you need to know to efficiently bring radical ideas to life.
AJ: (00:03)
You need to say, do you have the courage to change your business model and your strategy? And you have the responsibility to do that. If you don't do that, if you don't open up that possibility, then you're forever going to be stuck with just product innovation and product push. And that's not going to really move the needle.
Christine: (00:21)
Welcome to the Lost in Transformation podcast series dedicated to the complex world of Digital Transformation. We feature guests from large corporations, start-ups, consultancies and more, to shed light on the success factors around Innovation, Transformation, and adjacent topics.
We share first-hand insights and inspiration from experts for all the intrapreneurs, entrepreneurs, and anyone curious about Digital Transformation.
Christine: (00:50)
AJ Boelens is the Managing Director at Innovation Connected and a leading practitioner for customer-centric strategy and innovation in Asia. He explains how to bridge strategy, strategic marketing, and innovation, to create greater value and efficiency for your customers. We hope you enjoy this episode.
Christine: (01:11)
Hi AJ, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today on Lost in Transformation, and thanks so much for taking the time. And you are the Managing Director at Innovation Connected, where you also help companies become more customer-centric and help them achieve commercial excellence and effectiveness. And we're going to learn a lot more about your work with innovation and strategy today. But to begin with, I'd like to learn more about yourself first. Could you share more about your background and your experience that brought you to where you are today? Okay, great.
AJ: (01:42)
Okay, great. Sure. Happy to be here. So very quickly, I'm a Canadian from Toronto, Canada. Had been living out in Asia for the past 20 years. In my corporate life, I've worked mostly with large MNC companies across a variety of different industries. So I work with Siemens Healthcare, and I worked with BASF, which is the largest chemical company. And I've also worked with The Economist Group where I was heading up strategy and innovation for the Asia Pacific.
Christine: (02:10)
Super interesting path, also with a lot of different companies. And now looking to where you are right now at Innovation Connected, how did that come about? Like how did you get from your previous experience to where you're today?
AJ: (02:25)
So having worked in the corporate space, I was mostly in consulting. So my expertise is really around innovation and strategy and strategic marketing. And what I started finding is that a lot of companies always talk about customer focus. We need to be customer-focused. But very rarely is customer focus actually at the core of how we run established businesses. And so quite often I found a disconnect between strategy and actually really creating customer value. And I experienced this across several different verticals. And I started talking with some of my friends that work in similar roles, in a variety of other industries: in financial services and in resources, and FMCG. And, you know, we started finding actually the way that we develop a strategy is pretty similar. And the customer-centricity is really not there. And a lot of the methodologies for developing strategy have been the same for the past 30, 40 years.
AJ: (03:21)
And it's very much anchored on common frameworks, which we know we learned in business school. And so, you know, we don't really change that much from industry to industry on a strategic level. And so I started realizing that, Hey, maybe there could be a role for me to be independent and to help organizations across sectors, really try to understand their customers better and learn how to develop a strategy around their customers. And there are frameworks out there that exist that are well-established for helping companies create customer-centric, strategy and innovation. A lot of companies just don't know how to pull it all together. So that's what I really learned to become an expert in through my consulting work at BASF. It's what I applied when I was running strategy and innovation at The Economist Group. So I had a great background, and I was ready to make the jump to become independent and help companies do it as an independent consultant.
Christine: (04:13)
So basically taking the leap from being a consultant at different companies to now being independent. I think that's a very interesting journey. And you are already saying that you see that you saw some like disconnect between also strategy and the customer value, and the customer-centric strategies weren't really there for a lot of companies. Could you help me explain a little bit how things used to work for a lot of customers or companies out there before they approached you? Basically, that needed your help? How did their world look like?
AJ: (04:45)
And that world is pretty much the same for most companies. So, when I say customers, for me, these are large global multinational companies that I'm dealing with. They're not startups, they're not medium-sized businesses, they're mainly large MNCs. And large MNCs have a fantastic history and legacy of great product development. So these companies have established portfolios. They're trying to always innovate in that space with new products and services, but there's been always a very product push. That's the way that they're designed. That's the way that they're structured as organizations around business units that have certain products that go to certain sectors. That's definitely some advantages to that. The problem is that the catalyst for focusing and organizing an organization and people into teams is really around product and pushing product to market.
