Innovation as mantra and as process - Bettina Hein enlightens

Examples of innovations and their success story. From process to implementation

 

Bettina Hein, successful serial entrepreneur, promises to reveal a secret today: Innovation has nothing to do with heroes and genius. Heroism and genius help to market the story and are also good for the ego, but in reality innovation is a process "like any other".

Above all, however, it takes years of perseverance and must "always keep at it". The mantra of innovation should be repeated regularly. It is a daily task, combined with an appropriate attitude and a lot of perseverance.

What helps with innovation is navity. If she had known in advance how long the rocky road of her last company, Pixability, would have lasted, she would hardly have started. And now follows this story.

The first iteration began in 2008 with a B2C idea: A software that allows private individuals to edit their videos - to process what is already lying around on the hard drives into a product. The market then only proved to be suitable for people who earn a lot of money and was therefore too small. In addition, there was a financial crash in the USA.

Next, the company piled flip cameras on companies, from which Pixability produced nice company videos. Nice, but unfortunately these videos were then only "uploaded" and not marketed. They reached too few views. And the model was also not scalable.

So the company started to develop video marketing software. In addition to the naivety already mentioned, "courage" also helped. Or "chutzpah", as she also writes in the presentation. In the meantime, however, Youtube had become the de facto standard and the road to success was targeted advertising. There was money for it, but it was a new business again.

"I am in the business of making mistakes" says Bettina, which is also reflected in the sequel. The advertising budgets were mainly with big companies and suddenly they were service providers in the field of "Programmatic Youtube Ad Technology". On her slides she now writes the sixth iteration and then came Facebook with video.

"If an idea is not working pivot". The art is not to make the change in no time but with method. You have to be able to make an S-curve, like this:

 

Innovation is the daily business: everyday life. It just has to go on and on. Be a stand-up guy, because from now on you're going to get "kicked in the teeth". As an example of this, she shows the examples of L'Oréal un Zipcar, who carry out hundreds of experiments with Pixability every day, adapting to the reality of the customers.

What have we learned about innovation? Naivety, persistence, chutzpah and everyday life! 

See the whole presentation here.