Spotlight on Lowe’s Innovation Labs: Q&A with executive director Kyle Nel
Chain Store Age, a sister publication of HBSDealer, recently spoke with Kyle Nel, executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, who discussed the mission and activities of the retailer’s proprietary technology development center.
Chain Store Age, a sister publication of HBSDealer, recently spoke with Kyle Nel, executive director of Lowe’s Innovation Labs, who discussed the mission and activities of the retailer’s proprietary technology development center.
What is the main purpose of Lowe’s Innovation Labs?
Our main purpose is twofold – build stuff you wouldn’t expect us to build with people and partners you wouldn’t expect us to build with. Every organization exists because at some point it was innovative and then built around that innovation.
Lowe’s has been innovative enough to become the Fortune 50 company we are today. But we know we must continue to innovate in order to stay vibrant and grow. Lowe’s Innovation Labs must drive and instigate the future for Lowe’s.
Are you mostly focused on any one area of retail technology?
This is a differentiator for Lowe’s Innovation Labs. Most retail labs are focused on e-commerce and digital projects. We certainly are involved in those areas, but it’s not all we do.
Our focus is on understanding the future and building a cohesive narrative. We build out all the front-end solutions that will make the future better and faster, and then reverse engineer the back end solutions that will be needed to make them happen. It’s not a one size fits all approach.
How does Lowe’s Innovation Labs integrate with the rest of the company?
It does and it doesn’t. We integrate in intentional ways. In the early stages, we usually don’t integrate with the rest of the company. At that nascent stage, we are doing something truly unique and different that has to exist outside our normal partners and partnerships.
Once the proof-of-concept is working well enough, it has to be integrated back in with the rest of the company in order to move forward into production and use.
How do you determine what projects to assign to the lab and what projects to handle with outside vendors/service providers?
Now that we are driven by innovation, we deconstruct each future scenario we want to achieve to determine the exact path that will make it work most strategically. Will it be by working with an agency or startup partner, or would it be better to build it internally? We will build each future according to its unique case and the opportunities that are available.
Can you explain the concept of ‘science fiction prototyping’ and how you use it?
Everyone tries to understand the future in order to build the things we need to make it happen. At the same time, businesses are trying to do that by presenting the future in newer formats like bullet points and PowerPoint slides.
But human brains are wired to receive and understand complex environments and scenarios in a narrative format. It’s how we think and store information. To help understand the future, explain it and obtain buy-in from our business partners, we give the results of our market research and trend data to published science fiction writers.
The science fiction writers then look at the technology trends and people trends and envision how they will come together and play out in the future. The resulting narratives have complete story arcs with character, conflict and resolution. We turn the narratives into comic books.
With the comic book format, the executives may laugh and have fun, but ultimately it helps them realize that if these scenarios happen in the future and we’re not part of it, we’re in trouble. The comic books help suspend disbelief and let us explain what we’re working on in plain English, without relying on tech jargon.