How can you adopt innovation at your company ? Why should you bother ? How can you do it ? What matters and why ? Here I share my learning from starting and running a startup and building data science products in thomson reuters and other organizations

1. Building an
Innovative Product
Shishir Chandra Choudhary

2. Why Innovation ?

3. Amazon, Google, Microsoft are close by
Innovation today is rewarding
Apple hits trillion dollar market cap
Innovation guided by greed would lead to short cuts, local maxima

4. Shrinking Time to Market
Innovation
Market
Adoption
10+ years
Innovation
Market
Adoption
2+ years
Google, AirBnb,
Uber, Dropbox,
Technology,
Business Model,
Solutions
Technology,
Business Model,
Solutions

5. Those who execute well,
do wonderful in short run
Those who explore well,
do wonderful in long run

6. Software Scales
Distributing the innovation costs

7. Big tech companies don’t know
your business, but startups will,
so you need to start innovating
Business Model, Solutions and Technology
Innovation are not just for big tech firms

8. How to turn your company into
an innovation powerhouse ?
Execution Powerhouse Innovation Powerhouse

9. What’s Innovation ?
1. Problem you care about
2. Idea Generation
3. Idea Validation
4. High Speed and
Low Cost of Iteration
and enough runway
5. Empowered People who love
what they do and care about the problem
1.1 Closeness
with User

10. What’s the outcome ?
6. Insights Other’s Don’t Have
(Problem and Solution)
7. Successful Idea -> $$$

11. Detour - What
Innovation is NOT
Keep the innovation map we saw in mind. We will
come back to it shortly.

12. It’s Not
Eureka !
Best of First Ideas Do not Survive Impact of Reality

13. Neither is it careful
planning
You don’t know what result of your experiment would be.
You don’t know the learning you would have after next experiment.

14. Innovation is this,
but how to scale this economically ?
1. Problem you care about (and
potentially financially rewarding)
2. Idea Generation
3. Idea Validation
4. High Speed and
Low Cost of Iteration
and enough runway
5. Empowered People who love
what they do and care about the problem
1.1 Closeness
with User

15. Some parts of this are
familiar !
1. Problem you care about (and
potentially financially rewarding)
2. Idea Generation
3. Idea Validation
4. High Speed and
Low Cost of Iteration
and enough runway
5. Empowered People who love
what they do and care about the problem
1.1 Closeness
with User
This is a central Agile
Principal
This is Agile / Lean
This is Agile Dev Ops
AGILE ≢ SCRUM
The spirit of Agile vs
Form of Agile

16. Innovation
•People Aspect
• Problem you care about
• Empowered people who
love what they do and care
about the problem a lot
• Being very close with user
• Small team that’s self
sufficient and aligned with
common “why”
•Mechanics
• Low cost, high speed
iterations of idea
generation and idea
validation (experiment and
build)
• Commitment to invest to
enable such infrastructure
to allow such speed and
cost effectiveness
• Sufficient runway

17. It’s not the
particular
technology
Start with the problem you care about first. Figure out the right tech to apply.
Never the other way around ! You can’t “experiment” with outcome in mind already.
Also, If you don’t care about the problem, you would not survive the initial failures.

18. Short Runway
Before innovation flies, it crawls, walks and runs. Too short a runway and no idea will fly.

19. Not a work
for large team
You need small, self sufficient, fast moving team. Large team is only needed to scale the
final solution.

20. $$$
$$$
You don’t check success rate of innovation ideas
One in ten may succeed financially, but rewards would be large, specially if digital
solution which can scale easily. Each idea should be tried in a lean way.

