How do you innovate without cannibalizing your core offering? 

For multi-service operators like Time Warner Cable (TWC), there are standard service offerings that every provider typically provides: phone, internet, cable, and various bundles on those products. In order to break out of the competitive mix and grow, Time Warner Cable needed to identify the next big areas of growth and how they should play in those areas.

The Challenge
We were tasked with creating a framework of growth initiatives (fully formed ideas) to explore where, how and how much TWC should place their next bets. Next, we were asked to design, prototype and test each idea to promote deeper understanding, inform decision making and create stakeholder buy in. 

What we did
We defined the Connected Home as a major growth area, and began understanding where and how TWC could leverage their existing infrastructure. In parallel, we needed to understand customer demand for the Connected Home. We discovered that the connected home was fragmented and consumers did not have an existing behavior to pay for many of the emerging products in the space. Consumers liked what it promised, but not enough to promise to pay for it. As a result of this finding, our strategy focused on where there would be the most willingness to pay. We identified home security as an area where there was existing behavior to pay for additional home services and an area that could expand into other smart home services. By narrowing the innovation strategy in on home security, we provided TWC with a way to enter the connected home space in a focused manner. Lastly, as imagined in our prototype, TWC began developing a broader suite of connected home services that could be dripped onto the core security offering. 

The Outcome
TWC rolled out the home security solution across the US in mid 2013. They have continued to extend from security and home monitoring into the connected home through IntelligentHome, allowing smart devices such as light bulbs and flood detectors to seamlessly connect. Because the service enabled TWC to leverage existing infrastructure that they already had — in-home installation services, data lines into neighborhoods and homes, 24/7 call centers — it was able to quickly enter the market without any major disruption to the core organization. By Q1 2014, Time Warner Cable announced that they had sold 57,000 systems.