Coca-Cola’s Innovation Guru Will Talk Startup Agility at R3 Gala
To walk into a company as established and iconic as Coca-Cola and be able to spur innovation and new types of partnerships is an impressive feat.
David Butler has spent the last twelve years doing just that. As vice president of innovation and entrepreneurship at Coca-Cola, he leads venture platform Coca-Cola Founders, which is designed to create startups by opening up the company’s biggest challenges to a global network of founders to find new solutions together.
Butler has been named a “Master of Design” by Fast Company and a part of Fortune’s 2013 “Executive Fantasy League.” He will be speaking at NBIF’s R3 Gala tomorrow, which celebrates the work of three of the province’s top applied researchers.
David Butler explains that in his current role at Coca-Cola, his approach has been to get the company to open up its brands, relationships and distribution channels and partner with founders to monetize them in new ways. He says this can create a whole new level of diversity and economic activity within the startup ecosystem.
“This is my focus as Coca-Cola, but the good news is any company can take advantage of this approach,” he says. “Our approach is to collaborate directly with entrepreneurs to co-create solutions to problems, using new business models and new technologies in ways that would otherwise be very difficult or disruptive for us to develop internally.”
“So far we’re making great progress. In less than two years, we’ve co-created 12 startups in 10 countries.”
Butler says that through his keynote speech at the R3 Gala, he will share concepts from his 2015 book Design to Grow and his experience to help bring the idea of large companies collaborating with startup founders to life for attendees.
“The book emphasizes that to win, all companies, big or small, must learn how to combine scale and agility to adapt to a fast-changing marketplace,” Butler says.
Butler says he uses the approach of an entrepreneur to bring innovation and new concepts to Coca-Cola and helps founders do the same.
“I like the way entrepreneurs ‘step’ into big established markets by falling in love with the problem (not the solution),” he says. “They really dig deep into the ‘pain’ associated with the problem and understand the current solutions. Then they iterate constantly on a new solution until they get it to a point where the people using the solution couldn’t imagine not using it.
“I’ve used this approach across my whole career. And the good news is anyone can do the same thing.”
The benefit of smaller businesses is that they are more agile and able to innovate and try new things. Butler hopes to bring this idea to the gala meant to inspire researchers and business people to work together to create something new.
“Smaller tends to indicate the ability to be more agile. The bigger you are, the more processes and systems there are in place to ‘protect’ your position,” Butler says. “Generally speaking, smaller teams and companies move much faster than big, established ones.”
“Every company is adapting to (or maybe struggling with) digital transformation. This is the new normal and every company must learn to combine scale and agility to win.”