AJ: (05:38)
It's not really about being fiercely passionate about understanding certain customer segments and trying to develop and adapt your offering based and your business model based on those segments, it's very product push. So which companies do not have this problem? Well, they're the startups, they're the ones that don't have the resources and the legacy of these MNCs. So there's a bit of a, let's say a disadvantage in terms of resources, but they're not hindered by old organizational structures that are built around products. And so they have that advantage. They can be a little bit freer. And so my clients are really the large multinationals that are stuck in product-oriented structures and are finding it difficult to break away from that, especially as we go away from the industrial age and the age of products into the age of consumers. And as we look far to the future, a lot of these traditional companies that are product anchored are not really prepared to be agile enough to react and create value for customers.
Christine: (06:43)
Super interesting. I think what you're mentioning, you know, the focus on the products, I think probably a lot of companies or people out there can relate, rather focusing on the products and not really on the customers. So for you, what was kind of like the catalyst for change for you to then found a boutique consulting firm focusing on strategy and innovation? What was the problem with the status quo that made you want to tackle it?
AJ: (07:10)
So I spoke with a lot of people before I went independent. I really questioned it quite a lot. And would there be a need and would there be a willingness to pay for outside consulting? And the answer came back: Yes. It'll take time because consulting is kind of has a long buying process, especially if you're independent, but the need is definitely there. Now, what has been happening is a lot of organizations are constantly trying to innovate, and what does "innovate" mean? It means different things to different people, but essentially they all want to do something different to move forward. Now there's a lot of innovation that's happening in digital transformation. And the question is, what is the catalyst for that change? Is it either efficiency, trying to be more efficient at what you've already been doing in your existing business model, or is it really about being effective and challenging the status quo and saying, well, we're not gonna grow and get out of the break the status quo in our industry through efficiency alone, we really need to think more radically.
AJ: (08:11)
We need to think about new business models, reaching out to new customer segments and our existing business model is not set up, which does not allow us to do that. So this is kind of what's going on for a lot of large organizations. And the answer is actually, they need to do both. You need to have a kind of incremental efficiency, innovate and let that happen. That's important, but that's not going to really break the status quo in certain industries. So there needs to be some energy and time spent on some radical areas as well. And that's where a lot of companies are really uncomfortable. And a lot of people who are driving innovation, quite often don't define a strategy for the organization.
AJ: (08:51)
They don't decide how the company will go to market. So if you are in a product-structured organization and you're driving innovation and you're really responsible for this, that's your mandate. You might quickly learn, wow, our company has great products, but you know, that overlap between customer needs, fulfilling customer needs and our products, you know, it's starting to separate. The Venn diagram is separating and how are we going to fill that gap? Through more products? Probably not. So the question is, well, what do we need to do? We probably need to change our business model and or we need to change our segmentation approach. So strategic marketing innovation managers don't have that mandate. That's not under an innovation director's job. So we need to link strategy, innovation, strategic marketing, holistically to say, well, how will we really get the whole ship going in the right way?
AJ: (09:46)
And if you don't do that, there's a lot of innovation theater. So people will try to do innovation. Well, let's run some more hackathons and try to do these things. And like, yes, yes, yes - We're innovating. And in the end, actually, the customers feel, Hey, has your life improved in the last year through the services of this company? And often they say, well, not really. I hear that you guys are really innovative. And I see a lot of flashy stuff, but no, not really. If I could tell you what I want you to do, this is where I'd want you to spend your time to create more value for me. And, you know, quite often companies don't listen to the customers, don't even ask the customers and really understand what value looks like to them. So these are a couple of things that I see challenges that are going on within organizations. They are innovating, they're doing digital transformation. Quite often it's not to create value for customers, it's to create efficiency for themselves, try to squeeze more margins out of their existing business models, and save costs, but it doesn't really move the needle from a customer's perspective.
