Building a Culture of Innovation.
A ‘Genius Bar’ for fish: Driving growth through entrepreneurial leadership.
TESCO.
Tesco International is a multinational retailer of groceries and general merchandise and a FTSE 100 constituent. We worked with Tesco to instill a culture of entrepreneurial leadership within its senior leadership team, and drive growth by solving a key market challenge in Southeast Asia.
Based on a guest lecture given by OneLeap’s Hamish Forsyth and Julia Mitelman at Harvard University.
In today’s dynamic global landscape, fortune favours the entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurial companies innovate more and grow faster. Their employees are empowered and driven to push boundaries. Their leaders inspire action and set the stage for outstanding performance.
So it’s no surprise that large corporations are striving to be more entrepreneurial. However, successful ‘intrapreneurship’ (entrepreneurship within an established company) is easier said than done; Harvard Research on innovation models in global companies shows that the success rate is just 10-30%.
OneLeap exists to help companies overcome these challenges and achieve breakthrough growth by being more entrepreneurial. We start by working with a carefully selected A-team of successful entrepreneurs. We then translate their mindset, tools and techniques into practices that work in a corporate context. By doing this, OneLeap has helped numerous blue-chips identify and capitalize on exciting growth opportunities.
Tesco International is one such company. Using our Harvard Business Review-featured Venture Sprint® and the insight of carefully selected veteran entrepreneurs from our global community, OneLeap helped Tesco’s senior leaders embrace a new approach to innovation by tackling a sales problem, developing a new service line, and through the experience, equipping them with the mindset and toolkit to drive innovation long after we had gone.
Here’s how we did it.
Situation.
Tesco International wanted to equip its operationally-focused leaders to see and act entrepreneurially on new growth possibilities. Tesco was clear this would be most likely to succeed in the context of addressing an immediate business problem.
Define the problem.
Working together, Tesco and OneLeap identified a clear and present problem. The multinational retailer had opened stores in Thailand and Malaysia, where it staked its reputation largely on the quality of its fresh food.
However, Thai consumers were not always enticed by the retailer’s offering, preferring local wet markets for fresh food, especially for one of the most important parts of the local diet: fish and seafood. This impacted footfall in Tesco stores, and consequently, not just fresh food sales, but total sales.
How could we win back fish sales, and so boost overall revenue?
CREATE AND VALIDATE A HYPOTHESIS.
Now we needed to understand the current barriers to success. Why did consumers prefer to buy their fish from the wet markets over Tesco? The executives had assumptions, but we wanted certainty - and fast. With traditional market research both too costly and too slow, OneLeap adopted the lean start-up approach: live customer testing, right at the source.
Having mapped the assumed customer journeys and developed questions to validate them, we went to wet markets to test. Here, we uncovered a key insight: the wet market preference was particularly strong amongst the younger generation, who wanted to cook the dishes their parents had but - given the pressures of modern urban life - didn’t know how. At the wet markets, they could source cooking advice and inspiration from vendors; at Tesco, they could not. Even though wet market produce wasn’t better or cheaper, the wet markets met an experiential need: imparting confidence.
Through rapid fieldwork, we clarified this clear customer need - by the end of day one.
Ideate solutions.
The next challenge was to generate solutions that satisfied this customer need. We needed to supercharge the ideation process. Enter our team of proven serial entrepreneurs: carefully selected for sector, market, and functional expertise, from OneLeap’s 1,000-strong global community.
The executives were divided into small teams, each with two of these entrepreneurs, and guided by our experts through a process that encouraged a focused yet divergent thinking approach to tackling the problem statement. Through exposure to the entrepreneurs’ perspectives and real-world insights, they were challenged to think laterally; in short, to think like entrepreneurs.
One of the prompts was to assume the role of a brand admired for delivering the excellent experience target customers craved.
How would this brand respond to Tesco’s fishy problem?
One group chose Apple to inspire their idea: Apple stores have Genius Bars, where specially-trained ‘geniuses’ are available to fix broken devices and give the customer confidence needed to get the most out of their products. Following a rapid pitching and voting process, the executives decided to develop this solution.
Could we create a Tesco ‘Genius Bar for Fish’?
Develop and test prototypes.
