Making practical innovation an everyday habit

4 min readMar 30, 2021

Written by Ryan Powell, Managing Director, Accenture Salesforce Business Group-Innovation Lead

Innovation is about action. Not in the future, but now.

It’s about things you can do now that affect change. It’s about creating a culture of constant innovation — day in and day out across your organization — that believes that innovation is an everyday responsibility for everyone in your organization.

Accenture’s report on the future of customer experience: “Becoming a Business of Experience,” (BX) reveals new thinking on how organizations must put the delivery of exceptional experiences at the heart of their enterprise. While that may seem like the kind of ethereal concept that’s often associated with innovation, transforming into a business of experience can only be achieved by being intentional and taking action — regularly. Every day, in fact.

An important step in the four winning ways identified for becoming a Business of Experience is to “make experience innovation an everyday habit.” But what does this mean?

For someone like myself who is in an innovation role, this seems almost obvious. However, for many stakeholders, especially in complex organizations, innovation is often thought of as something another team does. While that may have been ok in a traditional CX world, as we’re seeing a shift to BX, those organizations who continue to focus innovation in certain parts of their organizations will end up in a “sea of sameness.” Closing the gap between your brand promise and the experiences you deliver must be a regular exercise. It means changing how your organization behaves. Not always an easy task.

Sustaining innovation with Salesforce

Built for a level of constant change, the Salesforce platform is dynamic by design. That’s a reflection of Salesforce — a company that takes the same cultural approach to innovation. And because Salesforce — both the product and the company — prides itself on moving faster than anybody else to get innovation into market, the organizations who benefit from their solutions the most are those that embrace a culture of change. To create a culture of innovation, you have to embrace innovative technologies and the partners that aren’t afraid to move quickly and iterate often.

Two weeks to serious impact

So, what does a culture of innovation plus a powerhouse technology platform look like in real life?

Let’s rewind the clock one year, when all of us were experiencing disruption far greater than we could have imagined. The COVID-19 pandemic required a rapid response. Contact tracing became a top priority for many of our clients. We had to build a solution and we had to build it faster than we ever have before and we had to bring together teams across many parts of our business in order to move quickly.

We developed an end-to-end solution, powered by Salesforce, that enabled many of our U.S. state clients to stand up and operationalize their own solution in 14 days. This included new multi-channel virtual contact centers to support contact tracing outreach, follow-ups and inbound chat/call support — which eliminated delays. If you know contact centers, you know that this is no small feat.

This unprecedented situation called for solutions in record time. We were able to deliver because we consciously make innovation an everyday habit on our teams, and when the challenge presented itself, they were ready.

Accenture’s Business of Experience report found that this level of agility is a significant competitive advantage, but takes it a step further by showing that a significant differentiator is organizations that engrain innovation into their culture.

Where do I start?

It can seem like a daunting task to move your business towards a culture of innovation. While change does not happen overnight, approaching this as a journey built with support from the top ensures that goals will be met throughout the organization. Here are a few of the most important ingredients:

Leadership Support: This is the most important ingredient. After-all, this shift will likely mean new ways of working, new priorities or new organizational structures.
Accountability: Cultural change does not happen just because you have leadership support. Someone has to be accountable for the shift and the ongoing journey.
Make it a Habit: This starts by creating a space where innovation can flourish, allowing for the diversity of ideas and concepts to flow and making that actionable through things like innovation competitions, hackathons, and others.
Create a Launch Path: Give your innovations a path to be tested in the real world so you can monitor for proof of value, test and refine. This also means investing in your ability to produce these innovations.It does n

There is much more to unpack on becoming a business of experience. Connect with me on LinkedIn and let’s continue the conversation.

1 Accenture C-level BX Survey; data collected from November 2019 to January 2020, with a refresh in May-June 2020

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