Kaon Interactive CEO On Bridging Innovation And Business

Gavin Finn is all about bridging the gap from technological innovation to the marketing and business side. When he joined Maynard, Massachusetts-based Kaon Interactive in 2005, it was still very much a technology-focused orientation.

“My focus has been on thinking about how marketing and sales can benefit from innovations and behavior to really meet the needs of the way that the world is evolving in general,” Finn says.

He has done this on some level throughout his career, both at small companies and multinationals alike. At Kaon, Finn’s goal is to take the company’s augmented and virtual reality marketing and sales applications and make them usable for customers. “It’s a pervasive challenge for enterprises to convey their complex products and solution messaging to a variety of customers within their buying ecosystems.”

Finn says augmented and virtual reality technologies can help their customers tell “very complicated solution stories and messaging.” They can help immerse someone into an environment where they can actually see what these complex marketing and messages mean, rather than imagining it.

Chief Executive talked with Finn about the challenges of using a newer concept to market and sell products, how he recruits tech talent and more. Below are excerpts from this conversation.

What are some of the big challenges that you guys face in trying to kick-start a newer concept in terms of being able to market and sell products?

I think CEOs in particular are always interested in looking at creating long-term competitive differentiated value that allows them to create a sustained, competitive advantage. And so, what we have to do is we have to find ways of linking those key strategic goals that CEOs have for marketing innovations. And so, in using marketing innovations, we can help accomplish these strategic objectives.

So, some of the challenges that we have is very often, marketers are focused on very tactical objectives that are focused on an event, a customer event or a trade show, or a product launch, or some bounded marketing objective. One of the big challenges is to help marketers align their key initiatives and all of the deliverables with the senior executive strategic objectives. Because when you think about it, all of these kinds of technologies can be viewed as sort of technology for technology’s sake by the CEOs and CFOs, unless they can be aligned with key strategic corporate objectives.

We have to overcome the visibility of why marketers need to be thinking in terms of strategic alignment or the strategic objectives, and not just tactical objectives in getting data sheets done, and branding and messaging for a particular solution story. One key objective for us is to overcome that inherent resistance to thinking about innovation in marketing as a strategic cooperate initiative and a potential strategic advantage.

Another barrier we have is because these technologies are relatively new, they can often be seen as experiments or sidelines and may get positioned as proofs of concept or interesting ideas. And what we’ve been really focused on is thinking about demonstrating that in a continuum of engagement solutions and innovation, these solutions can become very important and sustained over the life of very long product cycles or market initiatives.

The challenge is to get away from thinking about this as a cool, shiny object and a new toy to companies turning this into something really valuable on a continuing basis that provides substantive, competitive value differentiation to engage customers.

And so, what we did there was rather than just build it as a way to do a walk through, we created it in such a way where every time there’s a new innovation and a new development and new technology initiatives at an R&D facility, the application is updated and enhanced so that all the customers continuously want to keep going back and experiencing that virtual reality walk through because they feel it’s a way for them to get more industry knowledge and the company actually connects with their customers on a continuous basis.

So, I think it’s a continuing challenge to move these new technologies out of the cool, shiny toy bucket and into realizing this an important initiative for us to embed within our go-to market strategy.

Do you find that there’s challenges with recruiting and bringing forward and cultivating top tech talent?

Getting technology talent is a continuous challenge for companies particularly in high technology concentration centers like the Boston area and Silicon Valley and other places. What we found is because we are doing the application of these innovative technologies in a very unique space, the sales and marketing domain, we’ve really been able to attract a combination of both the core engineering technology talent, and design and user experience talent. And the very few places where people who have those interests both on the development side and on the user experience side can bring that combination of talent and interest together in a meaningful and sustained way.

We found we have a tremendous amount of success in recruiting people both right out of school. So, we’ve had a great success in working with local universities and advanced technical programs here in the Boston area. And we found that one of the reasons that we’ve been successful with those kinds of people is that there’s a lot of programs these days that are training computer scientists in technologies like advanced game design, for example. And that’s helped to really get us a pool of people who’ve already started thinking about multi-user, real-time interactivity, and immersive technologies.

So, that pool of talent coming out school has really evolved over the last five years, in some ways a little bit ahead of where industry is, and that’s been to our advantage. So, we’ve been very fortunate, but I also think we offer a great way for people to blend their design and user experience interests as well as their technical capabilities, and to build really useful and impactful solutions as opposed to just prototypes or R&D efforts where they may get to do that in other places.

What’s your mentality as CEO? How do you run the company and what’s your advice to your fellow CEOs?

Our corporate value system is really based around the principle of delivering value to our customers at every touch point. I think that our methodology is to understand our customers’ challenges really, really well, and to understand their business very well. And to lead from the perspective of technology and innovation. So that when we’re working with these enterprises, we’re a partner to them in being able to actually solve real problems, but we’re a leader for them in helping them see what’s coming down the road as well.

And so, my philosophy in running a company like this is that you’ve got to be very aligned with our customers’ business challenges and technical problems, but we’ve also got to play the role of being a partner to them in helping them be successful in the future rather than just responding to their needs today. My philosophy about this is that’s a culture that runs through our organization. Every one of our team members focuses on understanding our customers’ environments really well and then spending as much time as we can thinking about what we can do to help them prepare for and embark on these directions that are going to be important for their future.

My advice really is to think about each company as a way of partnering with customers both by reacting to their needs, but also by being visionaries about where they’re going to be in the future, and helping them get there faster than anybody else can. When you think about that as a corporate culture, an innovation culture within your own company, what that does is it sparks ideas and innovations and out-of-the-box thinking within the company that I think is really beneficial for the market in general for customers specifically because it allows you to be impactful in delivering value both for today and in the future.

And I think for most CEOs, what you really want to do is build long-term relationships so that customers rely on you not only for the day-to-day solutions and the implementations and deployments that you’re providing today, but as a partner to help them be competitive for the future. And that’s how we’ve organized ourselves and that’s my philosophy.

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