Christine: (10:48)
That's interesting. I think, probably a lot of people find themselves in that space that they feel like, okay, they're doing a lot of innovation, but then, in the end, it's not really that customer-focused. And I feel like you're really coming in there, as you're saying you want to link strategy and innovation and strategic marketing. So that sounds super exciting, but also probably a lot of work. So, how does the whole approach usually work with a client when you come in? Could you guide us through the first steps of how you go about solving a problem when they approach you?
AJ: (11:20)
Right. So very rarely, unfortunately, I start at the beginning. When I do start at the beginning, where is when I can influence managing directors, presidents, people that are running the overall business model and have the power to change the business model. And when I have conversations with them, we can start the journey of saying, okay, well, let's challenge the status quo. I'm going to bring in, you know, agitation. I'm going to bring in really different perspectives from a real customer perspective. And, let's go down this journey, and let's kind of do an assessment of where you are and where your customers think they would want you to be in two or three years from now. And let's just see how much congruence there is between these different visions. And so that's great if I can start from that level, we start at the beginning.
AJ: (12:05)
And so in that space, I do a lot of work in executive education, a lot of keynotes, speaking of podcasts sometimes as well, to kind of share and try to amplify this thinking of customer-centric strategy as a start point. Now that's going to be one audience. Another audience would be people that are driving innovation, and sometimes it's going to be running design thinking sprints. And what we'll find is, as we go through this process, we might have great, really great customer-centric ideas, that just don't fit in the existing business model. And we say, oh, well, the journey that we've identified that a certain customer segment would love. We've validated this with them. We've shared our MVP. They were getting a lot of positive feedback here on. This is really worth pursuing. Then we go on from consumer desirability to technical feasibility, and then we would go to viability. When we're at the technical feasibility, actually, technically we can do this, but we find out that this journey touches upon several different product groups, which, you know, crosses different silos and [...] within an organization.
AJ: (13:11)
And then you say, well, okay, even if we had a solution and we can implement this, how will it run? And we find out, actually, this wouldn't even. This wouldn't even fit in their existing business model. So it is very customer-centric. We did all the right things, the "yes, yes, yes", we use design thinking and lots of post-it notes and you know, like some high fidelity sketches, customers love it. And then we just realized when you come into the organization, you say, actually, we can't implement this because it cuts across all the business units. That's not how we were organized. So then you realize that things are really getting stuck in. And in this situation, I encounter that a lot more, and actually I've spoken with a lot of people. A lot of people will be listening, will have been through that pain as well, where they, you know, discovered great customer-centric ideas that just won't fit inside there into the client or their business model.
AJ: (13:57)
So they're kind of stuck and it's very frustrating because they've done everything right. So what I'm trying to do in my role is to agitate thinking on a higher level, and then try to tell the senior management, listen, if you don't have the courage to change or even carve out a sandbox where we can explore, then frankly, don't use all this design thinking, 'cause you're gonna use it in the wrong way. And even if you use it the right way, you're not going to be able to really implement it. So that's not the problem. You know, that's a tactical challenge to go through strategically. You need to say, do you have the courage to change your business model and your strategy? And you have the responsibility to do that. If you don't do that, if you don't open up that possibility, then you're forever going to be stuck with just product innovation and product push. And that's not going to really move the needle because in most industries. When they're disrupted, it's very rarely from a new product that comes in, changes everything. It's quite often a combination of factors, but most often it's a business model that's very radical in a very traditional industry.
Christine: (15:06)
I think that sounds like a very tough situation also to be stuck into, as you said, like you have all of those great ideas, they're customer-centric, but then they don't really fit with the business model and then you need to really ideate and innovate in that regard. I think that's a big challenge also for you to step in then and guide the company and the clients in the right direction. That sounds super challenging, but also interesting. And do you have perhaps a certain example of where you can let us know how you helped a client specifically with their problem? Any problem or challenge that you encountered and how you approach it together?
