This document discusses innovation at TalkTalk, a telecommunications company. It makes three key points: 1) Big innovations often come from ideas that seem on the "edge of ridiculous." These can come from disgruntled customers, rogue employees, or off-the-grid competitors. 2) When innovating, TalkTalk focuses on experimenting with ideas and being willing to fail early. They use their engineers to develop technical solutions around existing product needs. 3) TalkTalk assesses ideas based on factors like the scale of opportunity or risk, whether the idea fits their strategy, the timeline, potential to do it differently than competitors, and whether it could be a platform for further growth.

1. Digital Leaders: innovation
Max Alexander
Executive Director, Innovation

2. Where do
good ideas
come from?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
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3. Big innovation is right on the edge of
ridiculous ideas
Disgruntled Rogue
Customers Employees
Off the Grid
Competitors
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4. Innovation at TalkTalk: some principles
• Incremental innovation will always be important but it’s the step out ideas that make the
difference, we can’t do many so getting it right or failing early is critical
• Take your time, ask the right question
• Experiment
• Roll the dice
• We are not an R&D house but we have to use our engineers to innovate around technical
solutions to our product needs
• We have to plan for it being difficult
• We stay away from losers until its launched
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6. Innovation at TalkTalk: how do we assess
the ideas?
• Scale of the opportunity or risk – how many customers, economics – data please.
• Is it on strategy? If its not is it the idea or the strategy that needs to change?
• Is there a mantra? – 5 words – ‘we democratise new services’
• When do we need it done by?
• Can we do it differently? – if all we can come up with is a me2 the size of the opportunity / threat needs to be
huge
• Is this something we shouldn’t do? What do we need to understand?
• Can we do it quickly? – does it need to be perfect at launch or can we ship and iterate? (need to be perfect
is a bad thing)
• Can we cut our losses / can we change tack?
• How much do people care about it – sense of energy?
• Is it a platform for further growth and development?
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