Scott Whitmire

• How is your presentation relevant to the theme of this year’s BBC conference: Innovation in the Fast Lane?

In order to innovate, managers in a business need to understand how changes they can make to processes, skills, and technology translate to changes in customer behavior and then to business outcomes. Management cannot change either customer behavior or business outcomes directly, so a proxy has to be created in order to know what to change and how to change it. The faster the pace of innovation, the more critical it is to have the proxy built ahead of time. My workshop and presentation both show how to build the proxy, what I call “the plumbing” of the business, that maps processes (and skills and technologies) to customer experiences that drive customer behavior. Business outcomes are driven by both customer behaviors and inherent characteristics of the processes used to serve those customers

• What are your top tips for companies or employees wishing to innovate?

Companies truly wishing to innovate need to focus strongly on the experiences of their customers and the value propositions they deliver through those experiences. It is shocking to see the number of companies that do not even catalog their customers’ experiences, let alone manage them. If you focus on these processes that drive customer experiences, everything else naturally falls into place.