Innovation has always been a topic that we focus on exploring in the Institute of Advanced Study. A person, an organization, or even a country needs to rely on innovation to evolve and develop continuously.
So if you want to go to innovation, is there a way or not? The answer is yes. In the Institute, on one hand, we will study the best practice cases of innovation in various industries, extract their exclusive methods, and share them with students; on the other hand, students from various industries will also share their best practices of innovation with each other.
Now, I will report to you what we have learned from our 11th HLI students, and let's hear how they break the mold and realize innovation.
Xu Zhihua: People-centered
The first student I'd like to introduce is Xu Zhihua from Hangzhou. He is the project general manager of Zhejiang Yintai Department Store. He has worked as a general manager in a number of shopping malls, such as Yintai City in Wenling, Yintai City in Linhai, and Yintai World Trade Center in Wenzhou.
Hangzhou students may be more familiar with the Yintai Department Store, which is located in the prime area of Hangzhou and is one of the largest shopping malls in Hangzhou. In fact, not only in Hangzhou, Yintai Department Store is also an influential company in the department store retail industry in China. It started exploring digital transformation in 2018, and in the industry, it is regarded as an internet department store fully structured on the cloud, which should be said to be at the forefront of digital transformation.
Xu Zhihua, a fellow student, has been working at Yintai Commercial Group for 15 years, and is a hands-on participant in this digital transformation. Of course, digital transformation is too complex an innovation for me to expand on their entire journey here. I'd like to pick out one very specific element from the exploration of Xu Zhihua's team to share with you. That element is the shopper. Yes, it's the shopper behind every counter in the mall.
In Yintai, the job description of the shopper has changed dramatically. In an offline department store, a shopper is in a fixed store to sell products, which we are all familiar with. But now a shopper at Yintai can sell all the products in the store.
For example, in the past, a cosmetic counter lady, she sold cosmetics to customers, and the customer's trading relationship is completed. Only when this customer comes back to this cosmetic counter next time, they will link again. But now their shoppers are developing customers into their own fans. Each shopper is a bandwagon KOL who can recommend cosmetics to you, as well as other goods you need such as clothing, jewelry, and lifestyle products. The shoppers just need to focus on dealing with their customers, and Yintai Department Store is the supplier behind them.
You may be wondering how this change happened.
In fact, digitalization is the fundamental reason why this change can happen to shoppers. The digitization tool at Gintama Department Store plays the role of a shopper's secretary, assisting the shopper in managing his or her customers. For example, customer A is running out of cosmetics, customer B is running out of milk powder, how long has it been since you contacted customer C, and if you don't contact him, he's going to be lost, and so on. Including the shopper's own business progress data, how many new customers today, how many goods sold, etc., digital tools will be presented to the shopper in real time, to help him operate and manage.
You see, what is the essence behind this? In fact, it is through the digitalization of this tool, the shopper's role from the operation of goods, to the operation of the customer. The mall from product-centered, shifted to people-centered. In the past, the shopper only sells a counter, in fact, product-centered. Now the shopper and the customer has a friendship, is a long-term service for each customer, from clothing, food, housing and transportation to provide a total solution consultant, which is human-centered.
At the moment we almost all industries have to face the reality that the logic of relying on a constant flow of traffic to obtain a growth dividend is likely to have gone. What inspired me the most about Xu Zhihua's sharing is that this shift to a "human-centered" business mindset can build deeper user relationships and perhaps open up an innovative pathway for growth.
Wang Lin: Building a sense of dignity at work
Another student from the Guangzhou campus, Wang Lin, has achieved innovation by focusing on "people" in this way. Unlike Xu Zhihua, Wang Lin's goal is to motivate her team. As a manager, her focus to motivate her team is not the traditional external incentives such as rewards and subsidies, but rather to create an internal engine that will allow them to drive their own development from the inside out. This internal engine is the sense of dignity at work.
Wang Lin was the head of e-commerce operations for a well-known international beauty brand. During her tenure, she managed an online customer service team of nearly 800 people. When she first took over this team, she faced this challenge. On the one hand, the average age of the team was 24 years old with little education. On the other hand, they were not familiar with the business and often had to face pressure from brands; furthermore, they had to face customers' emotional outbursts all the time, and the morale of the whole team was low.
