Summary of the Article the Innovation Catalysts

SUMMARY OF THE ARTICLE “THE INNOVATION CATALYSTS”

Hortigüela Martín, Alberto

In 2004 Intuit, which is a software development company, adopted the Net Promoter Score, this concept is based on the likelihood that a customer recommend a product or service to a colleague or friend. From 2004 to 2007 Intuit’s NPS raised significantly, however, in 2007 the NPS stalled, it was then when Scott Cook began to figure out how to stimulate its customers. He create a one-day program called “Design for delight”, there he began it with a five-hour presentation, but he ended up not very satisfied because of the lack of energy in the room, this presentation was followed by a presentation of a young consulting professor named Alex Kazaks, in this one the key point was a participatory exercise, which took most of the presentation time. Cook realized, through a poll, that this last part of the program was where participants have learned more, this was taken into account by Cook in order to change the way of innovation and customers delight at Intuit.

He hired Kaaren Hanson as promoting designer, then, she created a team of 10 design-thinking coaches called “innovation catalysts”, people of the team must be interested in coaching others in design thinking. The group came from a variety of fields and not from a top level of the organization. The first step of this project was to import a design thinking into the DNA of the company, this was made through a series of Design for delight forums, another thing that was taken into account by Cook was to ensure help by the innovation catalysts to employees when they have to create prototypes, run experiments…

Decisions at Intuit used to be made based on a PowerPoint presentations, Cook realized that it was better to learn directly from customers through experiments. With the aid of “the innovation catalysts” the company developed a special process which nowadays is followed by every new innovation proposed at Intuit. This one begin with what it is called “painstorm”, the main aim of this step is to find out a customer´s issue in which Intuit can provide a solution. The second step is called “sol-jam”, which is like a brainstorming where people generate the solution for the problems they have founded in the previous step. Now, instead of integrating the solutions considered of high-potential to the software development process at that moment they prefer to get code into users ‘hand as soon as possible due to the fact that this is the best way to know if the solution has or not potential. The las step is the “code-jam”, when the code for those successful products is finally written. The profitability of this new method has been proved with different products as SnapTax or in India with the farmers’ app.