AJ: (15:38)
Okay. So I work with one client in Malaysia. I can't name the client, but it's a larger organization that was looking for a refresh. A new CEO was coming to take the helm of this business unit, which is under a much larger umbrella. And she was great. She was very forward-looking and she wanted to say, well, I don't want to just take over and, and just follow the way that things had been done. The previous CEO had retired. There was nothing controversial, but she came in saying, I don't want to just run it the same way. I believe that we could be more customer-centric, more focused, and I want to bring the whole organization more towards customer-centricity and innovation. So let's bring in some external consultants to give this outside perspective on how to do it.
AJ: (16:24)
And so there were two large well-known management consulting firms out there. One very traditional, one of the big [...] was there. And then another one was from one of the top four accounting firms. You know, they have a management consulting arm and they looked at their proposals. And they were pretty similar, and they're very much focused on efficiency. And so I was working for a much smaller outfit for just a little stint for about six months. And we had an opportunity to pitch because this company was an expert in design thinking. And I then came in as a strategist, which was the first one on their team to really know how strategies developed in large organizations. And so when I was in conversation with the client, I said, okay, well, what do you think is the challenge?
AJ: (17:07)
Do you think that you have the right business model, customers love it, and it's all about really efficiency and that's where you can get the most value from your budget and spending your time. Or do you believe that your customer, that your organization is not really clear on who your customers are, what value looks like to them and how to really service them? And it was kind of funny because everyone looks at each other and said, yeah, okay. Honestly, like we have this conversation all the time. We really don't know, and we're not organized around our customers at all. And we have kind of B2C customers and we have B2B customers. I said, okay, so you have two different business models. And they say, not really, we're like a hodgepodge. I said, okay, listen, honestly, it's not about efficiency.
AJ: (17:53)
It's really about effectiveness and effectiveness would then require a lot of research to be done. And so we took them. I said, if you're willing to go through this journey, it's going to be very different than, you know, other consulting projects that you've done. This isn't about efficiency. So this is what it would take. And as we go through this, we're going to have to run a lot of research, a lot of workshops, and we're going to have to bring in the customers a lot, cause they'll know. They need to be the Caesar's to put their thumb up or thumb down whether or not this is going to create value for them. So, you know, right away the other two consulting firms were eliminated. The project came to us and we went through a five-month project where we had face-to-face interviews with over 200 respondents in their different segments, B2B and B2C.
AJ: (18:39)
We got a lot of stakeholders. They were very internally oriented because they were a smaller business unit in a larger company. So they're going to a lot of stakeholders within the mothership. And I said, okay, well, you're not creating value for them. You need to create value for customers, but let's speak to the many ways, and let's see what happens, and let's bring it all together and overlap kind of all the circles and see what's at the core. And what we really found was that we understood what value looks like. We use the blue ocean strategy. So if you're familiar with that, we have value curves for specifically different customer segments. And we drew them out and we kind of understood what the gaps were. And then, with those gaps validated, we then went through a process of trying to innovate through the innovation process.
AJ: (19:24)
A lot of ideas came up that we brought back to customers and were absolute failures. The customers would say, why do I need a holographic, you know, like receptionists, it doesn't link to any of my pain points. Why would you suggest this? And like, oh yeah, but it's really cool. It's really novel. But okay, it doesn't really create any value for me, what I pay more money to, you know what I mean, to do business with you know, I wouldn't. Why don't you focus on these other things I told you about? And it was honestly, it was brutal. It was really, really, really painful. But you know what, you kind of have to see it happen. And as that happened, we came back and it was a little bit deflating. And you know, quite often in innovation, you have this valley of death, I'm sure you're familiar with this Christine where people are, they get to a low point.
AJ: (20:08)
They say, oh, I thought we got it. I thought we were going to crush it. And then we just, you know, failed miserably. And then we say, okay, well, listen, how do we get out of this? It's going to be the only way is that when customers are telling us that we're doing a good job, who cares about what all the other leaders in the company said. They're not the ones who are going to pay and fund this thing. It's going to be the customer. So let's go back to them incrementally with ideas. And we started building up really great ideas, which then became winners. And then what we found was the board of the parent company. They were very happy with the ideas that we came up with because we could strongly validate them. And we could say, listen, it's not about you actually it's about the customers.