But this team, led by Ms. Wang Lin, has become one of the most popular departments in the company in the past 2 years, contributing 30% of the company's e-commerce business. They also took the initiative to save nearly 100 million dollars of business for the company in the full year of 2020 under the impact of the epidemic.
How did this happen?
One of the first things Wang Lin's classmates did when they took over the customer service team was to change their name, changing customer service to EBA. EBA stands for Online Beauty Advisor. You can't underestimate this small name change, because of this change, the team members' work status and content have changed a lot. First of all, advisor sounds more professional than customer service. Many employees therefore take the initiative to learn more about beauty and understand more professional beauty products. Moreover, unlike customer service, which is usually passive in accepting inquiries and then responding, consultants are usually more proactive in providing professional services to customers. As a result, the mentality of team members in serving customers has also changed positively. As they provide more proactive and professional services, they receive more and more positive feedback from customers, and they have more energy to carry out their work, and a positive flywheel rolls up.
It's about building a sense of dignity in front of the customer, and within the team. One of the things that Wang Lin's classmates promoted was for the entire company to come to EBA for a three-day rotation. This thing brought two effects, one is that everyone in the company personally felt that the work of EBA is not as simple as they imagined. Second, they also really realize that EBA is the best advocate for customers. Because here will receive the customer's real feedback, and these feedback can guide the optimization of work. For example, a supply chain director from the customer's real feedback to the real deep understanding of the logistics service experience where the bad, after the rotation back to immediately do the optimization. A designer, who was confident in his product page design, realizes from real customer feedback that the product description designed on that page may not even be of interest to the customer.
It is through these actions that the entire EBA team became more professional and happier, and more accomplished in their work. 2020, because of the outbreak of the epidemic, the company's offline store business was blocked, and the online traffic encountered a bottleneck, everyone was at a loss, the EBA team stood up and said, "We have a solution, can we try? They launched a "single action", for those who ordered not paid, or paid and then asked for a refund of the customer, they use sales techniques and precise service action, the year to save nearly 100 million business.
You see, when a person's value is seen and illuminated, he can release much more energy than we can imagine. Wang Lin's inspiration to me is that, compared to traditional material incentives, helping a person to build a sense of dignity and see the meaning of their work is more likely to stimulate their internal drive and yield unexpected results.
Guo Hongyi: Differentiation
The third student I'd like to introduce to you is Guo Hongyi from the Wuhan campus.
Hongyi is a food lover, to what extent? For the sake of food, he changed his career from a professional space designer to an entrepreneur in the restaurant industry. When it comes to the restaurant industry, you can imagine how fierce the competition is. However, Mr. Hong not only succeeded in his career change, but also made a name for himself. Currently, he is the co-founder of "U You - Natural Seasoning Restaurant", opened 23 Chinese chain stores in 5 years, and also incubated a number of brands of food and beverage projects such as "Cui Xiao Xiao - Jelly Pot".
Why is this possible? Hong Yi students of the heart of the method, is a key word, differentiation and innovation.
He said, he entered the catering track of entrepreneurship at the beginning, as everyone imagines, the most difficult problem is to choose to do which type of catering? To do differentiated categories, this reasoning to say that everyone understands, so in the end how to find differentiation?
Guo Hongyi and the team tried to eat a lot of restaurants, and detailed records from the store to the store every touch point and experience, review and analysis, they decided to seize a point, that is, the customer's experience of the five senses, vision, taste, hearing, smell, sense of touch. They feel that to make a difference, they must work on these five senses.
As an example, one of their breakout items, jelly pot, is a differentiated category from the five senses of the customer.
Jelly pot is a kind of Guangdong cuisine, the famous food documentary "tongue on the second part of China", has had a detailed introduction. Jelly Pot is a unique cooking technique in Cantonese cuisine: the ingredients are placed in a pot and heated over a high flame. The high temperature causes the soup in the pot to evaporate quickly and make a "sizzling" sound, which is pronounced "啫啫" in Cantonese, giving rise to the name "Jelly Pot".
