CASE STUDY BY: STARTUP AT COX AUTOMOTIVE 2017

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1 CASE STUDY BY: STARTUP AT COX AUTOMOTIVE 2017

2 StartUP at COX Automotive Your Ideas Are Terrible has been working with Cox Automotive s New Ventures division since What started as an oneoff event has become a company institution thriving even during leadership turnover and dynamically changing core business challenges. This brief outlines Your Ideas Are Terrible s methodology, Cox Automotive s StartUP program details, the initiative s commercialization and engagement results, and what is next for the series. Tackling Innovation on Multiple Fronts Cox Automotive New Ventures entered an engagement with Your Ideas Are Terrible to: Build an idea pipeline for the Cox Automotive New Ventures Incubator Drive collaboration across diverse and geographically distant business units Cultivate and encourage employee entrepreneurial ideas and talent Craft an internal and external reputation as an innovative company Creating a large benefit culturally across Cox Automotive was a part of my charter since day one of joining the New Ventures team. We wanted innovation to ripple throughout the organization as an initiative that embraced and crosspollinated team members, not something we executed as a side project. StartUP has saved the company millions of dollars in the things we didn t do. We learned to move swiftly to market and get out of our own way. By focusing on projects in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, instead of millions, we were able to learn quickly about what ideas were viable and was wasn t worth pursuing. David Liniado Vice President of Global New Ventures at Cox Automotive Sept Jan

3 A Peak Behind the Programming Curtain StartUP is an experiential education event that gives employees the opportunity to build a new product or business in just three days. The event is based off of the Startup Weekend model that Your ideas Are Terrible partners, Carie Davis and Shane Reiser, are particularly well versed in. As the COO of Startup Weekend, Shane helped build the operational infrastructure and volunteer training program that expanded the well-known 54-hour event to thousands of cities worldwide (Startup Weekend was acquired by TechStars in 2015). Together, Carie and Shane ran Startup Weekends across multiple business units at Coca-Cola, incorporating Carie s decade of corporate innovation experience and training into the typically startupcentric event. With a focus on rapid validation and experimentation methodologies, using internallyrecognizable language and filling an immediate need, Your Ideas Are Terrible has created custom curriculums for each Cox Automotive StartUP event. From exploring new markets to streamlining inefficiencies, the program model has been sculpted to address near-term needs. Building the Innovation Pipeline Over 600 Cox Automotive employees have been involved in four StartUP events since Here are a few commercialization and engagement highlights: 2014 Atlanta: 146 participants & 29 teams The winner of the first StartUP, Ready Set Car, created a flash sale offering for luxury cars. The nascent idea became a real concept within the 54 hours of StartUP. After the win, Ready Set Car moved into the Cox Automotive New Ventures Incubator where it received a financial investment and five full-time employees solely dedicated to the project. Sixty-eight days after the winning pitch, Ready Set Car launched an in-market beta. Shortly after, it sold the first car to a consumer directly from a Manheim auction. The team worked on the venture for a year following the event with three distinct iterations on the same concept. StartUP is initially socialized to employees via an information session that reviews what the event entails and examples of applicable ideas - getting potential attendees excited and brainstorming. This information session also offers a pitch practice where participants can prepare a compelling and succinct one minute pitch of their idea to present at the beginning of the event. Driving Team Participation and Priming for Success There are very few times in a career when a $5+ billion company opens a door and lets you pitch, let alone offers funding, for your idea. Cox Automotive gives us that chance and it can pay off. StartUP is the perfect arena to get an idea out of my head and into the hands of a team, where it can be challenged and moulded into a real business opportunity. Chad Sexton Ready Set Car team member & Director of New Ventures at Cox Automotive June 2014 June 2017 The event itself is a 3-day fury of ideation and discovery - engaging a cross functional group of employees, hearing their ideas, prioritizing solutions as a group, quickly getting to work validating assumptions, and then prototyping and experimenting to discover if the solutions will work. Participants pitch their budding solutions to a panel of company leadership in hopes of catching their eye and launching their idea with seed funding and development by the New Ventures team. Cox Automotive StartUP Cox s commitment to following through on StartUP s winning ideas has been integral in ending flash-in-the-pan innovation and creating an incentive for employees to build something tangible. Additionally, it fosters continued internal excitement for the project and the methods learned over the course of the event. 4