AJ: (20:46)
And this is what they're saying, bang, bang, bang evidence-based, evidence-based, evidence-based. And it became a really compelling story to go in a particular direction. And as an external consultant, here's another tip, you know, what am I going to do? I go into the boardroom and I have like, you know, zero years of experience in their industry and they have 300 years of experience. So what I'd have to do is say, well, who cares what I think, but you should care what your customers think. So let's bring in that voice of the customer all the time. If they were there in the room, like you know, to give input on your strategy or innovation, what would they say? Would that be important? Would you even listen if you were to hear it? Well, let's hear it. And I would have like short videos. We did a great job. There was a big marketing effort that needed to happen as well to get them to see, wow, that's the voice of the customer. You're bringing it in. We haven't spoken with customers ourselves for years. Cause we're in senior management positions. Wow. These are really great insights.
Christine: (21:43)
So you basically came in as that external consultant and you made them really uncomfortable, but you really helped them to get to the basics and to really the core of what they would need to change in order to address the customers better. And that's should be most important to them. And I think taking on such a big transformation for a company, that's probably not always easy for people to implement these practices as well. Looking back on your journey on both as a consultant back then, and now also with your company, what would you say was your biggest challenge so far?
AJ: (22:16)
The biggest challenge would be getting senior leadership to listen to the voice of customers. And I just realized a lot of people in mid-mid-level management roles and I was in one as well, we typically don't do a great job of bringing those insights in. And people can then challenge you and say, well, you don't have enough experience or, you know, we all feel this way. And you know, you're a real disadvantage, especially that even intensifies when you're a consultant. And I work across different industries. So I'm industry agnostic. So what's really important is to really in a short, crisp way, kind of get the attention of the senior leadership by bringing in the voice of the customer. But of course, you have to kind of trade in some ways, there's a big PR effort in the beginning. They have to believe that the problem is real.
AJ: (23:04)
It's sizable and it's worth addressing. It's not something you can just be, it can be interesting, but actually, they have to be like really smacked in the head by a customer, say, my gosh, you know, we're doing a lot of things, but we're not really creating value for customers. They don't see it. What's our differentiation point. Customers don't see it. Like, you know, guys, we can't have too many customers answering that. They're clueless about our value proposition, you know. That's not a sustainable business. And so bringing in that message, I think is really important. This is what I do quite often working with clients is, if my client is in the middle level, it's trying to get that conversation at a higher level with the senior leaders. They usually trust my experience. I also work in academia with good business schools.
AJ: (23:49)
So I have some, let's say kind of academic credit as well. And so I can craft that. I can convince them, contrasting conventional strategy versus customer-centric strategy, and then quickly come to the point and realization, all right, we're listening, we're listening. But then their worry is, how far do we go? Right? Because they don't, you don't want to go into a client say, well, we need to destroy your existing business model. No one is going to want to do that. So the question is how do you surface the pain point, but then say, okay, well, how do we pragmatically take steps forward? Would you have a willingness to do this or to do that? Let's understand what is your risk tolerance when it comes to innovation and innovation is first in terms of strategy and ways that you go to market.
AJ: (24:32)
Let's look at that and understand that first, we can get down a product and service and solution innovation later. But if we can't figure this out in the beginning, then we might create very customer-centric ideas that won't have any legs to them. So I'm pretty good at having that specific conversation time and time again, across industries. And I become relatively, let's say good at it. So, that's where I can be the catalyst for change and what my hope is that I can free up the thinking and then middle management or people driving innovation and product development can have a little bit more, let's say, understanding from the top, and support to innovate a little bit more broadly.
