Bata Innovation Lab
The Bata Innovation Lab (BIL) enabled Bata to aggressively expand its offering of consumer-validated and technically-validated global products for men and women. BIL also formulated and managed relationships with best-in-class strategic partners and manufacturers to deliver an integrated collection of product-focused innovations for Bata’s customers, globally.
BIL was about solving the most challenging business problems by delivering tangible and functional product prototypes to Bata’s Brands and Regions.
My Role
As the Global Innovation Manager, I supported the acceleration of key organization-wide innovation projects and priorities to achieve Bata’s innovation rate goal, including advocating for the adoption of the product technologies introduced across all global regions and influencing the organization through data-driven insights. I helped scope, explore, and kick-start new innovation & product initiatives, and drive the ongoing execution of existing projects with the following skill set,
Scouting – I explored the unknown to discover business problems worth solving. This search for ideas and new technologies was within and outside Bata. This included a screening of various innovation sources, conducting and facilitating workshops for brainstorming, and using innovation tools to collect and validate ideas from all these activities.
Analyst – It was my job to help prioritize the most valuable problems to solve based on marketable, measurable, and meaningful criteria which include validating the innovation concepts’ most critical assumptions via prototyping & testing. Furthermore, this involved an analysis of the opportunities, risks, strengths, weaknesses, and viability of the innovative ideas.
Innovation Product Manager - I coordinated, prioritized, and aligned the development of the projects with various stakeholders and suppliers globally, and managed expectations accordingly. Additionally, I established processes and mitigating strategies for managing issues and risks across projects.
I succeeded in this role because I am obsessed with change management, self-driven to achieve results, and am someone who thrives in the grey i.e. wasn’t afraid to take on challenges that didn’t have a clear path to the desired solution.
Work Highlights
At BIL, our mandate was to reinvigorate a culture of innovation at Bata and achieve the 2020, 3-year global innovation target of 10% starting from less than 2% in 2017. We started off by creating global innovation and product validation criteria that are summed up below.
We developed and executed an Innovation Champion program for Bata’s 19 Innovation Champions, co-led Quarterly Innovation reviews with 5 Regional Presidents & Bata’s CEO. Additionally, we conducted 100+ innovation workshops with stakeholders in all 5 regions.
Our quarterly innovation governance process, innovation champion program and product validation program saw 0 certified regional/local innovations in Q1 2018 grow to 81 certified regional/local innovations as of Q3 2019.
Achievements
The innovation governance project led to an 87.5% increase in revenue generated from footwear with an innovation focus from $80M to $150M.
The innovation and Product validation framework produced products with 4.6% higher gross margins than products that didn’t go through the framework.
Increased innovation idea generation by 139% from 2018 to 2020 by facilitating in-person and virtual workshops.
Key Learnings
Innovation and global product management are about networking and building trust with all stakeholders.
Innovation is not about a singular process like design thinking, human-centered design, or lean startup.