Before Guo Hongyi opened his restaurant, there were many Cantonese restaurants in Wuhan, but at most they treated jellied pot as a small dish, not as a mainstay. But Guo Hongyi realized that jellied pot was actually extremely unique in terms of the five senses.
First of all, "Jelly", as the name suggests, is a singing cuisine, which is aurally unique.
Secondly, visually, this casserole has a very short cooking time, and at the end, there will be a process of drizzling Hua Diao wine to ignite the fire. At this time, the whole casserole will be wrapped in flames, which is visually stunning.
And then the sense of smell, the burning of the Huadiao wine, coupled with their unique homemade sauce, the final casserole on the table when the lid is opened, the aroma will be very special.
Finally, because it is a fierce fire rush, the heat of the food has been continuous to the table. There is an old saying that "a hot top three fresh", eat while hot, the flavor will be more delicious. This way, both the sense of touch and taste will be satisfied.
You see, the five senses of customer experience brought by Jelly Pot is very unique. This can give a little surprise to those who originally like to eat Cantonese food, but also attract those who do not eat Cantonese food.
To this point, with the unique five senses experience, Jelly Pot, as a main product, can achieve a unique differentiation in Cantonese cuisine. But that's not the only reason for choosing this category.
We know that Chinese food, in general, relies particularly on the craftsmanship of the chef. A chef's choice of ingredients, the length of cooking, and even the skill of upsetting the spoon, all affect the flavor of a dish. So to make a standard dish, a chef needs a long time of training, which leads to the problem that Chinese food is difficult to scale up and standardize. And if you think about it, this problem is almost non-existent when it comes to Jelly Pot. In the case of Jelly Pot, the ingredients are rationed, the sauces are standardized, and the cooking utensils are also standardized. For restaurant operators, chef operation is less difficult, the training cycle becomes shorter, the ability to get started becomes stronger, most of the work can be turned into standardized actions, and the difficulty of restaurant scale expansion is reduced.
You see, from the case of Guo Hongyi's classmates we can appreciate that we can find a niche category of innovation through differentiation strategy. This way we don't have to catch up with our competitors on one track, but can create a new track and thus reap the dividends of being a frontrunner.
Guo Zhiyong: Unitarian thinking, analogical thinking
The last student I would like to introduce is Guo Zhiyong from the Guangzhou campus.
He is an organ transplant surgeon. The innovation he did, of course, is related to medical technology. Their team solved a technical problem that had plagued the medical industry for 63 years, and it only took 3 months. The president of the World Transplant Association, the presidents of the German and Dutch Transplant Associations, the director of the Harvard Transplant Center, and other big names flew to China to observe their new technology. What kind of technical challenge is this?
Student Guo Zhiyong told us that in organ transplantation, most surgeries fail not because of the surgical operation, but as a consequence of organ damage. The surgery is done successfully, but the organ does not function, and in the end the patient cannot be saved.
Since the birth of organ transplantation technology in 1954, the medical profession has been using techniques similar to frozen seafood to barely maintain the vitality of transplanted organs. But organ damage is still hard to avoid, which is the biggest problem with transplant technology.
This challenge has been pondered by scientists around the world for 63 years, and the team of fellow student Zhiyong Guo has found a solution that reduces complications during surgery by 92.1 percent and increases the one-year survival rate of patients by 9.8 percent.
How did this happen? Mr. Guo shared that in addition to the medical technology itself, it was thanks to their "monistic" and analogical thinking.
What is "monist" thinking?
In fact, this is a basic principle of clinical diagnosis, that is, no matter how many abnormal symptoms and signs the patient has in front of him, he should endeavor to explain it by a single disease, instead of explaining the clinical symptoms in different categories at the beginning. For example, a person may have both dizziness and low back pain symptoms, if the dizziness is diagnosed as neurological diseases, low back pain is orthopedic diseases, then it is very capacity to fall into the "more treatment the more complicated" embarrassing situation.
Back to organ transplantation, why should we apply "monist" thinking?
