How Atlantic Lottery Corporation Thinks Like a Startup
MONCTON – When you’ve been running a business for a while, it’s easy to get set in your ways.
But when hoodie-clad startup kids come around and disrupt your industry, what can you do to not get left in the dust?
You learn their ways.
Atlantic Lottery Corporation (ALC) is doing just that. The company is thinking like an entrepreneur to help the lottery reach a new audience. The concept is called intrapreneurship, which is basically when a large business applies entrepreneurial concepts to innovation.
At ACL, the head “intrapreneur” is Jean Marc Landry, director of customer innovation.
“Essentially the idea of an intrapreneur is using very similar approaches as entrepreneurs do inside a large corporation and trying to spark entrepreneurship from within the corporate environment,” Landry says.
Landry’s job is basically to think like an entrepreneur. He leads a corporate innovation group, whose goal is to create new concepts and solutions to reach new players. They are working to engage customers who don’t play the lottery often (maybe once or twice a year) and struggle to see the relevance in the products. ALC does this by subscribing to what Landry calls the “lean startup” approach.
“We do a lot of customer immersion interviews. We do a lot of design thinking work, brainstorming, prototyping and tons of consumer feedback along the way,” he says. “We get really quick output from these events because really quickly you can design an idea and have it prototyped within a couple days.”
The team’s first move was to get out and talk to the very people they want to target.
“The first thing we did was interview people who don’t play lotteries very often . . . we got a lot of insights from that from which we brainstormed and at this point we have kind of unmet needs and pain points they expressed . . . how playing the lottery can be an annoyance,” Landry says.
From all of those insights, ALC has 10 projects that are ongoing, three of which are in the very advanced stages. This means they are doing live-market tests with real paying customers.
One of the pilots that’s currently running with eight New Brunswick customers is a subscription service for scratch tickets. Customers are sent a scratch ticket package every few weeks or every month based on the tickets they want. The package also includes exclusive incentives. Landry says the project is getting a lot of positive feedback so far.
“We’re just testing that right now because people have been telling us ‘I don’t mind playing scratch tickets, but I just don’t do it often because I don’t go to stores,'” he says. “Or we’re hearing a lot ‘Jeez, this would be really great for my aunt Pam who isn’t as mobile as she used to be but this is part of what she likes to do, so it would be really great if I can give it to her for Christmas.'”
Landry said that before, innovation at ALC often ended up with great ideas trapped inside Excel spreadsheets. He says with an entrepreneurial approach, new concepts are being tested much faster.
“You show the customers and they give you very clear feedback on if it’s an interesting idea or not. I find that because we’ve been doing that and exposing external stakeholders to our progress they help us get it done faster,” he says.
A lot of companies recognize they need to change their approach to innovation, but don’t know how. ALC didn’t know at first either, so they employed the help of Market Gravity’s Iain Montgomery to show them the playbook. Market Gravity has also worked with companies such as MasterCard, Barclays and British Gas, among many others.
“One of their biggest challenges is that [corporations are] being disrupted by startups. Big companies have lots of great ideas but it’s also very hard for them to launch new things into the market that’s different from what the core business is designed to do,” Montgomery says.
“A corporation is a business that’s very good at making an existing process that’s designed by customers more efficient and maximizing the profit out of it. As the world changes it’s hard to change those products or services due to new emerging technologies or changing customer lifestyles. “
Though intrapreneurship is proving to be effective for many corporations, implementing its concepts can be challenging for some businesses. Getting employees on board to overhaul their way of doing things can be a learning curve, but it’s something Montgomery says is necessary.
“It’s all about embracing those ways of change, because as a startup it’s never been so easy to access the capital. The technology is more easily accessible to them,” he says. “It’s really important that big companies are able to be agile and flexible and quick to market with their own sort of disruptive or improved compositions.”
Montgomery is from the U.K. and is based at Market Gravity’s New York office. He says Canada is doing some really cool things when it comes to intrapreneurship, citing the corporate innovation work at Communitech as an example.
“I think it’s a really interesting place to be at the moment in terms of doing things differently. I think often Canada can get overlooked as a market in favour of the U.S. or places in the U.K. but there’s a lot of big Canadian businesses that are very good at doing things differently,” he says.
Other New Brunswick businesses are looking to do things differently as well. McCain Food’s work with Resson is an example of a big corporation working alongside a startup to solve a problem. Montgomery also recently did a workshop on intrapreneurship with members of the New Brunswick Business Council.
“Seeing the pressure that New Brunswick is under in terms from a relatively small population, a part of the world that can be often overlooked, I think there’s actually some really cool stuff going on in this market,”Montgomery says. “Seeing companies like Atlantic Lottery embracing this way of working and then being a good flagship of sharing this way of working is fantastic for the region.”
Landry says he thinks there will be a serge in intrapreneurship over the next few years as more corporations realize they can’t stand idle as the world changes around them. They will need to push their boundaries and look at new business models and ways to approach innovation.
And of course, they will need to work together.
“Being a New Brunswick corporate citizen in Atlantic Canada, we’ve already shared our approach with lots of people and we’re completely willing and enthusiastic if other companies want to call us and see what we’re doing,” Landry says.
“Because one of the key tenets is you have to network, because you never know who you’re going to meet and you never know what can come out of that meeting.”