by Melissa Withers
Per-Kristian (Kris) Halvorsen is a pretty busy guy. As chief innovation officer at Intuit, the world’s leading maker of financial and tax software for small business and consumers, Halvorsen is responsible for building the company’s innovation capability and for translating emerging technologies into products and services that drive growth.
This is a tall order anywhere, but at Intuit it’s even more spectacular, as the company must respond quickly and aggressively to the emergence of new technologies, while remaining attuned to their customers’ evolving preferences and behaviors. Intuit does this well, often forging into new territory despite the risks of adopting innovations that disrupt current business practices. Clay Christensen has dubbed Intuit a “serial disruptor,” and Halvorsen and his team are proud that this strain of innovation is stitched firmly into the company’s DNA.
Such a deep and embedded focus on moving fast and thinking forward doesn’t happen overnight. Halvorsen is candid about the journey Intuit had to take to get there and what they do to keep their positioning strong.
“Three years ago we realized that a myriad of technologies—mobile, social, data analytics, new interaction technologies like speech and image recognition, etc.—had come onto the scene that could solve our customers’ problems, but we weren’t using them,” says Halvorsen. “How do you turn a company onto new technologies and make the employees expert (enough) at applying them to create great customer experiences?”
Halvorsen led the team down a fast and focused path to identify new technologies that Intuit could absorb effectively and quickly enough to make a real difference in their customers lives. “First, we had to select from the cloud of candidate technologies a small set that, if we could get expert at applying them, could transform the customer experience. We couldn’t afford to have the organization thrash between alternatives, most of which would prove fruitless,” recalls Halverson. “Then we embarked on an internal campaign to familiarize people with the new palette of technologies and their use, and a technical training and recruiting program to get us to be truly excellent at applying them.”
Despite the dizzying changes in personal and mobile computing that have happened over the last few years, Intuit has maintained its brand positioning, opened new channels for growth, and bolstered customer loyalty.
Intuit’s success can also be traced to what’s been described as a “near-maniacal” focus on the customer. “Staying focused on our customers’ needs is an ideal, and we’re much closer to it than most companies. The key is to get everybody, not just product managers, immersed in the problems of the customer, and to develop empathy for them,” says Halvorsen. “We put engineers next to customers on ‘follow-me-homes,’ and today we have proxies for direct observation, thanks to the metrication of the products that tell how people use them.”
Intuit also leverages communities of users that help the company identify problems and improve products. “Our ‘Live Community’ is a revolution in customer engagement. This is live help from other customers who are doing – and know how to do – the same task a customer is doing at that moment,” says Halvorsen, who sees the service as a new way to stay close to customers.
Another customer touchpoint is IntuitLabs.com, where customers can give feedback directly to the developers of experiments that are posted there. “Reaching out through our labs site to get reaction earlyis helping us with the speed part of the innovation equation,” says Halvorsen. “IntuitLabs.com also brings together many of our most significant innovative outcomes from across the company, so that our customers and others who follow Intuit can find those innovations in one place."
“It’s in the company’s DNA to stay fresh and forward-thinking,” Halvorsen contends. “This allows us to find important customer problems and solve them in an innovative, disruptive way. We combine this with a commitment to innovation across the company, from top to bottom, and by leaving unstructured time in everybody’s schedule so they can exercise their creativity.”
Halvorsen believes this approach helps Intuit stay smart and porous—a must to compete effectively in today’s global economy. “Speed is the best way to avoid being copied. Putting up walls is much less effective than moving faster than your competition. When you move fast you also have to be alert, take in vast amounts of information quickly and process it, or you will end up in the ditch.
