Story:
Innotribe – a tribe of innovators in the financial industry

Phase-0: 2005-2007 (bottom-up activities and murmuration)

• Several groups in SWIFT expressed the desire for a faster time to market and a more modern product and service portfolio.
• Just before the creation of the innovation team, prototyping was introduced when one of the innovators challenged an executive on a proposed new product line, and suggested to fund a prototype as an alternative to theoretical PowerPoint presentations.
• The executive agreed in funding 2 competing prototype teams, one for his own idea and one for the idea of the innovator.
• The “only” constraint was that the prototype needed to be ready in the next four weeks.
  • The executive created the prototype with the existing internal development teams.
  • The innovator went outside and procured the development services of Microsoft Consulting Services
  • What the innovator did not know was that the executive was already 4 months in development with his own team.
• Anyway, four weeks later, each prototype team pitched their idea and prototype head to head in front of the full executive team.
• To the surprise of many, the prototype of the innovator won, and got the opportunity to make it happen for real in as one of the first Innotribe Projects.
• The winning idea was one of the first to be tackled by the Innovation team that was started end 2007.
• Other needs for application integration and secure file transfer found their home later on in the innovation team. In that sense, the first projects were bottom-up initiatives that first got credibility internally, and then across the network.

Phase-1: 2007-2008 (group established, focus clarified)

• In April 2007, a new CEO came on board, articulating a strong focus on innovation across the company.
• The innovation team was formed in September 2007, under the executive sponsorship of the new CEO.
  • He appointed Kosta Peric as Head of Innovation, reporting into the Executive for Products and Services. Kosta had 15+ years of SWIFT under his belt, in all possible departments of the company, except HR.
  • Kosta handpicked the first members of his team: most members of the initial team had product management experience, and about half of them had joined the company the last 2 years, coming from enterprise software providers and telecom companies.
  • Project Management skills were insourced per project from different product and IT units.
• Initially, the innovation team was seen as a fast product development shop where the end deliverables were software products. Black-Belt teams were formed per product, and end-to-end delivery cycles were reduced from 3-5 year to 1 year.
• This was made possible by forming self-sufficient multi-disciplinary teams versus a silo-approach, and a strong CEO executive support with fast and direct escalation paths.
• A good example is the trigger-prototype example for low volume customers. The black-belt team delivered a brand new product in one-year time. The team not only revamped the product functionality, but also revised fundamentally the buying experience, on boarding, pricing model, and business UI experience.
• The black-belt teams delivered 3 products to market.
  • The Alliance Lite SAAS application targeting the low-end customers.
  • The Alliance Integrator EAI product, targeting the mid segment of our customers
  • The SWIFTNet Mail product, addressing the secure file transfer need.
• At the end of 2008, the financial crisis hit. The decrease of worldwide economic activity also had its repercussion on SWIFT’s message traffic evolution. In an attempt to increase the efficiency of the organization, a Lean program together with McKinsey was rolled out company-wide.
• As part of the in-depth internal customer review – part of the Lean methodology – it became clear that the executive team was not aligned on the mission and scope of the innovation team. Some executives expected the team to act as a pure R&D and fast product delivery shop; others wanted a pure enabling unit. Almost every executive could be plotted somewhere on the spectrum from R&D to Enabling, with the result that nobody was really happy.
• Lean requested the executives to align in an unambiguous way on the scope and mission of the team: they agreed that it should be a unit within the company for enabling collaborative innovation.

Phase-2: 2009-2010 (public launch, initial portfolio of tools/capabilities in place)

• The Innotribe brand was launched in 2009 during SWIFT’s flagship event “Sibos” in Hong-Kong.
• Initial focus of the revamped Innotribe was on idea generation and creating serendipities
• The core-team composition changed gradually from product management type of resources into a multidisciplinary team of content researchers and curators, facilitation and design experts, and program managers
• The core team was complemented by “megaphones”
• Megaphones: very early on we started with the idea of “Megaphones”, some sort of internal innovation ambassadors in different departments of the company.
  • In the initial version, megaphones were “volunteered”, their mandate was unclear and their management was not motivated or incentivized.
  • In version 3.0 we got it more or less “right”: we have a novel and very transparent megaphones recruitment campaign, megaphones now have a clear mandate, spend 15% of their time on innovation related activities, and this is part of their objectives, and signed-off at the begin of the year by their managers.
  • The role is to co-create internal awareness about our innovation activities
  • Megaphones also play an important role in filtering the ideas coming in via the idea-management tool.
  • In addition they have curation and production roles for internal events.
• We wanted to create a culture where “failing smart” was accepted. To that end, we created a number of tools and techniques to enable collaborative innovation.
• By end 2010, we had in place:
  • An innovation framework based on open innovation;
  • A portfolio of tools and techniques for internal (SWIFT as a company and ecosystem) and external (the financial industry at large) innovation. Most of these tools and techniques were used to create the initial tribe and ideation for the open innovation pipeline;
  • A group of internal ambassadors, called “megaphones”;
  • A successful event and facilitation practice
  • Our own “sandbox”. The concept is introduced on Kosta Peric’s Forbes blog here. Kosta is SWIFT’s Head of Innovation, and has documented the history and activities of Innotribe in a recently published book “The Castle and the Sandbox” available here.
  • The sandbox is an “incubator” – a protected place where people with ideas can “play”, or to try out their ideas, without impacting the castle. The “castle” is the metaphor for the mothership, the core of the company. The incubator is the place where you can try, experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually learn and succeed.
  • We also offer tools to the SWIFT employees like Idea Challenges, Brown Bags, Hackatons, and internal TEDx-like events to encourage team members to learn from the edges, to step forward and to reward initiative.
• The team focus was balanced about 50/50 on internal and external innovation activities.
• Quite organically, we found some methods to growing and energize the tribe
  • Very early in the year, the team goes on off-site and hacks a very rough activities plan. Tasks are distributed and team members get ownership for “game-plans”, that have to start from the “intention”, and then drilling down into “what does it enable?”, the measurable results, and only then the next steps, milestones and actions.
  • The consolidated plan is then underpinned by a communications plan that includes all channels: Social media, blogs, video channel, press roadshows, publications
  • Some other team members focus on trends scouting and content curation. Once the themes and trends are stabilizing, we identify the subject matter experts in these domains; we call them the “igniters”. As a matter of fact, this is quite an iterative process: sometimes the igniter informs the theme; sometimes the theme informs the igniter required.
  • We also give a lot of attention in creating connections between the igniters for a specific team, so that natural leaders emerge, and strong and aligned igniter teams are formed.
  • We have a very solid events/workshop production capability within our own team to create/architect serendipity. Our designs are very detailed, and documented in minute by minute straw dogs, detailing crowd control, architected turbulences, audio and video landscapes, support and effect.
  • The ultimate goal is to create connections between people at the human level, beyond the functional level.