21. Why Bother ?
Innovation is tough and time consuming, why bother ?
Execution is fast.
In shorter run the better
executing team wins.
Exploration is slow and wasteful.
In long run those who explore, leapfrog
Digital solutions scale well distributing
the cost of innovation
So you need both

22. Back to innovation
map

23. 1. Problem
You care about
• Innovation is a winding path
• People put more effort for
things they care about
• How to enable this ? We’ll see

24. What’s your company’s /
team’s DNA ?
• Selecting the problem you want to innovate on is “the
most important first step”
• What does your company/team really excel in ?
• If problem you pick is one you don’t really care much
about at team and company level, you are unlikely to
succeed.

25. 2. Idea Generation
For idea generation you want to do following
• Improve quality of ideas
• Improve quantity of ideas

26. Idea Quality & Quantity
•Be cloooose to
users
• Ideally - be your own target
demographic
• E.g. if an investment product, be user of
that investment product to invest
• Entire team should feel as
close to users as possible
• Otherwise, you solve the
wrong problem or fail to
learn

27. Idea Quality and Quantity
•Explore
• Experiment a lot (cheaply)
• Have a long term process

28. Idea Quality and Quantity
• Be aware of and leverage
Open Source
• Explore open source
• Be aware of what is
possible

29. 3. Idea Validation
• Never drive blind
Build analytics into your
product
• Talk to users who used your
new idea
• Take your product for test
drive yourself

30. 4. Rapid Cheap
Experimentation
• Each experiment should be
fast and cheap
• Invest in building infrastructure
to enable rapid experimentation

31. 5. Empowered People
Who love their work and care about the problem
• People are very important component of
innovation
• Hire people who just love what they do.
People who do work just to pay bills never
build ground breaking products
• Empower them, trust them. Use agile
approaches where you don’t stand behind
the shoulders or try to control people.
• Agile daily stands should be just 5-10 min
of what each person is doing today and
not a question and answer or control
system. Note this requires people who
love what they do.
• Teams should be small (5-10) and self
sufficient

32. Selecting Good Ideas
• Management can’t be
bottleneck for innovation
• Allow in company anyone to
start a cheap experiment (infra)
• Easy approval for 20% time
• Simple approval for dedicated
time based on results of easy
approval
• Sufficient runway for failures
and retries

33. Comparison
Proble
m you
care
about
Problem
company
cares
about
Idea
Generatio
n
Idea
Validation
Fast
Iteration
Infra
People
who love
work and
the
problem
Closenes
s to users
Hackathon Yes ? Yes ? ? Yes ?
Hackathon
with
Sufficient
Runway
Yes ? Yes Yes ? Yes ?
Distributed
Experiments
Yes Yes Yes Yes ? Yes ?

34. For DataScience
Projects

35. All previous still
applies
Problem You Really Care About
Empowered People Who Love Work & Care about The
Problem
Being Close to User
Generating Ideas -> Validating Ideas -> Quick Iterations
Learning and Sufficient Runway

36. Adopting Latest Innovation Research In House
Using Open Source Models,
Libraries & Platform
Early on concentrate on
learning from each small
project, not success or
inevitable failures
As you figure things out,
scale and execute
You must do a bit of this to
develop appreciation of
nuances & solve problems
not yet solved
Identify core pain of users/
customers and focus on
each of those with research
too (longer runway)
Small self sufficient and multi
disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI,
Devops etc) teams
Small self sufficient and multi
disciplinary (DS, DE, API, UI,
Devops etc) teams

37. 2. Idea Generation
3. Idea Validation
4. High Speed and
Low Cost of Iteration
and enough runway
Get This Right
Tools to speed up experimentations

38. Start with simple solutions
Start with simple rules
Once you have lot of data, introduce ML
Replace any complex rules with ML

39. Open Data
Wikipedia, Wikidata,
Twitter etc
Apps and API
Your own UI, API etc
would provide data
DS Strengthens With Data
Data Augmentation
Use Sensible
Augmentation of
Available Data

40. Summary

41. Why Bother ?
Innovation is tough, why bother ?
Execution is fast.
In shorter run the better
executing team wins.
Exploration is slow and
wasteful. In long run those
who explore overtake
So you need both