KICKBOX method - The ultimate Guide

What is the Kickbox method?

KICKBOX is a bottom-up innovation management method and methodology. As a method, KICKBOX has two main goals: 

1. To engage employees
2. To create valuable business cases for the company.

KICKBOX enables every employee to take an active role in the company's innovation process by submitting and validating their own ideas. No gates are set at the beginning of the process and every participant has the chance to prove that their idea is valuable to the company.

Within a few years (starting 2013), KICKBOX became the world’s most popular enterprise innovation framework, used by thousands of organizations.

KICKBOX is both a method and a methodology. 

KICKBOX is a method since it prescribes a series of steps and a collection of tools to perform a certain task, namely to engage employees and create valuable business cases for companies.

However, KICKBOX is also a methodology, since it offers a rationale on the methods it employs. As a framework it is based on certain beliefs and values, such open innovation, decentralization and flexible hierarchies.

The methodology was invented at Adobe in 2013 by Mark Randall, Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity. He then open-sourced it in 2015 and presented KICKBOX at Swisscom, the leading IT- and telecom-company in Switzerland. This led to the founding of GETKICKBOX, which would in 2021 become rready and be spun off.

rready went on to further develop the methodology and support other companies in implementing the KICKBOX program. The full story of this evolution can be read here.

The KICKBOX method is mostly used by large organizations. Mature companies often find it difficult to recapture the entrepreneurial spirit that created their original success. Government agencies may never have had an innovation culture in the first place, but are suddenly required to lead or at least adapt to megatrends like digitalization.

Today, thousands of organizations are using KICKBOX.

Here a few examples:

• Multi-nationals: 3M, Cisco, Caterpillar, MasterCard, Swisscom, P&G, Roche, LGT,  Johnson&Johnson, Baloise Group, Siemens Energy
• Educational institutions: ETH, UNSW, USC, University of Zurich
• Government agencies: DARPA, United Nations, SBB, Post Luxembourg
• Non-profits: Peace Corp, Gates Foundation, Kickstart-Innovation
  

The typical use case for KICKBOX is a large company that is under serious pressure to create new products or services within the next few years. They may have tried other approaches before, like innovation consultants or an “innovation week”.

Companies often choose and stay with KICKBOX because:

1. Decentralized: KICKBOX is truly bottom-up because it includes every single employee. There are no gates to participation.
2. Scalable: KICKBOX works better the more people participate. There is a multiplier effect, and a SaaS that automates processes makes the method truly scalable.
3. Employee motivation: Granting employees budget and worktime creates trust – which in turn encourages experimentation and validation
4. Fail safe system: KICKBOX enables a healthy culture of failure: fail early, fail fast, fail cheap – try again.
5. Innovation ecosystem: Includes an ecosystem accessible to the company and their employees with access to coaches, service providers and peers.
6. Benchmarking: The method is widely spread by now and companies can compare their results and exchange notes.
7. Intrapreneurship: Focuses on intrapreneurship, which includes topics such as stakeholder management and internal pitches.

Newly hired innovation managers also favor the KICKBOX method because it can be implemented relatively fast. It leverages and streamlines whatever is around, including (a possible chaos of) previously installed and mashed-up innovation initiatives. KICKBOX can start producing measurable results within months, which tend to improve the longer the method is consistently applied.

Companies may also have already successfully implemented a top-down innovation method. Now they are looking for another, complementing approach, and KICKBOX is useful for complementing top-down approaches because it works the opposite way.

KICKBOX works under the assumption that all the information needed for innovation is already embedded inside an organization. The information is dispersed among the many employees dealing with customers and being exposed to everyday processes. The method aims to activate their creativity so they can start working on improving the processes they know best. 

KICKBOX achieves this by giving each employee time and resources and an equal chance to enter and validate their ideas. The method also implements a transparent process and a corporate culture that favors innovation.

KICKBOX typically works as a multilayered approach:

• Transparent process: The method gives everyone an equal chance to validate their idea and, once it passes the gates, gives them full responsibility for going through with it. 
• Discover hidden champions: Because KICKBOX is built to favor creativity, skill, and drive (and not simply the loudest or most dominant), those who succeed are sometimes employees who nobody noticed before.
• Cultural transformation: Kickbox encourages an agile culture that allows failure and values creativity and experimentation. 
• Internal innovation brand: having an innovation-week once a year will not work. KICKBOX builds an internal innovation brand, a program that is always on. This is crucial so employees know that innovation is expected. Also because creativity is sometimes unpredictable – when an idea strikes, the process to enter it should be available, easy and straightforward… and not innovation week next year
• Digital tools: to increase internal visibility and facilitate measurability. An innovation funnel visualizes the process and makes it predictable and transparent for participants.
• Innovation ecosystem:  Peer-exchange across companies to compare methods or start common projects.

How KICKBOX is implemented in practice ultimately depends on each organization and the coaches they choose. This is how we do it.

Bottom-up innovation is the concept that ideas can come from anywhere in the organization, and therefore all employees should be given the chance to prove their idea and lead it through the innovation process.

A famous example of bottom-up innovation is the Japanese car-maker, Toyota. They have been using lean manufacturing for decades, part of which is the principle of continuous improvement. In practice, this means that the average Toyota employee makes around 100 ideas for small improvements in their work processes. With 360000 employees, this amounts to millions of ideas per year. Many of these are implemented and save money.

