How do you predict the ROI of innovation?
In a world where challenging the status quo is no longer a choice, innovation has become almost everyone's job description.
We should know better than most - our clients come to us from the public and private sectors with some of the most ambitious projects in the world:
- Addressing a mental health epidemic
- Creating solutions for a housing crisis
- Improving K12 curriculum choices across the US
- Designing products that can push hundreds of millions of users to exercise
...and all of that is just in the last few months!
If you've been following us for a while, you'll know that we use a healthy mix of scientific thinking and pragmatism to turn really hard problems like these into opportunities for a better world (if not, read more here). This puts us in a unique position, where we regularly talk to some of the most ambitious (and more importantly, kindest) leaders in the world.
Something almost all of them face is predicting and demonstrating the ROI of innovation-focused projects. This is perhaps the toughest problem of all, as organizational and social change only happens when you have large-scale buy-in. All too often, we’ve seen scenarios where an ambitious leader at an organization pitches some (often no-brainer) breakthrough idea to the CFO, presenting a tight business case with five-year projections for costs and returns. And all too often, we see that the CFO is unimpressed. They are thinking about the case as an optimization problem, not a zero-to-one opportunity. Their job is to exploit, whereas the pitch is focused on exploring.
This is why a core part of our practice is focused on exactly that - predicting and demonstrating ROI, as a tool for behavior change.
Case in point - a financial services company came to us to launch an entire suite of innovation initiatives related to trust, customer satisfaction, HR, and even risk audits. The definition of ROI in this case was different for each of these initiatives - with different stakeholders caring about different things, and different parts of the customer journey (or employee journey) being targeted. After an intense research & ideation phase, a large part of the project, then, became centered around proving that the proposed solutions had legs (or, as science goes, finding out they don’t) - i.e. predicting the ROI they could deliver in each domain.
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.
About us
We are the leading applied research & innovation consultancy
Our insights are leveraged by the most ambitious organizations
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I was blown away with their application and translation of behavioral science into practice. They took a very complex ecosystem and created a series of interventions using an innovative mix of the latest research and creative client co-creation. I was so impressed at the final product they created, which was hugely comprehensive despite the large scope of the client being of the world's most far-reaching and best known consumer brands. I'm excited to see what we can create together in the future.
Heather McKee
BEHAVIORAL SCIENTIST
GLOBAL COFFEEHOUSE CHAIN PROJECT
OUR CLIENT SUCCESS
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Annual Revenue Increase
By launching a behavioral science practice at the core of the organization, we helped one of the largest insurers in North America realize $30M increase in annual revenue.
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Increase in Monthly Users
By redesigning North America's first national digital platform for mental health, we achieved a 52% lift in monthly users and an 83% improvement on clinical assessment.
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Reduction In Design Time
By designing a new process and getting buy-in from the C-Suite team, we helped one of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world reduce software design time by 75%.
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Reduction in Client Drop-Off
By implementing targeted nudges based on proactive interventions, we reduced drop-off rates for 450,000 clients belonging to USA's oldest debt consolidation organizations by 46%