OneLeap led the group to adopt a lean start-up approach: choose the simplest, fastest prototype that can be created within current resources to reduce cost and increase speed to insight. In this case, that meant recruiting wet market sellers to act as ‘fish geniuses’ in Tesco. That day.
The idea was to get fresh food geniuses into Tesco delivering cooking demos and offering recipe advice alongside a curated selection of ingredients, making cooking as easy as ‘plug and play.’
To the seasoned corporate executives in the room, this went against every modicum of standard industry process. The following conversation ensued:
What do you mean, ‘put them in a store’? Can we do that?”
“Well, you’re the CXO. If you can’t do this, who can?”
“But there are processes, this will be expensive.”
“Much cheaper than months of analysis while we’re losing sales.”
“Hmm. Maybe we’ll set up a test for later this month.”
“No, we’re doing this today.”
“But the wet market guys won’t want to leave their stalls.”
“Well, let’s ask them…”
Armed with fees for day rates and the entrepreneurs’ chutzpah, the group headed across town and successfully(!) recruited several wet market vendors for our ‘Genius Bar for Fish’ in the seafood aisle the following afternoon. In tandem, teams in-store rapidly built special areas for the geniuses, adding some of the colour and drama that inspired customers in markets. We had our minimum viable product (MVP). For four hours that day, Tesco customers could enjoy live cooking demos and recipe advice in their local store. The result? Compared to the same four-hour period on a regular day, the store’s seafood sales were up by 400%.
Test for scale.
Our rapidly built prototype validated our hypothesis. The customer's needs were met. However, in order to be commercially viable, our solution needed to be scalable. Drawing from our team’s global strategy experience across multiple industries, OneLeap led a business model analysis, exploring a wide range of patterns in order to identify ways to make this new service sustainable.
The favoured option was the Tupperware model: turning loyal customers into active promoters. Earlier customer conversations suggested there might be enough social kudos in being an accomplished Thai cook to make this work. Could we get Tesco customers to provide the cooking demonstrations and advice? Again, the initial reactions from some of the executive team were skeptical: why would someone give up their time to showcase our products?
We approached ten customers in-store and asked if they would be interested in running a live cooking demonstration and providing tips and recommendations in exchange for a free grocery shop. Nine said “no”. One said “yes” - and ‘I Cook for You’ was born.
Over the next four hours, OneLeap and Tesco ran an extended experiment that saw hundreds of customers gather around ‘I Cook for You’, sampling and buying curated ingredients for this and related dishes.
The result was overwhelming, revalidating the value of inspiration. More importantly, the waiting list of aspiring cooks demonstrated that the social approbation associated with being a cooking ‘Genius’ was sufficient reward to drive a customer-as-salesperson model. Word-of-mouth promotion increased, Tesco Malaysia’s social engagement shot up, and before long, the local press turned up to get a slice of the action.
Seafood sales surged.
The Outcome.
This ‘little bet’ had proven that there was a market for our bold idea - and that it was commercially viable.
At every stage of tackling this problem, Tesco leaders worked as part of a team with OneLeap’s entrepreneurs, experts and facilitators.
The OneLeap team video captured and recorded initial reactions, decision-points and hesitations. As we reviewed this, the executives recognized that if they felt hesitant about taking a more entrepreneurial approach, their reports certainly would. Drawing on this experience, we worked with the executives to help them design simple systems, including OneLeap’s Safe Harbors, to make it easier for everyone to go after rapid growth opportunities.
The Value.
Combining strategic rigour with entrepreneurial creativity, OneLeap’s approach helped Tesco International to innovate with real impact.
By translating proven start-up practices and the mindsets of real-world entrepreneurs throughout the entire ideation and build process, OneLeap enabled Tesco to reap the rewards of operating like a start-up within the constraints of their corporate context.
The project delivered not only a new source of direct value, but also a fundamental shift in the executives’ mindsets. Having witnessed the tangible value that a culture of innovation can create, they became advocates for the new way of working and championed it within their organization long after this project.
Feedback.
“I was searching for inspiration to stretch and challenge my CEOs and their teams and OneLeap answered the brief perfectly. Modern, agile and well-connected, I would recommend this crew to light a fire under your business plan or accelerate the development of your people.”