Guo Zhiyong told us that most surgical failures are the result of organ damage. So most of the medical profession tries to figure out how to mitigate the degree of organ damage. From this point of view, one has to look for solutions from the mechanism of organ damage. This leads to the cellular, molecular, and genetic levels to develop a variety of drugs, stem cells, and so on. Naturally, it gets more and more complex to study.
What does Guo Zhiyong's team think about applying "monist" thinking? They believe that, in fact, the root cause of organ damage is that the blood supply is interrupted after the organ is removed from the body. Because the blood supply is interrupted, the organ damage mechanisms mentioned earlier are its results.
You see, when you think about it this way, the solution is not to look at the cellular, molecular, or genetic dimensions, but to look at the external blood supply mechanism.
Then how to find it? This time analogical thinking comes into play, and they think of the backup power supply in life. When the main power supply goes out, a backup power supply can be activated to provide power. So they want to create a backup blood supply for the organs, and they want to do a seamless switch between the human blood supply and the backup supply.
And Zhiyong Guo happens to be one of the few international experts who have mastered the technology of extracorporeal mechanical perfusion of organs. So the problem of the backup blood supply system was solved. Then came the question of how to make the switch seamless.
Let's go back to the analogous standby power supply. Typically, a standby power system has a three-way structure, with one end connected to the power-using equipment, one end connected to the main power supply, and one end connected to the standby power supply. The main power supply stops working at the same time need to immediately start the standby power to ensure that the continuous work of the power equipment. Therefore, in order to achieve seamless switching, a 3-way structure is also required. Do the blood vessels of human organs have a similar structure? Miraculously, this 3-way structure can be found in the blood vessels of almost every organ in the human body. By connecting one of these ends to a backup blood supply device, an organ's blood supply is realized minute by minute from the time it leaves the donor to the time it is implanted in the patient!
After repeated experiments, Guo Zhiyong's team of students successfully performed a world's first ischemia-free organ transplant on July 23, 2017. Their work has been recognized in academic journals as "a milestone in the history of organ transplantation".
Dr. Guo Zhiyong told us that he has a bigger goal in mind, which is to spread such an innovative technology around the world so that more people can benefit from it. The challenge, he said, is actually no less than the technological innovation itself. Because it requires not only scientific research ability, but also more comprehensive problem-solving ability, communication ability, resource integration ability and so on. And that's why he came to the Institute of Advanced Study, where he hopes to meet more practical people, accumulate more comprehensive capabilities, and add bricks and mortar to his vision.
In fact, this is the value that the Institute wants to provide to its students. Economist Schumpeter has a definition of innovation, which is to take the original factors of production and rearrange them into a new mode of production. I think, from this point of view, the Institute of Advanced Study is a distribution center for innovation. Because here, 17,000 students contribute rich thinking, diverse problem-solving approaches.
For example, Yang Qiuhao, a student from the Wuhan campus, is the director of research and development at the China Construction Third Intelligence Corporation. Last year, he took over a project that had half the schedule and funding compared to normal standards, and was understaffed. But he forcefully chose an innovative approach, and eventually led the team to build a technologically leading all-area, all-scene smart park platform within the schedule.
For example, Mr. Chen Erdong from the Beijing campus, who had an insight into the pain points of the business process within Shell, created an innovative product called "Intelligent Signing Screen", and together with his team, got the highest level of project awards within Shell.
And Fan Ming from Chengdu Campus, when the epidemic broke out in 2020, they, as the smart district construction unit designated by Chengdu Hi-Tech District Public Security, were tasked with quickly opening up a set of digital epidemic prevention and control systems, and faced with a brand new problem of tight time and heavy tasks, he led his team to quickly and remotely collaborate on the construction of a set of reliable epidemic prevention and control platforms, which gradually evolved into the "Tianfu Healthcare System" used by all of us. The company's "Tianfu Health Link" is a standardized system that is used by everyone.
I believe that new permutations and combinations will be born in the collisions and exchanges with them, and innovations will be born in some unintended moments. Last but not least, you are also welcome to join this innovation highland, to join get the Institute of Advanced Study.