1. Bank of America 1.1. Introduction In late 1990s Bank of America established an Innovation and Development (I&D) team. At that point of time Bank of America became one of the largest banks in the United States and opportunities for further growth were limited. Banking industry was predominantly focusing on the innovations that generated savings or allowed them to grow organically by continuously developing new products to obtain a greater share of the consumer wallet. An establishment of I&D team aimed to innovated the traditional banking approach where the innovation usually arose from the marketing department with a lack of formal processes, methodology or resource commitment. The idea was to create a process for generating ideas, test …show more content…
This had a direct impact on the failure rate of innovations. The unwillingness of taking of enough risks significantly reduced chances to generate really new ideas. Also an appropriate mix of operational and innovation testing responsibilities was very difficult to achieve due to traditional for the banking industry mentality and variable-incentive compensation purely relied on performance. This conservative approach to the innovated left a little opportunity to create a radical innovation that created a significant competitive advantage. 1.2. Innovation Development System The I&D team created a 5 stages process for innovation that had some similarities to the Corning’s “Five-Stage-Gate Process” principles adopted to their requirements: 1) Idea Conception; 2) Planning and Design; 3) Implementation; 4) Testing; and 5) Recommendation for the Market Rollout. The process also included a clearly defined innovative evaluation and measurement system. The process goals, similarly to the other baking innovative initiatives, was to determining customer satisfaction and revenue growth through scale up recommended innovations across other