8 quotes to live by straight from Coca-Cola’s director of innovation

It almost goes without saying that launching a new product is hard. 

Several studies, including a study from Harvard Business School, make that very clear — estimating that between 80% and 90% of new product launches will fail. So what can you do to make sure your latest innovation is a success with the odds (more than) against you? 

Why not hear what an innovation expert at a major brand has to say? Say, someone who has generated over $2.5 billion in revenue from new products over their career so far?

Cedric Steele, Director of Global Innovation at Coca-Cola (McDonald’s division) joined us on Inside Insights, our award-winning podcast, to reveal the points he lives by during the innovation process that helps him innovate in a way that actually moves the financial needle.

In this article, we’ll cover 8 of the points he shared with us so you can start to up your own innovation game and launch with confidence.

The truth is, to successfully innovate means you have to constantly be on your toes and solving for new problems or trends that arise.

The creators that grow are those that have knowledge, a unique perspective, challenge their customers' thinking and help provide a clear path forward. In order to get to that space, you must be aggressively curious. As the world is constantly changing, you have to understand at a granular level what you're dealing with and what's influencing people's lives and their livelihoods. In this way, innovation is a constantly changing puzzle that you’ve got to piece together.

Every innovation master has to earn their stripes. Often, that means working through huge volumes of ideas in order to find the ones that work. It takes time and practice to develop the ability of refining where you hunt for ideas.

But as you get more experience under your belt, you’ll become a lot more efficient and agile in your ability to select the ideas that are going to give you a greater probability for success.

The more refined you get, the greater the speed to market. And speed is everything in innovation.

Let’s talk ideas. In general, you don't need to budget the number of ideas that you have, but you may want to be more selective about what you present or move forward in the innovation process.

Truthfully, you're always better off the more thought you can put into something, and the more you can collaborate with others. So identifying when to collaborate is the key.

Sometimes, the culture of an organization isn’t ready for some ideas. There can be a strong resistance to what’s new and different. In that early stage, it’s often worth working with a very close-knit group of like-minded folks that are striving for new ways to get things done. 

Circulating too many under-baked or “fragile” ideas is often not effective in terms of:

1. Demonstrating that you know the business you’re in, and how to take the idea and move it through the organization

2. Showing your understanding of resources and return; it’s unrealistic to start creating every individual idea that you want to try as this simply isn’t cost effective (or possible) in most environments

…it involves people on both sides of the fence. 

This is not only the people on the customer side, such as the owners of the brand and their brand equity, but people on your internal teams too. Mainly, insights. 

Insights teams have a very crucial role in making sure that the innovation journey goes well. In order for people to be involved and engaged in the process of making an innovation exist, you have to give them the vision, or a way to demonstrate how this is going to accelerate the organization's goals and profit. 

“At the end of the day, people want to know: ‘Where do I fit into this, how can I help the vision become bigger, if I do put my hours and my effort into it, what's the return going to look like?’ Those are basic, universal things that I've found, regardless of where you are on the planet.”

Democratizing the creation process can be a great thing, but it can also result in ideas that aren’t actually feasible in the real world. 

Meaning, by involving a lot of people and asking them to vote on a favorite idea, you can end up with a lot of ideas that may or may not work, rather than laser-focusing on a few that have a better chance. It’s always best to develop ideas a little further and assess their feasibility before sharing across teams.

“Once you start peeling back the layers of the raw idea, you're able to get to a more developed idea that can lead to a concept. And once you start drilling a little bit more deeply, you’ll find it's not the number of votes that you get for or against an idea, but the qualitative feedback and the opinions of other stakeholders that can help you to actually execute.” 

Approaching idea development in this way will help you get laser-focused on what’s possible, rather than firing out large volumes or a “scatter gun” approach of ideas that don’t end up working.

This one is pretty straightforward: Ask people for ideas that you don't always ask. Winning ideas can come from the (seemingly) most unlikely places. 

“One of the things that I worked on at Georgia Pacific years ago was trying to come up with some new ideas for Brawny that could take the brand out of just the paper towel space. We opened it up to all the employees in the company, and received over 150 submissions. This one line worker sent me a really elaborate description of a way that we could take an existing manufacturing line, make a slight change to it, and come out with a totally different product that made $2 million a year right off the bat.”

Ask people that are the closest to the base of knowledge, and give them just some room to be creative. You don’t have to be an expert in something to give good input. If you’re willing to listen, the ideas you can get back from people are incredible.

In addition to who you ask questions to when kicking off a concept, you should also be thinking about what you’re asking. Sometimes, better solutions come from asking better questions.

“I remember my typical starting point would be asking, ‘What do we want to learn, what do we want to know, and what do we feel we can gain from doing the research?’ And I totally ask different questions now. I start with ‘What do I want to do with it?’ and ‘What do I feel would be useful knowledge to make better decisions?’” 

A small shift in perspective from the getgo can produce very different results. Often, it’s who you choose to consult that can help to push you in new directions. Which leads to the next point…

“I will only use research partners that I know have the fundamentals there, but the thing that I really value is the push and the pull that comes through partnering discussions at a strategic level.” 

Assembling a team of trusted thought partners, not just vendors, is a great way to help you look at a problem you’re encountering differently and on a more strategic level during any stage of the innovation process. 

The people outside your organization, but who work within the problem space on a day-to-day basis, can be the ones to help you see the bigger picture or help you learn from other customers they work with. Seeking the perspective of different thought partners is essential to make sure you’re really approaching a problem from every angle.

While these points are by no means a silver bullet for success, we hope these insights from a true innovation legend will help you streamline your processes when developing your own innovation.  

One key action you can take is to invest in researching your concepts with consumers so you feel more confident about how your product will succeed in the market.

And if you’d like to hear Cedric’s full interview, listen to his full episode, “The innovation game.”