An article by Scott Williams
published on 9 Sep 2023
Commercialisation is your job too, buddy.
In this OPS:Innovator podcast episode, I spoke with Melissa (Mimi) Curran about commercialisation and growth. Interestingly, the conversation quickly headed toward customer experience and how that is essential to any organisation achieving its growth objectives. It’s not surprising that CX is so important, of course, but jumping straight into it was fun!
Here’s the tl;dr:
- Growth is not about having a “make money” mindset
- The tension between demand and fulfilment is a fact that needs to be acknowledged and addressed
- Commercialisation is everyone’s responsibility, and each person needs to understand their role in it
- Start innovating your growth efforts by improving what you already do, then use trends to take the next step
Mimi said that the right mindset is not to focus on the money when considering commercialisation and growth. Revenue is an outcome of value exchange between the organisation and your customer, and this means that the ability to commercialise a product or service centres around what you are offering.
Once you think about it correctly, you can start to work on the roadblocks preventing you from achieving your growth objectives, like how in the world you will set yourself up to operate so that fulfilment can support demand. Revenue has to stay ahead of delivery, but the sale doesn’t end when the contract is signed and the payment comes in. So, every organisation needs to constantly monitor their pipeline and future capability to deliver against it while organising themselves so that the response to surges and headwinds can be swift and as non-disruptive to the people involved as possible. This means you, if you’re the person who wants to do a restructure every other month. Please stop that.
With the right mindset and op model to back it up, you are ready to start letting the creative juices flow to try and build a future that your customers and your people can be excited about.
She talks about selecting and focusing on a future moment if you want your innovation efforts to succeed. Otherwise, it’s too easy to go off-track or try to make things too big, complicated, or difficult to achieve.
I can tell you that I’ve seen that happen first-hand, and it’s a genuine risk. Marketing folks want the big thing to promote, executives want an innovative thing to show the board, and finance wants a thing that achieves a decent ROI target. All reasonable “things” to ask for, but without a specific future to focus on and purposefully design an experience around, the “ooh, we could do this too” conversation will never end.
And that brings us to the fact that commercialisation, in any organisation, is everyone’s responsibility. Leaders have a responsibility to help their people understand the individual and team-based contribution they can make to growth because everybody’s got one. Simultaneously, those people are responsible for actively seeking that understanding to make better decisions about how they do what they do. When we know, without question, what part we play in how the organisation services their customers, makes money and grows, it makes it easier to feel like we are making a difference.
And speaking of making a difference, a little creativity goes a long way. Start where you are and with what you know. Look for the things that are getting in your way today, and take a few minutes to think innovatively about how you might fix it. If you are struggling, talk to your colleagues, but not about how to solve your problem. Talk to them about how they might have addressed similar issues in their work. Usually, you can pick up on something in one context and apply it to yours in a way that hasn’t been done before. Boom: You’re being innovative.
After you have that nailed, you can start looking at customer and industry trends, apply your practised innovation skills, and change the world (or at least commercialise and grow something in it).
You can contact Mimi by visiting novariconsulting.com.
To hear more of this conversation or those with any of our other notable guests, check out OPS:Innovator wherever you get your podcasts or find all our shows on YouTube.
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