Unicorn Hunting AND Zombie Slaying

Almost every CEO I speak to thinks the job of their Strategy and Innovation team is to make money for the company by leveraging capital to search for breakthrough new business, product and service ideas. Hardly any of them think the job of Strategy and Innovation is to save the firm money by preventing it from investing capital in lousy business, product and service ideas.

This is a mistake.

Every year, we see hundreds of projects limp on, draining limited human and financial resources and distracting teams from working on the truly transformational.

Just last year, CNN spent $300,000,000 to launch CNN+. A paid-for streaming news service that would be the network's answer to Disney+, Paramount+ and Discovery+ (we really need a new naming convention for streaming).

McKinsey told CNN that by charging $6 per month or $60 annually, they could expect two million U.S. subscribers in the first year and that the domestic subscriber base could grow to 15-18 million in the first four years.

In reality, less than 10,000 viewers tuned in, equating to a per-customer acquisition cost of $30,000.

The decision to invest in a venture that would have required ~4.5 million subscribers to break even while regular CNN (which you can access literally everywhere) captures fewer than one million viewers daily was baffling. Within three weeks of launch, it was shut down.

As innovators, we tend to present our Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile skills as weapons for unicorn hunting - using them to find new growth territories, develop new propositions and get them into the hands of customers quickly.  

But a proper application of Design Thinking would have told executives that CNN+ didn't solve an unmet or underserved need, running Lean Startup would have helped them to test the idea in a matter of weeks, and developing the service using Agile could have invalidated the venture on a smaller scale and saved around $299,700,000.

Of course, this is an extreme example of failure. But in a challenging economic environment, when many leadership teams believe they can do without giving you a budget to search for the next big thing (at least until the next financial year), you should be presenting Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile as weapons for zombie slaying - using them to discount fanciful predictions, test questionable ideas cheaply and kill the bad ones before they grow legs.

As innovators, the value you add isn't just in finding the one in ten revenue generators your company should be investing in; it's in rooting out the nine in ten loss-makers they shouldn't be investing in.

As you head into battle for 2024 budgets with the red pen wielders, it's worth keeping track of the money you've saved your company through zombie slaying, as well as the money you made through unicorn hunting. Who knows, maybe they'll reinvest it?

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