Most innovation post-mortems look at the idea. This week's three stories point somewhere else: the gaps between teams.
At Mars, good products kept fading after launch because the people who built them weren't the people selling them. Cristina Garcia-Cervigon spent two years redesigning that, and the first result is Mars's best-selling SKU since 2019.
At RGA, Chris Murumets found that full rooms and five-star feedback weren't changing how anyone worked. So he replaced events with a dinner for eight and one hard question for the whole company, and people started caring.
Finally, new HBR research by Linda Hill and co-authors names the leader who keeps work moving when it crosses into IT, compliance or a partner's world.
Which of these gaps looks most familiar?
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
How Mars Stopped Losing Good Products After Launch
Mars was good at launching products but struggled with keeping them alive afterwards.
The ideas were strong and the prototypes impressed stakeholders. But by the time a product reached the region meant to sell it, the people had changed, the context was gone, and the momentum drained out.
Cristina Garcia-Cervigon, SVP Growth Strategy, Portfolio and Innovation, traced the problem to three structural causes: regions that never asked for the product, incentives that kept weak projects alive at the expense of strong ones, and the handover itself. She spent two years redesigning all three.
Mars now splits innovation into a small Discover team that owns consumer pain points and pods that carry projects from development into the market, with the regions involved from day one. Early-stage teams are measured on what they learn, not on revenue, which makes it safe to stop a weak project. Funding for new products is ring-fenced from the core. The first proof is a mood-management gum, built with Tesco from the start, that became Mars's best-selling SKU by rate of sale since 2019.
Five-Star Events, Zero Change: How RGA Gets Colleagues to Care
Most innovation teams try to get colleagues to care by running events: lunch-and-learns, guest speakers, booth days.
At RGA, those events filled rooms and came back with five-star feedback, and then nothing changed in how people worked. Chris Murumets, Chief Innovation Officer at RGA Americas, found that participation doesn't equal caring.
So his team dropped the formats that didn't move the business and kept two that did. The first is a Jeffersonian dinner, named after Thomas Jefferson's habit of seating a small, mixed group around one question. RGA's version brings about eight people together, sends the question ahead, and opens with why each person cares about the problem, not with their job title.
The second reaches everyone: one hard, structural question put to the whole company, such as why GoFundMe is the largest payer of funeral costs in North America. Chris makes it personal on purpose. RGA reinsures roughly 20 million lives in the U.S., and at the end of every row on those spreadsheets is a human being.
Every Innovation Needs a Bridger
An innovation team can have the right people, process and funding and still hit a wall the moment the work moves into another part of the company.
IT has a different priority, compliance sees a different risk, and a partner wants something built differently. None of them reports to the innovation leader.
Research by Linda Hill, Emily Tedards and Jason Wild, published in Harvard Business Review and their book Genius at Scale, found that structural fixes like governance contracts don't build the trust this kind of work needs.
What does is a specific kind of leader: the bridger. Bridgers curate the right partners, translate across their different ways of working, and integrate their efforts around a shared goal. This is how Raja Al Mazrouei got banks, startups and regulators to build DIFC's Fintech Hive together, how Garry Lyons got Mastercard's board speaking the language of digital, and how Nicole Jones turned Delta's resistant IT team into a partner.
What’s happening @ Novum
This week, members of the Novum Society are engaged in a week-long Co-Working Sprint. They started sharpening their problem statement on Monday and are now exploring possible solutions and defining an experiment they’ll run in the coming months, to address one of their main challenges.
Members are working on challenges like
1 - Proving innovation's value in terms finance accepts | One member needs a way to measure the impact of technology innovation that both the business units and finance will recognize. Tangible results are tracked, but without a shared way to value the intangible ones, innovation risks being seen as a nice-to-have.
2 - The innovation team without a mandate | Several members are trying to turn their innovation team into something with a clear operating model, decision rights and resources, rather than a "toothless tiger" or a pilot factory with declining ROI.
3 - AI app sprawl | Business units are building their own AI tools, and several departments end up solving the same problem in different ways. A hub-and-spoke model with IT helps, but IT is uneasy letting business units build outside its remit, and there's no good way yet to validate AI-generated code.
4 - Bold bets vs. a risk-averse HQ | A member's core business faces a technology shift that could make its main product obsolete, and their team has identified bold opportunities in adjacent markets. HQ, however, would rather not try than risk failing.
5 - Winning when AI does the shopping | How do premium consumer brands compete when shoppers increasingly search and buy through AI assistants? Even the success metrics are still open, and the scale of the shift is what makes it hard to get started.
Would you like to learn more how you too can tap into the expertise and experience of fellow innovators to tackle your issues? Check this page for more info about the Novum Society.
We spend a lot of time on frameworks, structures and tools. This week is a reminder that the work still moves at the speed of the people involved.
In the next edition, we’ll invite you to ask yourself some foundational questions about our roles as innovation teams in the years to come, and we’ll share 5 immediate tactical points to end the year strong.
Yes, ambidexterity applied to innovation management… ironic, maybe?
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