Christine: (25:12)
So you're basically coming in and you want to drive that change and really drive that conversation forward. I think it was a really good tip that you were mentioning to really focus on, you know, what are the people, that they're talking to the customers out there? I think that's a good takeaway. And as you were also talking about your journey already and also like the successful parts and what you're doing well with the clients, I think that's very inspiring to hear about all of the successes. But I can imagine that on the other hand, there's also like, you know, stuff that isn't smooth sailing all the way. Do you have perhaps an example of a mistake or anything that didn't work out the way you expected it to in the first place?
AJ: (25:56)
Sure. I've worked on a project with a large financial services company and it was in retail, banking essentially. So we were doing some design thinking sprints with different teams on different types of challenges. And what we started realizing is we said, okay, guys, you know, before you start innovating, you have to find out how long has this problem been known to the organization. And how would we solve it through insights? What can we leverage that has been done in the past before? Or how can we not replicate a failure that's happened in the past, right? We need to learn from our mistakes. And quite often organizations are not always good, people move and then people forget and the organizational memory is sometimes not always there. And so what I found with one client, a large bank is that they wanted to understand certain customer groups. And the design thinking team, they said, well, we're not going to do this demographically because you know, it's not everyone between the age of 40 and 55 all want the exact same thing.
AJ: (26:56)
There are some people that are very aggressive, some people are very risky and, you know, we should be doing it behaviorally, which makes sense, right? What are the nudges that, how can we nudge people to certain behaviors by understanding their attitudes. But actually, this is not the way that bank looks at the market. They look on like, well, how much, how old are you? What kind of education do you have and how much money do you have? It's very demographically based and demographics are great for marketing, for finding people, and communicating with them. But you have no idea what value looks like to a group of people based on their income or age, right? So, you know, what ended up happening was we could not rely on the insights that the bank was generating.
AJ: (27:38)
And what ended up happening is I ended up telling the sponsor of these projects saying, Hey, listen, even if we were to find out, you know, a great customer journey based on a particular persona, we know their behaviors and their buying decisions. We discover how to nudge them into certain ways to make certain journeys or actions. Even if we found out all that, you do not collect these behavioral insights on an organizational level. So it's going to be very interesting, but it's not very actionable because that's not how you look at the market. You look at it demographically. So actually what became very, very clear for the sponsor was that even if we did this, we couldn't implement it. So what value will we get from this project? And we change the value to be, can we use this as an example of how the bank needs to change the insights that it gathers from the market?
AJ: (28:32)
So they can move more towards attitudinal and behavior, that can inform innovation which they can then organize themselves around and then go to market. And so that was "an aha moment" for the sponsor, but it was also very frustrating because the sponsor, you know, first of all, kind of had ideas of what she wanted to do anyway. And it was kind of like trying to reverse engineer through a design thinking project and I wasn't having it. And I said, well, listen, we got to go by science. Like, you know, you can't rely on my experience. I'm only a customer of banks, but you got to rely on the process and the insights that we get. And so when we went through that journey, it was a failure in one way, but it was a much bigger success in changing the thinking of, do we even have the right insights that we can take action on as a bank?
AJ: (29:20)
And what I said is, listen, banks, you've been always been getting information the same way, demographics, age, and income for the last hundred years. If you continue getting insights that way, and only that way, then I'm sorry, but you're not going to understand your customers and what value looks like to them. And you're not going to create great experiences for them. And banking is, essentially it's intangible. It's only about experience. So that was a moment of truth that was kind of revealed. And it was kind of like, oh, you're right. This is so much bigger design thinking project. Oh my gosh, what are we going to do? I feel how you see it? The question is, yeah. What, what do you do? And I said, well, don't worry though. Like one take solace in all of the other banks are doing it just as badly, you know?
AJ: (30:07)
So you can take solace to that, but that's not much solace to have because guess what that is coming, they totally don't do it that way. They're like, why are we going to try to become a better bank and do it, do it the way that the banks do it. That doesn't make any sense at all. So I said, so it's kind of real. And, you know, you gotta think about how to move forward.
