When we think of change and innovation it’s perhaps easiest to break things down in terms of incremental change, step-change and radical or disruptive innovation. Arguably, incremental change and step-change are the most common forms of change we see within large established organisations; disruption is harder to achieve from within due to a whole range of small ‘p’ political, social, economic and technological challenges which can ultimately best be described as ‘corporate antibodies’. Being too radical inside established organisations often sets alarm bells ringing, calling for the corporate antibodies to jump into action to mitigate the risk of self-inflicted ‘corporate disruption’. Truly radical innovation, the type that turns markets on their head, mostly comes without such constraints.
Uber, Tesla, Facebook and Amazon weren’t born out of traditional organisations, but they have totally disrupted the world of public transportation, media creation and distribution as well as shopping and commerce. By being free from corporate antibodies their founders were able to start from the ground up and often with very little resources have flipped the markets in which they operate totally on their heads in a very short period of time.
This rise in the number of start-ups has, in turn, lead to the rise (and fall) of innovation labs set up by organisations and governments to bring some of that start-up thinking into their own ways of working. As Charles Leadbeater explains in his article for TheLong+Short; Hooked on Labs, the idea isn't new as it might first appear. Look through history and you’ll find a range of high impact inventions and innovations which came out of sheds and basements rather than the main day-to-day business departments of their organisations of origin; built by teams who had been given a relatively small amount of budget and a little bit of space, both physical and metaphorical, to get on with getting on.
Yesterday, I was pleased to join other colleagues from the Disruptive Innovators Network to meet and learn from the team behind one of the latest such labs. Qlinker (dutch for brick) is a stand-alone business which was established in 2017 by parent company Mitros with a single question in mind - “What if Google set up a Housing Association?” Mitros has over 28,000 homes, making it one of the largest housing corporations in the Netherlands. With a small budget and a space in the attic of their HQ in Utrecht, the newly appointed Qlinker COO was able to handpick a very small team of Mitros colleagues to start looking at ‘making everything about renting a house as easy, fast, user-friendly and efficient as possible’. The Qlinker ambition is simple - achieve higher customer satisfaction with lower operating costs.
The approach Qlinker has taken is to think like a start-up. By adopting user-centred design principles Qlinker is iteratively developing a digital customer journey across 84 properties (54 more comings in early 2020). They don’t use the Mitros corporate IT framework and work directly with a small group of tenants and a persona/archetype named Joost who together help them develop and improve their processes to better meet customer needs and expectations. The result is a fully digital onboarding process which cuts down the application time from 6 days to 6 hours; in fact, to-date, the fastest approval and sign-up is only 10 minutes. Customers use an app to do everything from finding their new home, signing their tenancy agreement and paying their first month’s rent to logging a maintenance call. A chatbot named Q is currently resolving 40% of contacts directly, with 60% being passed to a ‘real person’ to be progressed further. The relationship between Qlinker and their tenants is based on trust, and as it stands, satisfaction levels are currently high. Along with an expanding property portfolio, Qlinker is also growing their workforce, creating new roles such as the exciting-sounding ‘Chatbot Master’, essentially responsible for monitoring and training Q to best handle customer queries. Things appear to be going from strength to strength.
It’s really great to see the energy, passion and enthusiasm that the guys at Qlinker are putting into growing the business and it’s heartening to see a parent company being forward-thinking enough to support them. It will be interesting to see how things progress over the next few years; will Mirtos become Qlinker or with Qlinker become Mitros. Will the result be a 100% digital housing corporation running at scale, or a new hybrid business model born out of the two? One thing seems certain, there is still a huge amount of learning to come and there are likely to be plenty of opportunities for anyone bold enough to share the learning and try it for themselves.
Thanks to the team from Qlinker for a really good session and also Ian from DIN and the Clarion team for hosting us yesterday.
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