Phase-3: 2011-2012 (scaling and addition of incubator and start-up challenge)

• In 2011, the Incubator and the worldwide start-up challenge were added to the mix and we further scaled and perfected our existing tools and techniques.
• The Start-Up Challenge:
  • The Start-Up Challenge emerged almost organically. Already in 2009 we were experimenting with 1-2 hours/day workshops over 4 days, facilitating our audience with ideation all the way up to preparing a professional VC pitch of that idea in front of a professional jury.
  • In 2010, we decided to sponsor GuideWire Group’s Innovate2010, with a specific request to identify 6 start-ups in the financial services space. We added 6 other start-ups to that initial list (really based on gut-feel), and let them compete at the Innotribe@Sibos event 2010 in Amsterdam.
  • It was a huge success, and we decided to professionalize the approach. With the first edition of the Innotribe Start-Up Challenge in 2011 in Toronto.
  • In the 2012 edition, we had 3 regional competitions (Americas, EMEA, APAC). In total more than 600 start-ups in financial services competed for a 50,000 USD cash price
• The Incubator
  • The incubation phase was particularly important as for the first time we had a multi-million dollar fund for investing in promising innovations.
  • It was a natural extension of our proof-of-concept tool, but this time with more a more significant budget.
    • The incubation projects are funded by the Incubation Fund, a 100% SWIFT Fund.
  • The concept of “enablers”.
    • To help us deciding where we put our funds, a group of “enablers” was created. This is a group of senior leaders from our industry ànd from outside our industry. They have been selected for their authority and influence as persons, not necessarily because of the organization they represent.
    • The role of the “enablers” is to “enable” incubation projects. This is NOT a killing committee or gating process to say “no”. It’s a group of wise people saying “yes” to projects and bringing enabling assets to the table such as contacts, experiences, trend validation, etc
• By end 2011, our Innotribe “brand” was considered the most important brand SWIFT launched in the last 30 years.
• In 2012, we explored the Acceleration phase to progress the most promising incubation ideas through different forms of co-investment.
  • As the word suggests, the acceleration phase is to accelerate incubation projects into scale-implementations.
  • As the funding required for such projects usually exceeds the funding capacity of the incubation fund, co-investment with other parties is one of the options.
  • So, only one project reach acceleration phase, but it was not using any form of co-investment to reach that phase. It is a rather well-scoped and self-contained project where internal funding was sufficient.

Phase-4: 2013 (plans for further experimentation with innovation journeys, etc)

• In 2013, we will continue and further increase our innovation efforts, with a greater focus on the core activities of the company for internal innovation, and exploring novel funding models for our external innovation.
• In 2013, we will also experiment with “Innovation Journeys”, a model for enabling business units to win though co-ideation, co-creation, co-delivering. We also plan to complement our existing toolset with scenario planning and story-telling.
• One particular example is a project where we plan to combine big data and scenario planning to support our growth objectives. Instead of making the innovation team win and shine, “journeys” are much more about coaching, knowledge transfer, transparency and making the business unit win and shine.
  • Co-ideation: the business unit iterates together with somebody from the innovation team on the business needs, requirements, and possible approaches. The innovation team fully transparently shares its extensive network with the business unit, and we select together the most appropriate parties to work with.
  • Co-creation: the project objectives, scope, constraints, deliverables and budgets are set together. Team members from different business units are part of the core project team. External parties are interviewed and their opinions further inform the direction of the project.
  • Co-delivering: In order to inform the different decision levels in the company (from Board, to Executive Team, Senior Management, Middle Management, and Executing levels), joined roles and responsibilities will be defined.