LOS ANGELES—Not surprisingly, innovation was the subject of some of the discussion at the California and Nevada league’s REACH Conference here. That included a panel discussion that was moderated by Mollie Bell, chief engagement officer with the Filene Research Institute (during the meeting the league and Filene announced a new venture, coverage of which can be found here.
Participating in the discussion were Sarah Canepa Bang, president/COO of CO-OP Shared Branching; Eric Cotter, VP-automotive product and innovation with CU Direct, and Erik Vandermause, VP-TruStage Innovation and channels, with CUNA Mutual Group. Here’s a bit of what was discussed:
Bell: How can we bring innovation about?
Vandermause: At CUNA Mutual, innovation occurs around three steps: Ideate, execute and activate. In ideate, we find lots of ideas flowing all the time. But how do you capture them? Something we do is we open and close the window two times per year, and when it’s open we say submit your ideas, there are investment dollars to be had. Employees are asked to submit a one pager, and all those are reviewed in a Shark Tank. We give them give five minutes to state their cases. It really moves people to action. Some filters we use are selectibility, viability and feasibility—can we scale it. With execute, that’s where we bring the muscle and project management comes into play. And with activate, that’s where we go to market and really focus on the customer and the buying process.
Bang: How do we innovate in such a big company? One of the things that CO-OP does that I love is we really bring everyone together. At any other company it would not be productive. But there is no fear that you bring forth an idea; except you might get saddled with making it happen. We have a very prescribed process and we are all involved in it. The iteration bit of this is also important. We know we’re not going to hit a home run every time. A lot of innovations come from the credit unions. One thing we know is the ideas are out there in the credit unions.
Cotter: We have open office hours that are in the calendar. Anyone can come in and pitch the idea. We will help them with understanding where an idea is weak and where it has strengths. Then they come back in and pitch their ideas again. I believe firmly that innovation is not a department, because that implies that all other departments are not innovative.
You need to know your customer, know their needs. Evaluate the feasibility of solving those problems. Critical to building a team of innovators is not to lower the bar. We try to resource people to do well, and we really invest in people. I think we as humans have a way of going over and beyond when we have others believing in us. It’s not just writing code; it’s about solving problems.