“At Intuit, innovation is everyone’s job.” – Brad Smith, Executive Chairman
At Intuit, each and every employee is expected to think like an entrepreneur, and it’s everyone’s job to create, to invent, and to look for new and better ways to improve our customers’ lives. The way we do that is by turning the individual ability of our founder, Scott Cook, into organizational capabilities.
We all learn the techniques, and practice the behaviors to be innovators and help our customers around the world be prosperous. We do that it into it through two core innovation competencies we call Customer Driven Innovation (CDI) and Design for Delight (D4D).
Our first core competency is Customer Driven Innovation, or “CDI”. CDI is where we focus our energy on important, unsolved customer problems, and then figure out the best way we can solve that problem well. In doing so, we build a source of durable competitive advantage so that Intuit is built to last, and the competition could never do what we do. You might say CDI is “what” we’re looking for.
Our second core competency is Design for Delight, or “D4D”. D4D is where we take a company of thousands of people, and break it down into small, passionate, cross functional teams. These teams get deep customer empathy, falling in love with the customer’s problem, not the team’s solution. Then they come back and go go broad to go narrow, focusing on what matters most to customers. And finally, we get customers involved in the development process by running rapid experiments and quick prototypes until we find solutions that actually delight our customers so much, they will tell their friends and family. You might say D4D is “how” we work. Together, these two competencies guide us on or journey.
All 9000+ employees strive to be entrepreneurs and innovators, focusing on the intersection of CDI, and applying D4D to get there. We connect directly with our customer to gain empathy, focus on bold solution that provide real benefits, and then quickly test the best solutions. Each and every day we wake up with that mission in mind. That’s innovation, and that’s what we do each and every day at Intuit.