Maersk Growth

Innovation can be anything from a business and category-defining enabler to an anxiety-inducing buzzword rife with financial and strategic failure. Since 'crisis', ‘capacity’ and ‘resilience’ have become the current watch words for the global supply chain, how might we think practically and effectively about innovation?

At a minimum, internal and external innovation can provide valuable sensing tools, generating customer insights and market-facing signals about the commercial and operational threats or opportunities created by novel technologies and business models. Beyond this, structured innovation programmes can deliver deeper value for firms, with real potential for long-term asymmetric returns on invested resources.

External Innovation Making Inroads

Technology adoption and functionality curves within supply chain will be somewhat familiar to many from the venture and innovation community. Experiments and companies start small, frequently with questionable early economics, but hold significant ambition and a focus on large addressable opportunities.

As examples, the ongoing development of supply chain "super-apps" can provide the most modest of SMEs with tooling to procure, transport and manage the distribution and financing of international goods. Ubiquitous smartphones and connectivity create additional visibility layers for frontline operations or enable 'personalisation at scale' for last-mile interactions. The application of machine learning techniques to supply chain data sets offers exciting opportunities for many planners, buyers and sellers of logistics.

Normalising Innovation

With existing customers, capabilities, and deeper resources, internal innovation might seem a good place to start. Sadly, industry data from recent years indicates that much work must be done to unlock this latent potential.

In the UK, a mature supply chain market, 2020 tax data indicated that UK R&D spend for the transport and storage industry reached all-time highs of a mere USD 94M (GBP 72M).These low levels of indicated R&D investment seem common across the globe. Such levels of industry-insider commitment to innovation seem incompatible with the current and future demands on global supply chain, not least for growing industry ambitions to reach lofty decarbonisation goals.

IEA data indicated that within the maritime industry, R&D investment fell 40 percent to USD 1.6BN in the 3 years to 2019. Recent research from the IMO and Ricardo highlighted a need for over 200 projects to address critical challenges linked to 2050 zero carbon emissions targets, and a capital need of over USD 4BN.

By comparison, recent Venture Capital (VC) data from Pitchbook indicated that US and EU supply chain technology firms received USD 7.8BN of new investment in Q3 2021 alone. Whilst capital markets exuberance and VC industry growth play key roles in this narrative, these capital flows illustrate a clear external centre of gravity for innovation and risk-taking within the supply chain industry. Capital and new talent are tackling long-standing and emergent challenges that we have been slow to address from within.

The Role of VC

Despite enabling some great technical talent over the years, the transport and logistics industry has struggled to achieve a level of synchronised or integrated digital capability observed in other industries. VC has played a significant role in addressing these challenges also. Whilst implied business valuations and certain founder proclamations have elicited equal parts adulation and eye-rolling from industry insiders, VC has been a demonstrable force for good to drive innovation.

VC-backed firms have risen to early challenges and seized competitive ground, creating and reframing certain pockets of economic value. Within visibility, we see some logistics providers—once the sole arbiters of data—as increasingly reliant on external data providers to drive visibility for their own customers. This may be an ongoing cost of competitive digital business, which early innovation and experimentation may have lessened.

Exploring Different Innovation Channels and Structures

VC-backed innovators can initially lack the depth and capabilities required to serve customers consistently at scale. Incumbents may question their stability and competencies outside of narrower technical domains. Nonetheless, the speed of growth and transformation in young companies can be such that even existential business needs can be built or reconfigured in a matter of months.

Venture activity within corporate requires a patient, long-term commitment from stakeholders. It is a long-term, nuanced and competitive space. Financing markets, even opaque private ones, are also subject to their own cycles. Of course, VC-centric outcomes can sometimes seem easy to cheer with media-friendly headlines. However, early celebrations of escalating portfolio value can be a dangerous characteristic to fête when the real strategic mission of enabling repeatable and quality solutions at scale may not yet be fulfilled.

Other innovation models can offer shorter (if narrower) on-ramps for specific business areas. The "venture client" model is a surprisingly lesser-adopted approach that provides novel solutions to known or visible commercial challenges. This model makes it easier to do business (usually on a pilot or PoC basis) between parties. Companies can attract younger, less visible innovators that sit outside conventional corporate procurement process.

Unleashing the latent potential of an existing workforce is always an exciting concept. Innovation labs, incubators and intrapreneurship programmes require specific skills and efforts to balance the needs, process and language of experimentation and corporate engagement. These approaches can face numerous operational and cultural challenges, but present valid structures to support innovation.

“Venture activity within corporate requires a patient, long-term commitment from stakeholders. It is a long-term, nuanced and competitive space.”

For companies facing a sense of strategic inertia or the 'firefighting' mentality often prevalent in supply chain, such programmes can unlock solutions and new energies from existing talent. This is a valuable pursuit for any firm seeking to improve engagement and a sense of shared ownership among its leaders and operators.

Exposure to new ways of working can also encourage experimental thinking. We see continued value in critical reflection across the industry about the "where and how" of competitive strategies. Robust competition will continue to exist in many areas, but it is apparent that certain commercial domains may benefit from collaboration, especially in the developing field of decarbonisation.

Continuing the Journey

It is reasonable to expect the long-term VC industry failure rates will persist for young companies, but this should not be taken to mean VC-led supply chain innovation is an invalid or unworthy pursuit. Motivated and ambitious talent, oriented towards the most significant and challenging problems, has immense value. The very act of investment or joint endeavour can constructively influence and evolve our industry's language, commercial approaches, and long-term vision in quite practical ways.

The future will always be marked with uncertainty. A company's ability to successfully navigate the challenges and opportunities borne of uncertainty is a hallmark of its resilience, its management and its organisational capability. Structured innovation can clearly enhance a firm’s ability to capitalize on emerging opportunities. A healthy innovation "muscle" permits rapid exploration, engagement and execution of opportunities that may have been overlooked by core commercial and strategic activity. A firm's ability to explore and interpret through new lenses is naturally enhanced by engaging entrepreneurial risk-takers and talent from "outside".

It is something of a cliché to cite competitive threats from US technology or e-commerce giants. Nonetheless, just a few short years ago major last mile carriers seemed almost amused by the idea of a reliable, independent network scaled by an e-commerce giant. Today we see the competitive influence of newer solutions, impacting the landscape in terms of service and customer value.