The Creativity Suite. Episode 156: Innovation Hunger Assessment
Interview with Kien Foh Lo, President and CEO of Continental Automotive in Singapore.
Here’s an insight many companies overlook: You can only innovate at the speed your clients are ready to accept innovation, but different customers have different levels of “Innovation Hunger”. The trick with Innovation Hunger Assessment, is to assess how much innovation you can push on your customers.
Maximising the innovation push will maximise your speed of innovation.
One business leader who espouses this idea is Continental Automotive Singapore’s President and CEO, Kien Foh Lo. For an hour or so I sat down with Kien Foh Lo to discuss this interesting and important topic.
Continental, if you did not know, does way more than just the tires that they are famous for. Its Automotive group sector, which employs about 92,000 people around the world, develops and produces all kinds of parts for the mobility industry, from parking radars to window projection solutions to software defined vehicles and much, much more.
According to Kien Foh Lo their different automotive customers have different innovation needs. Some need help with improving their processes, some want to be pushed to the limit to be able to be the first to introduce the latest technical solutions on the market. The job of the people at Continental Automotive Singapore is to understand how much each customer wants to be pushed.
Kien Foh adopts this concept that he calls “the 3R of listening” – it stands for Receive, Review and Respond. It’s all about Receiving ideas, demands and suggestions from the customer, Reviewing what to do with this information and then Responding quickly and correctly to the right things.
It’s more than just “listening to the customer” – it’s about understanding how much innovation their customers are able to receive and – more importantly – what kind of innovation they are ready to receive.
Kien Foh Lo: “We need our people to be curious, to challenge the status quo and to be hungry to nudge our customers forward but just the right amount that they can ‘handle’.”
Kien Foh Lo calls this “the positive push”.
If you know which client to push, in what direction and with what level of force, you will maximise the effect you can get from your innovation.
After all, cutting edge innovations that no clients want is not going to bring you success.
And just producing the same old solutions that customers always wanted is not going to bring you progress.
But, pushing the right innovation, to the right customer in a way that makes the customers appreciate being pushed will bring you both progress and success.
To be able to do that effectively you need “Innovation Hunger Assessment” (IHA).
Final Thought: Do you assess how much innovation you can push on your different customers based on their “innovation hunger”?
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