4 2015 Irvine: 114 participants & 22 teams ServiceNow, led by Alec Gutierrez - Director of Valuations R&D at Kelley Blue Book, was the star of the second StartUP. The application idea aimed to help dealership customers schedule service appointments via their cell phones. The judges for this event included Sam Zaid, the well known CEO of Getaround, and top level executives from Cox Automotive. Also, Alex Taylor, who served as executive vice president of strategic investments at Cox Enterprises at the time (and is now in the C-suite), stopped by to share Cox s innovation vision, encourage teams and answer questions. This big-name buy-in brought visibility, credibility and excitement to the participants. StartUP attendee s positive response to their experience was overwhelming: Would you recommend Cox Automotive StartUP to others? Answered: 54 Skipped: 0 Strongly Agree Agree Neutral At StartUP his team cooked up a white glove tire and oil change offering where a customer s car is picked up and serviced while at work. The Car Concierge team printed flyers and posted them in every office they could canvas to test the market. By the next evening they had pulled off their trial run - making $600 and delivering one of the most memorable pitches in the event series. Julian brought his infectious excitement for the program back to the UK, championed the event, and urged his team to bring it over. Julian s passion, coupled with New Ventures interest in cultivating cross departmental collaboration, resulted in expanding the 2016 StartUP event to include teams building simultaneously in the UK. COX is a business built on disrupting its own model as a form of innovation cannibalism. We have a long tradition of doing it and supercharging that process. It helps to build a culture of innovation and openness when leadership says they want to hear ideas. I know I want to be apart of that company. Julian Wheway Product Director of Retail Solutions at COX Automotive UK January 2015 December 2016 Disagree Strongly Disagree 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Dojo, an application that tracks and scores driving skills like braking and swerving, was the winner of StartUP s first global event. Dojo users earn points based on improvement to be cashed in for merchandise and used to compete with fellow drivers. Packing The Innovation Pipeline 2015 Atlanta: 139 participants & 27 teams One of StartUP s most enthusiastic participants, Julian Wheway, had just joined COX Automotive s UK branch two weeks before attending the 2015 event in Atlanta. After hearing about StartUP from influencers in the company, which he describes as gossip like a hot band was touring, he had the sense that something big was happening and hopped on a flight. After the StartUP win, Dojo was turned over to the New Ventures accelerator, tested with employees, and subsequently refined and launched in the app store. Debbie Hoffman, one of the original Dojo team members and the Director of Marketing for New Ventures at the time, continued to work on the project as a part of her charge. 6

5 StartUP sparks innovation throughout the organization - giving us ideas to chase, the knowledge that we are being heard, and the empowerment to innovative within our current jobs. I now approach marketing through a Design Thinking lens, fundamentally changing my perspective on trying new things in the market. The Global Initiative Expands Cox Automotive s next priority is to train outstanding StartUP past participants to become internal innovation coaches. This education program will help employees to effectively teach Lean Startup principles to peers and act as an ad hoc mentors - unsticking any working group at COX, not just StartUP teams. Debbie Hoffman Director of New Ventures Marketing at Cox Automotive March 2015 November 2016 Cox has identified high-potential talent and imbued an innovation muscle into our culture through StartUP. Participants know they can push boundaries, garner support for their ideas, and bring COX together across functions to develop solutions strategically UK + Atl: 208 participants & 38 teams The large acquisitions of Dealertrack.com and Dealer.com had Cox focusing away from moon-shot innovation projects and looking to save money, hack at internal inefficiencies, and focus on integrating the brands, people, systems and processes across the organization. Joe George Senior Vice President Chief Strategy Officer of Cox Automotive November 2013 October 2016 The Rostrum Jockey project, a 2016 judge favorite in the UK, took a fresh approach to the antiquated rostrum system of printing and distributing car details to buyers at auctions. The interactive Jockey app was designed to give Manheim auction attendees not only an easily-searchable digital avenue to find information, but also allow for cars to be viewed in advance, facilitate pre-bidding, and give private buyers a chance to buy. Judges appreciated that Jockey was easy to implement with existing data, solved a strong pain point, and created a new revenue stream. Streamlining Internal Inefficiencies Your Ideas Are Terrible built an operational approach to cultivating and training Cox s innovation coaching network. The curriculum for coaches helps them know which questions they should be asking and how to help teams create business model canvases and conduct empathy interviews. Peer coaching was occurring organically as a by-product of StartUP - this initiative will make the effort wider and more purposeful. 8

6 Uncovering and Encouraging Latent Entrepreneurial Talent The core principals of customer discovery, feedback loops, rapid prototyping and launching minimum viable products, covered in StartUP, give employees a new perspective to approaching their daily tasks. StartUP On display in COX Automotive s company museum in Atlanta, GA. StartUP seeds agents into COX Automotive to think from a customer s perspective, solving actual problems instead of just shipping features out. Getting key stakeholders involved in what you are doing around innovation can be difficult. StartUP was instrumental in giving New Ventures exposure and credibility with extraordinary results - increasing engagement from the executive team, creating awareness around our projects, and citing it internally and externally as a pipeline builder. - Cox Automotive hires top talent and knows the value of tapping into them - the people closest to the business - for the best ideas. Hosting StartUP has given their employees a clear opportunity to help drive growth at the company while simultaneously driving employee engagement off the charts! Innovation is typically viewed at this ivory tower part of the company. Not understood and distant. StartUP makes it feel accessible and provides a space that is free from judgement and repercussions for sharing an idea and trying something new. This gives employees a chance to exercise that part of themselves. Acting, and meeting people, outside of defined silos in a unique combination of competition and fun. Patrick Boggs Senior Manager Development of New Ventures at Cox Automotive, April Nov 16., he has participated in every StartUP either as a participant or coach David Liniado Vice President of Global New Ventures at Cox Automotive, September 2013 January 2017 Carie Davis Partner of Your Ideas Are Terrible Joshua McClung Director of New Ventures February 2015 Present 10

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