I use the example of StashAway. Are you familiar, Christine with StashAway? So StashAway is a FinTech company, very big in Southeast Asia, but it was founded not by a banker, but someone with a very strong e-commerce background. So people from outside banking are coming in and saying, I'm not intimidated by your hundreds of years of experience. You know, I'm not intimidated at all. Cause you could do it all. You're doing it wrong from my perspective. And I'm going to bring it in a different way, which is a much more consumer and customer-centric approach. And yeah, there are regulations that I need to overcome and fulfill, but I will work on that. Well, we can overcome that at some point, but we're going to create much better experiences, you know, using pretty similar products and we're going to win, you know, that's kind of their attitude.
Christine: (31:07)
That was a very big "aha moment" for you actually in that example that you brought, with actually the very valuable mistake. I think probably that mistake brought up a lot of good value in the end for the company. But seeing that actually, you're questioning all of those approaches that the company had in the first place and then seeing, okay, can we steer away from the traditional ways? Can we take a behavioral approach? Can we rethink it in a way that perhaps in one way led to a mistake, but as you said, like to a bigger value in the second place? So I think that's actually a really nice story. And really great to hear about all your experiences and how you work closely together with the clients as well, to help them be more effective and more customer-centric. I'm also kind of curious, is there anything in the future that you're looking forward to in your position that you're in right now? Anything that you're especially looking forward to?
AJ: (32:08)
I'm looking forward to innovation practitioners, so speaking now more about innovation in the innovation space, innovation practitioners getting a better understanding of how these different frameworks come together within innovation, but also with strategic marketing, you know. I know a lot of great innovation practitioners that have deep experience in a particular framework, like design thinking, or we have agile and Scrum people, or you know, we have business model innovation, we have systems thinkers. There's a lot of different things. And it's kind of consulting, it's in management, there's like a toolbox, you know, you need to curate the tools that fit the needs that you have. But customer-centricity and customer focus will always be valuable no matter what tool you use, but I'd like to see also more innovation practitioners understanding the bigger picture. How does this all connect together?
AJ: (32:58)
So for example, design thinking for me is not the start point. Actually great insights and having great market leading-edge, market research that's done, you know, ethnographic research and getting great insights on behaviors, attitudinal insights, understanding how that really informs innovation because that's really, really helpful. But also for these innovation people understanding most companies, 80% of businesses do segmentation on a firmographic or demographic basis. So if you're in that situation, you know, if you know that right from the beginning, and I would ask as an innovation practitioner, either internal or external, I would ask the client or my company, how do we go to market? How do we look at the market? And if you see it's really, really product-oriented, you know, right away that we can not use design thinking exactly the way it should be used.
AJ: (33:55)
So actually what could be more helpful is probably explorations around the business model. And so that's where I need to start off with. So understanding what is the right, let's say concept or intervention that needs to go forward. Sometimes it's not innovation at all. Before you even innovate, right, here's a fundamental gap in understanding value, which is a strategy and a marketing challenge rather than an innovation challenge. So by having more awareness amongst independent practitioners, they can start to find out how do these things connect and really what would be my recommendation, that's in the best interest of a client on how to move forward. And it's not just innovation. It starts with strategy and marketing insights, and then it moves into innovation. And then once you start to innovate, you need to implement it. And then it comes into operations. And so, you know, you're only as strong as your weakest link, what are the links? And some people don't know the other links there. They don't think about it enough. So that's something that I hope to see in terms of the professionalization of the innovation space.
Christine: (35:00)
That's a super interesting outlook and really having a look at that bigger picture, seeing how we can connect all of the relevant links here. I see that evolving in the future as well. So I think that's a very good outlook here. It was great to hear all about your profession, your experience, all of the work that you do. Thanks so much for sharing all your personal journey, as well as being a consultant and now leading a consultancy firm today to help others achieve excellence. It's super interesting to hear about your experience and all of the challenges and also the tips that you mentioned. Really inspiring. So, AJ it's been really great having you on, and thank you again.
AJ: (35:42)
Thanks, Christine. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Christine: (35:45)
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