Being the Venn
A mantra for new business value acceleration
Innovation Inc.
Ever since the late Clay Christensen coined the phrase “disruptive innovation” (HBR homage piece here), startups and incumbents alike have battled to capture and consolidate market share leveraging the strategy. For a generation, business consultants, high profile VCs and rock-star founders have all credited innovation and disruption as the key drivers to business success.
But the connected if chaotic world of humans and brands has evolved in unimaginable ways since Dr. Christensen first identified his formula in 1997. The magnitude of change — technological, cultural, social and commercial — has affected every aspect of our lives from the couch to the café, in the boardroom and down Broadway. In fact, over the past twenty years, innovation transformed from a business strategy to an industry of its own, creating a new sector of incubators, accelerators and consultancies along with heralded domains of fresh expertise — digital transformation gurus, growth hackers, futurists and more.
Two Problems
When we analyzed the market need for an alternative approach to business acceleration, we identified two problems with most for-profit innovation centers and consultancies. The first is what we call the wrong who, that is, the primary beneficiaries of the value created are the investor stakeholders of the accelerator. We wondered if there was room for a lab with a different value model, one serving first and foremost the ultimate who of any business — the customer.
The second problem is related to the first and has to do with the missing why — the human insight upon which a new business’s go-to-market strategy either fails or succeeds.
It seemed to us that an innovation lab within a university like ours might provide an uncommon space for enabling a different kind of value creation. A system of value creation starting with the human audience — the one a launching business needs to reach and serve. This would be the new who around which our value model would revolve, with the missing why of human insight as both touchstone and north-star for our Lab’s design.
Insight to Value
When you’re in the startup acceleration business, every decision becomes a marketing decision. Everything from business model and pricing to product and service design are informed by a marketing insight about the audience, the market, the competition and ultimately the new business’s emerging brand.
Marketing’s job is to extract deep insights into human need and transform them into value — demonstrable and compelling value first for targeted customers and then for the business. Our deliberate model is to apply this formula of insights-to-value in solving for the two problems with the value models of existing innovation labs.
There’s a good reason why so many brands and businesses suffer the lack of deep human insight– it is extraordinarily difficult to uncover and articulate. Our founding instructor-consultants and faculty leaders have spent their careers helping businesses solve for this enduring marketing challenge. The opportunity for igniting competitive differentiation is immense. As we say in the Lab — it’s not the insight, it’s what we do with it.
Being the Venn
Our value model and entrepreneurial academic culture make us different, but what truly distinguishes the Innovation Lab is where we sit in the market landscape. If you overlay the set of new businesses eager to enter the North American market through the fearsome gates of New York with the marketplace of early customers, you find an interesting mix of players. Digital agencies, business consultancies, VCs, incubators, investment groups and even commercial bankers all compete for a piece of the innovation-as-a-service business.
We’re in the business of higher education which means our incentives and success measures are radically different from the other actors inhabiting this venn space between business idea and the market.
Our Lab is business-student-fueled and instructor-consultant-led. Our student innovators are a mix of both graduate and undergraduate scholars as much as they are aspiring entrepreneurs, product designers, strategists and analysts. Our consultants are a select faculty from the New York community of expert scholars and executive practitioners — in-market brand and business leaders, agency heads, consultancy practice leads.
What gives this mix its unique potency is both the diverse internationalism of our students as well as the professional creds of our professor consultants. Armed with our distinctive formula for value creation grounded in human insight, this mix of student innovator and accomplished professionals offers our partner start-ups the potential for truly alchemical business outcomes.
Experiments ‘R us
Working within the venn between startups and the world of their future customers is an intensely opportunistic space to inhabit. We take the concept of laboratory literally as our instructors, students and partners vigorously embrace the business of experimentation.
Every university strives for some degree of integration with industry partners, whether it’s a challenge brief, a master class or internship opportunities. Our Innovation Lab pushes industry integration to another level. Each of our courses — whether it’s social media, digital marketing, data analytics, marketing finance or applied research — integrates targeted startups deeply into their 15-week lab session. The courses become the vessel for experimentation, with their syllabi’s projects briefed to produce in-market experiments for value creation and optimization.
One of our core courses is applied marketing research methods where our students learn the tools and apply the skills of a cultural anthropologist. Whether it is deep listening, video ethnographies, quantitative surveys or qualitative focus groups we exploit the most appropriate form of research to surface the insights to inform our partner project experiment design and implementation.
These value creation experiments take many forms. In our charter semester our student projects delivered a compelling array of value outputs for our partner startups — applied research studies, MVP development, acceleration strategies, brand architectures, customer profilers, creative platforms, go-to-market plans and roadmaps.
Academy as platform
In a meaningful way, our Lab’s value model is academy-as-platform, leveraging a unique community of students, instructor consultants, startup founders and future customers to accelerate value creation for all. Our platform approach suggests that innovation is but table-stakes, what’s required to drive true competitive differentiation in this or any market is fresh insight — and a process for doing something extraordinary with it.
Our partner startups came from across the Atlantic — many from the heart of startup nation itself, Israel — and from across the Hudson, emerging from the next generation of garage entrepreneurs. They come to us because we inhabit not only a unique academic space between their business and its future customers, but because we are deeply embedded and integrated into the commercial fabric of the greatest market experiment the planet has ever known — New York, New York.
We’re just getting started. We don’t pretend to know what the next big thing will be in consumer tech, ecommerce, packaged goods, healthcare outcomes or personal wellness or which new business idea will trigger its explosion. What we do know is that we’ve got a powerful model for value creation and we sit in a singular nexus between new businesses and the markets they seek to conquer. We’re confident our Lab is poised to play at least some part in the accelerated marketplace of 21st century business in New York — and everywhere else insight can be applied in the service of human and business value creation and exchange.
We invite you to connect with the authors, Dr. Maria Blekher the Innovation Lab’s founder and director, and lead consulting adjunct Thom Kennon.
Visit the Innovation Lab here https://www.yu.edu/innovation-lab.
