Work / DARE Innovation
DARE Innovation
- Client
- ABN AMRO
- Year
- 2018
- Role
- Developed the methodology; coached and trained innovation teams for seven years
- Question
- The organisation had several ways of arriving at innovation. That created the wrong kind of competition: teams didn't learn as a collective.
- Approach
- One way of working built on Scrum, Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking, with learning at its core rather than the method itself.
- Result
- DARE Innovation became a self-learning concept and the standard for everyone working in innovation and product development.
The situation
ABN AMRO had no shortage of innovation. There were, if anything, too many ways to get there. Every team had its own way of working, and that sounds healthy until you see what it does.
It created the wrong kind of competition. Teams compared themselves on method instead of on what they learned, and what one team discovered never reached the next. There was no learning as a collective.
What I did
I developed DARE Innovation on my own for a year, then together with colleagues. The way of working is built on Scrum, Agile, Lean Startup and Design Thinking — none of those parts was new.
After that I coached and trained innovation teams for seven years. That coaching wasn’t the finishing touch but the core: a way of working on paper changes nothing, you have to stand alongside people while they use it.
What came of it
The result wasn’t that the way of working was perfect. It never is.
What it solved was that there was now one shared way to learn. Learning was the product, not the method. That’s how DARE Innovation became a self-learning concept, and the standard for everyone working in innovation and product development.
That insight is exactly what I now do with AI. The tools aren’t the differentiator, and neither is the methodology. The differentiator is whether an organisation is able to learn together how to work with it.