The million-dollar question: Just how do you commercialise innovation?

If you’re looking to make innovation a commercial success, PwC’s latest Platinum Series event may shine some light on the matter.


The digital avatar

Soul Machines’ Rachel, the digital avatar designed to provide a human-like interface for AI systems.Image provided courtesy of Soul Machines.

Andy Symons and Dr Mark Sagar

Andy Symons, PwC Innovation Partner and Dr Mark Sagar, CEO Soul Machines.

For some businesses, innovation is a pie in the sky – a nice idea, but ultimately an expense they can't afford. Other Kiwi companies are trying to future-proof their processes and operations without much hope of making any return on it. And yet, there remains a fantastic number of organisations in New Zealand today that see the real commercial opportunity of innovation – not just seeing it as something to budget for, but something to propel their people, their processes and (yes) their margins forwards and upwards.

The matter was discussed in July in PwC's Auckland office between Dr Mark Sagar, CEO of Soul Machines and creator of incredible Artificial Intelligence technologies, and PwC's Innovation Partner Andy Symons. With the 'Essential Eight' technologies (AI, Blockchain, Robots, Drones, Augmented Reality, 3D Printing, Virtual Reality and the Internet of Things) becoming more relevant each year, capturing their value is now a priority.

Here are a few snippets of what Dr Mark and Andy had to say:

Andy: "Start-ups are driving disruption by combining their agility, hunger, speed and focus on a new business model – and they're laser-focused on the customer problem being solved. Take a partnership perspective. You don't have to do, own and control everything yourself in house."

Mark: [On partnering with incumbent businesses as a start-up]: "We've designed our technology to integrate with incumbent technology, plug into it and enhance it, which is not really a difficult [sell]."

Andy: "I ask boards: 'where is your innovation session in your agenda?' If you're building a company culture that drives innovation, that starts at the board level, and it goes right out to the people who're face to face with the customers. Everybody is involved in innovation – it's owned by the whole organisation. Our people watch and learn what is valued and we need to help them see that new, agile behaviours are valued."

Mark: [On finding business]: "You have to make use of networks. We're dealing with some of the biggest companies in the world, with hundreds of thousands of employees, and we're now bubbling up to take the attention at the top of these companies. Particularly CEOs of financial organisations, they get it like *that*."

Mark: "We're doing pilots with different companies, and they're ready to test it internally … so they can really explore and get some feedback from people in the company."

Andy: "Constantly evaluate emerging technologies, because it's not a one-off exercise, and shift organisational thinking to outside in. A lot of the innovation we've seen in New Zealand in the last 50 years has been inward looking – how do we become more efficient and how do we take costs out of the business. Now is the time to turn that thinking around and look outside."

Mark: "I am constantly looking over my shoulder for disruption. I know we're competing at a global level, so I think it's really important to have people tinkering with other technologies that are coming up. At Soul Machines, we're playing with a number of technologies that we know could be disruptive to what we're doing but we also are trying to build things in a way that means we can get disrupted at a couple of different angles and it won't matter."

Andy: "Our vision for New Zealand companies is leveraging our natural inventiveness and hunger. It's going to mean evolving the conversation away from 'what are the emerging technologies and aren't they cool' to 'why do companies need to evolve, why do they need to take a structured approach to exploring and experimenting with emerging technologies and how are they combining them to create commercially impactful innovation plays – innovation that's impactful because customer feel it, staff see it and the market really believes it'."

Mark: "We've been presenting the technology globally, and we're starting to get some very serious bites now. Part of that is the market coming up to the idea that technology is ubiquitous. In Japan, they've loved [AI] for years, whereas the west has been more resistant to it. But now, you're starting to get things like Amazon Echo and Google Home, and that's suddenly become commonplace. People are getting more used to the convenience."

Andy: "Over-abundance of money and resource does not lead to innovation. But one of the quickest ways to kill innovation is to create competition for resources. There's definitely a strong case for ring-fencing some funding and making that available for innovation, but don't create a scenario where people have to compete for that funding, because they just won't."

Fit for Growth

For more ideas, research and success stories on how great Kiwi companies and global brands have carved a way forward

Read PwC's Commercialising Innovation report

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Andy Symons

Andy Symons

Partner, PwC New Zealand

Tel: +64 21 410 732

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