Startup success story: Innovinco
Meet Incubateur HEC Paris alumnus Tom Pullen, founder and CEO of Innovinco
Innovation performance is indisputably a defining feature of any corporate growth story. This is why it was important for us to connect with Incubateur HEC Paris alumnus Tom Pullen, founder and CEO of Innovinco, to gain insight on his company’s work and evolution within the innovation sector and share his tips on sparking innovation-led growth.
Hello Tom, could you tell us a bit about yourself?
Yes, sure. My name is Tom Pullen. I spent 18 years working in major global corporates, with 5 years spent as Global Innovation Director at Danone. I left Danone at the end of 2016 to undertake an Executive MBA at HEC majoring on Innovation & Entrepreneurship, and to create my own start-up.
What prompted you to create Innovinco?
I founded Innovinco in early 2017, based on the real-life challenges that I had faced innovating within large corporates. I had worked with several different consultancies and innovation agencies who were supposed to be able to help with this - and found that they didn’t really deliver.
Firstly, projects were often staffed by consultants who had never actually innovated within a large company. I found this crazy - after all, if you needed heart surgery, surely you’d prefer a surgeon who’d previously done it with success, rather than trusting someone who had never even worked in a hospital!
Secondly, they were all operating a classic consultancy business model of selling large, long, expensive projects - which is the exact opposite of what I needed as a client, which was solutions that were quick and agile, to get innovation moving in as quick and pain-free a way as possible.
Like many entrepreneurs, I thought that there had to be a better way - and I wanted to find it!
What’s Innovinco’s mission?
Our mission is to help large companies to accelerate growth through making innovation quicker and simpler. We enable and empower people in large companies to become the best innovators they can be.
We achieve this through a range of products & services - all which are short (from 2 hours to 2 days), and also high impact, as they are always delivered by experienced real-life corporate innovators.
How has Innovinco progressed?
During our first 2 years, we were focused on 3 main things:
Build & refine our value proposition. How can we help to solve the innovation challenges of large corporates in a way which is unique & tangibly better than our competitors?
Building a wide customer base. How can we prove that our offer is relevant and performs highly for all large corporates, across all industry sectors?
Defining our value architecture. How can we best deliver our unique value proposition to customers?
During this first 3-year period, we doubled the size of the business each year, working with over 25+ large corporates. These included companies such as Pernod Ricard, Unilever, Danone, McCain, Henkel, Decathlon, Quiksilver, Orange, Bouygues, Rexel, Schlumberger, Veolia, Essilor, VW, Estée Lauder, L’OréaI and others... so objectives fully achieved!
What’s next for Innovinco?
We are now entering Innovinco Phase #2, which we are super excited about. Whilst our mission does not change, we have now finalised transforming our offer to become ‘digital-first’, which was always the endgame for Innovinco in order to scale. Key news:
Firstly, on 1st September, we are launching a new micro-learning YouTube channel, Innovinco TV, where I will be sharing innovation tips, tricks & tutorials for free, three times per week. This is our way of helping the many businesses who will need to innovate to grow during this tough new economic climate. Make sure to subscribe!
Secondly, we will be accelerating Innoflix, our online innovation course platform. We pre-released our first masterclass, ‘Conso-Connect’, before the holidays and it is already showing strong signs of success. Our next masterclasses will be launched very soon!
And thirdly, we will be further developing our Innogym service. This is where we bring together a group of people from across different companies for 2-hour live online ‘workouts’ to be coached on a specific innovation challenge or skill.
What are your top 3 tips to help someone who wants to innovate?
1. Connect with your customers.
This may sound cliché, but it’s amazing how many people who are trying to innovate fall in love with their idea or product, thereby losing focus on the customer whose problem they are trying to solve!
The way to avoid this is to speak directly to customers & potential customers on a very frequent basis. Start-ups often find this relatively easy; people in large corporates find this much more tricky, which is the exact reason we developed our Conso-Connect masterclass to show them how to do this.
2. Obsess about their pain points.
Pain points are super powerful fuel for innovators as they provide massive clues regarding where high-potential innovation opportunities lie.
So make sure to look out for problems, tensions and frustrations that your customers have – because, if you can create an innovative solution to these which is financially viable, you are very likely to succeed.
3. Progress is better than perfection
It can often be tempting to wait until you feel your innovation is perfect before you share it – but don’t do this! After all, you may end up wasting lots of time and money developing an idea or features that simply aren’t valued by your customers.
Much better to get out there with a test & learn approach as early as possible, using low-resolution prototypes. You’ll be amazed at how easily customers are able to give robust and useful feedback, even on a prototype that may look ugly or does not yet fully function.
For more on these topics, check out the short TEDx talk ‘When did innovation get so complicated?’ I gave as part of the TEDxHEC event last year.
What added-value did the Incubateur HEC Paris bring to you?
The Incubateur HEC Paris was pivotal to Innovinco’s success so far - and helped in 3 main ways:
Visibility. Start-ups are a sexy topic for journalists right now, and so many of them ask the Incubator to recommend start-ups for articles. This provides money - can’t buy PR opportunities - for example, Innovinco was even featured in The Sunday Times!
Expertise. The breadth and depth of expertise of the Incubator mentors is huge, and there is always someone who can help with any specific issues you have - in subjects as diverse as legal, design, pricing or growth hacking.
Support. Starting a company can be super tough at times, and so it’s great to be surrounded by fellow entrepreneurs who are either at the same stage as you, or a bit further down the track.
Is there one piece of advice that you’d give to someone joining the Incubateur HEC Paris?
Make sure to give back to the community. You surely have some expertise or contacts which other start ups would benefit from - so share without moderation!
Just like Tom Pullen, you can apply to the Incubateur HEC Paris too!