PEXA: Innovating for good

Increasing idea quality and innovating for good

PEXA CEO Glenn King describes Pretotyping as the answer to the crucial question: “How do you keep that philosophy of innovation going, and do it in a way that is fast-paced, uses experimentation, celebrates learning, and doesn’t mean investing a lot of money?” 

PEXA Chief Product & Digital Officer, James Ruddock, says PEXA’s core value of ‘innovate for good’ means the team always has far more ideas than time to process and produce them. And Pretotyping helps solve this dilemma.

“What I love about Pretotyping is the notion that you can very quickly test whether an idea has legs or not,” James said.

“Testing and validating ideas before they go into production means that if an idea can’t be validated with real data, it doesn’t get built. By killing off [unvalidated] ideas, we have already saved millions and millions of dollars of wasted effort.”

But Pretotyping isn’t just about stopping unvalidated ideas from being developed – it also aims to increase the quality of the ideas that go through the innovation process, and iterate the ideas themselves before going into production.

“With the ideas that do get through the Pretotyping process, we have seen great refinement over what the potential solutions could be,” James said. 

“It helps to know where things should go, and make sure ideas are really stress-tested to make sure they are going in the right direction.”

He adds that PEXA is also using Pretotyping outside of product development to test innovation ideas in other parts of the business, such as new business ventures and ideas to improve operations, customer service and HR.

“Managers have embraced Pretotyping because it allows them to process ideas and sort the wheat from the chaff. Pretotyping [provides] good guidance to the people on the ground about what is worth doing and changing, as opposed to having millions of ideas thrust onto people’s plates, where no-one has any idea what to do with them,” James said.

Embedding Pretotyping company wide

PEXA Head of Innovation and Labs, Natasha Reidy, says Pretotyping has fundamentally changed the way the company approaches innovation.

“Innovation in the market is thought of as, ‘We need to build the next big thing that’s going to change the game.’ It’s seen as needing to be big and disruptive, but now we are understanding the benefits of incremental innovation,” Natasha said.

James says Pretotyping was well supported by executive teams from the beginning. 

“For the People Experience team, Pretotyping helps improve engagement and deal with internal ideas from staff. It helps us work out how the business can collectively make people better,” James said.

“For the CFO, it saves a lot of money. And for the CEO, it’s about taking all those elements and seeing that Pretotyping has a lot of benefits for the organisation as a whole. It’s about living the ‘Innovate for Good’ value, and showing that we are serious about testing ideas, and not being happy with ‘fine.’”

What’s next for PEXA and Pretotyping?

As PEXA continues to scale Pretotyping via Rapidly, Natasha is excited to improve the team’s skills in experiment design through Pretotyping training with our expert Rapidly team. 

“When you have better quality experiments, you can get better data, and you get better product decisions,” Natasha said. “It’s all about refining the process, getting more strategic alignment between the experiments we are running and the strategic goals of the company.”

James agrees and says training is key to bringing people on board and Glenn is excited about what Pretotyping will continue to do for PEXA.

“It’s about making sure that people embrace it, see the opportunity, and it becomes part of the fabric,” Glenn said.