Facilitating a Young Leaders Innovation Bootcamp for Westpac

Challenge

As part of the Young Leaders program, Westpac wanted to support high-performers to build their innovation skills in customer-centricity, creativity and design methods in order to prepare them to become innovation leaders into the future.

The Bootcamp was run for 10 young leaders and was an intensive course that included Design Thinking, Value Proposition Design and Business Model Innovation in just three days. The 3 days included specific Westpac challenges to be solved in small teams by using and applying the learnt innovation tools and frameworks including prototyping ideas and pitching solutions.

Approach

The approach covered a broad spectrum of topics over a 3 day Intensive Bootcamp

Day 1: Tools

Introduced the core concepts including: Customer-Centricity, Value Proposition Design and Business Model Innovation. Teams were formed to focus on a challenge throughout the 3 days of the bootcamp. The participants spent a a lot of time getting out of the building and immersing themselves with customers.

Day 2: Design

The participants did a deep dive deep into creating customer-centric value and designing lasting business models. Participants were introduced to ideation and prototyping techniques for innovation projects. A guest speaker also presented their experience working as an entrepreneur.

Day 3: Test and Pitch

The participants learnt how to run lean experiments and use the Lean Startup Methodology. Participants were introduced to testing techniques and asked to design their own tests. Teams also learnt about managing a pipeline of innovation opportunities and how to pitch their final business model.

Outcomes

The engagement outcomes included:

1. Provided Young Leaders with an innovation toolkit – participants learnt key skills in Value Proposition Design, Customer Centricity and Business Model Innovation in order to address business problems.
2. Uncovered growth opportunities – using Business Model Innovation, the teams learnt to design a new business model based on particular challenge area to uncover a new growth opportunities for Westpac.
3. Learnt from leaders in startup innovation - participants had access to a leading startup entrepreneur in Australia who shared their experience about how to bring a new product to market and scale rapidly using startup methods,