The key idea here is that innovation comes from the bottom, not the top. Even the wisest CEO cannot know every single process in a large multinational company. The knowledge is dispersed in every single employee, and they know best how to improve their processes.

Should your organization use bottom-up or top-down innovation? Consider the advantages and disadvantages listed below. 

While both approaches are logical opposites in theory, both can and even should be combined in practice. Many companies find that the bottom-up KICKBOX methodology complements their existing top-down innovation programs.

Advantages of top-down innovation methods:

1. Fast: Top-down innovation often works faster as it tends to come with the buy-in of upper management
2. Better chances: because top-down innovation projects tend to have access to more resources
3. Moonshot: focused on long development and therefore useful for moonshot projects (= risky, time-consuming ventures, like the first moon landing)
4. Too big to fail: This could also be seen as a disadvantage, but maybe you have a project that should not fail at any cost.
5. Strategic: tighter control of the direction of new ideas

Disadvantages of top-down innovation methods:

1. Zombie ideas: without a validation process, factually dead ideas (= ideas that no expert would support and no client would buy) will forever walk your corporate hallways.
2. Anti-meritocratic: The lead of an innovation project often goes to people because of their position – and not because they have the appropriate skills for the task.

Advantages of the bottom-up innovation methods:

1. Leverage employees: Discover people in your company who have ideas and entrepreneurial drive.
2. Only the best: The gates are open to everyone, but ideas that cannot prove themselves with data are killed without mercy.
3. Fail fast and cheap: ideas are continuously evaluated, long before they make it to the customer
4. Innovation now: suited for short-term innovation based on current market needs

Disadvantages of the bottom-up approach:

1. Slow: building a coalition of bottom-up intrapreneurs tends to be a slow process
2. Spartan: ideas and innovations must learn to deal with limited resources
3. Tough: the need to prove and validate each idea in order to survive can make it harder for long-shot ideas
4. Needs top-down: requires top-down support in later stages

Strictly speaking, neither approach works on its own. On its own, bottom-up innovation will produce an army of ideas that will each die silently without top-down support. In contrast, pure top-down innovation will produce only a few bad or mediocre ideas, which top management will pamper until they fail expensively. 

However, combining top-down and bottom-up innovation correctly will yield the best results.

This is how you do it:

1. Use bottom-up to create a large number of ideas
2. Through validation and testing, reduce the number
3. Use top-down to back the surviving ideas with the resources they need to give them a chance for success

In KICKBOX, everyone, from the newest intern to the CEO, has the chance to prove that their idea is valuable to the company.

To continuously create bottom-up innovation, KICKBOX employs the following methods:

• No gates are set at the beginning of the process, inviting all employees to participate.
• A transparent ruleset ensures that the best ideas win, not those favored by management.
• Gamification keeps methodologies and buzzwords in the background, making the process more approachable.

KICKBOX has a meritocratic approach that potentially subverts conventional hierarchies. Consider an extreme case where a newly hired intern (secretly a clone of Steve Jobs) validates her own idea with KICKBOX. She continues to succeed with her idea on the market and the company, not being stupid, makes her head of her own department. Having risen through the ranks quickly, she left older or better-paid managers with fancy degrees behind.

In practice, this is not an everyday KICKBOX-story (yet). But this example embodies the ideal case of decentralized intrapreneurship that the method strives for.

The problem is that this does not go well with conservative companies that emphasize strict hierarchies. Unionized or governmental organizations are also places where your rank and salary are often determined by seniority.

Rigid hierarchies or seniority-based compensation may work well for some organizations, but not if the goal is innovation.

Innovation depends on fuzzy, psychological concepts such as creativity and individual initiative. It depends on finding the right person with the right idea at the right time. This is why the following aspects of traditional company culture are detrimental to innovation:

1. Rigid hierarchies: this prevents idea-givers from taking full ownership of their project, which might be handed to someone with fewer skills but more authority. Innovation does not require any hierarchy at all, but an agile, meritocratic one.
2. No failure allowed: this prevents experimentation and reduces the number of ideas given.

Culture is not a product of chance. Humans are social animals, and they behave in group dynamics. This already starts with two people: each couple has different rituals, families have different habits, villages form different traditions, and so on. We spend too much time in companies to not think about how their culture affects our behavior. 

While it is not so easy to change your cultural background, family, or nation, corporations are much more subject to change. Talented employees will quickly leave a company if it offers them not enough, or join another if it offers them more.

KICKBOX works as an internal company brand for innovation. The method works as a vehicle for sustainable change within organizations. KICKBOX aims to cultivate an open culture of innovation, attracting top talent and equipping them with the skills they need to face the challenges of the future. 

This is how KICKBOX drives an innovative company culture:

• By giving everyone in the organization a fair chance with their idea, no matter their rank, experience and position, from managers, salespeople to call-center agents or interns. KICKBOX also hands them full ownership of their project, which is the complete opposite of traditional idea management.
• By inviting employees to shape the company’s future
• By proving to employees that their ideas matter and are heard
• By creating an internal brand that is known in your company for innovation
• By involving not only idea givers but also experts and a whole innovation ecosystem  to support and back up the intrapreneur

This cultural transformation does not happen on its own though. The prerequisite is to have the KICKBOX process in place for a long time, consistently and for everyone.