From Benchmarking to Mashmarking

Published on April 20, 2007 at capgemini.com
Three innovators from Capgemini Netherlands - Ron Tolido, CTO Continental Europe Asia Pacific, Hans van Grieken, business innovation officer, and Koen Klokgieters, business innovation officer Consulting Services - delve into multiple burning questions on business innovation. You can also read Capgemini Netherlands’ transformation process around mobility to safeguard it in the future. We also talk about how Capgemini supports organizations in the transformation required to achieve Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to be able to innovate better.
Mashmarking to Innoboxing
Koen Klokgieters, one of the driving forces behind Capgemini’s Innovation Management Consulting Services, says, “Innovation is not a luxury with which thriving companies indulge themselves. It is absolutely essential if you are to remain successful. And because of this, innovation is an integral component of serious transformation. Many recent market research studies underscore this fact. ‘Great Expectations, the changing role of IT in businesses’ from The Economist Intelligence Unit is a good example.”
Ron Tolido defines innovation as, “it means coming up with new ideas, goods, services and processes. It is all about dealing with things in a new, improved way (to the extent that this is possible).” Koen prefers to use the term business innovation as it means developing and implementing unique added value that the customers adopt. “The more unique and the bigger your head start over the competition - at the time of introduction - the better your chance of success with the customers, not to mention your operating results.” Hans van Grieken, involved with Capgemini’s Center for Business Innovation operating worldwide, agrees with Koen and in his view that innovation means ‘doing different things’.
They believe that innovative impulses increasingly come from unexpected directions. For example, Intel, British Petroleum and Wal-Mart adopted an innovative initiative in the American health care sector, for creating integral, electronic patient files. None of these companies are from the health care sector, but they have considerable interests and influence over it. Craig Barrett of Intel says, “I don’t believe the health care sector can update itself, so perhaps we have to do it.”
Ron, Koen, and Hans cite the term ‘mashmark,’ which indicates the level at which an organization is able to integrate with the outside world and quickly arrive at new insights based on continually changing information sources and events.”
They also say that innovation is only about opening up and dissolving formlessly into the ecosystem and then letting everything happen spontaneously, it is about innovating systematically. They refer to the TRIZ method, an innovation approach developed in Russia that builds on the notion that, no matter how diverse, innovations can be traced back to an orderly number of partners. Hans has added TRIZ to Capgemini’s design centers’ work methods with great success: inviting, provocative environments in which teams of clients, partners and consultants come up with innovations, frequently in unconventional ways.
They also agree that innovation requires in-depth changes in the various domains of an organization (business strategy, business model and management, the operational organization, the different stakeholders); ‘Innoboxing’ is how Koen refers to the innovation transformation approach: A question of finding a balance between the proper, rational steps, and creating the emotional experience of the image of the future.