Tag Archives: intrapreneur

Is intrapreneurship different now?

Terri Griffith blogged about some remaining questions she had from the Social Networking for Innovation event.  She asked me to comment on the following:

“Companies have looked at working with intrapreneurship for a long time — is what we’re seeing now different?”

I say yes, at least for software intrapreneurs, for the following reasons:

  1. cheaper – it’s possible to try internal incubation without having to make significant investments as a result of the more open environments and tools…
  2. new opportunities – with the down economy, there appears to be more risk tolerance with taking small gambles on longshots with limited downsides but potentially significant upsides…
  3. staying competitive – across the technology landscape we’ve all witnessed companies like Google launch new services / revenue streams derived from stimulating and nurturing intrapreneurial passions…
  4. social – the explosion of social networking externally has led to models for improving internal social networking and crowdsourcing…
  5. reputation – innovation is a hot term and many seek opportunities to build their reputations and grow their personal network…

I’m sure there are many other contributing factors as well.  What do you think?

Social networks for innovation event

I was one of the panelists to share insights about how companies can use social networking for innovation. The event was on Friday January 14, 2011 at Santa Clara University.It was a really interesting event where leaders from several major companies as well as knowledgeable academics discussed external and internal challenges and approaches for leveraging social networking for innovation.

Some goodies I picked up from the speakers include:

  • ideas are an organizing social object
  • Techshop sounds like a way cool community workshop with industrial tools to help get the maker out in all of us
  • give people access to a network of collaborators, give them access to the right tools…. get out of the way
  • crowdsourcing can be very good for incremental innovation, disruptive breakthroughs perhaps not so much
  • The crowd might miss stuff.
  • position yourself to become the ‘escape valve’ of ideas
  • “Technology has the shelf life of a banana” – Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems
  • Difference between Consumers & Enterprise with respect to innovation = consumers not about money, enterprise is ALWAYS about money
  • Pain for external innovation is socializing value of co-creation and negotiating IP
  • We are clearly entering a future where there will be more and more open innovation markets, perhaps there will be too many
  • There are idea networks and there are action networks.  (I personally love this ‘action network’ term, captures the essence I think).
  • there’s not doubt about need for mobility going forward but there’s disagreement to how critical mobility is for supporting innovation efforts.
  • The Chicken and the Pig fable is an analogy for the different levels of commitment.  (Personally I think there are many many chickens dressed up like Pigs.)

Of course there were many more insights, especially during the internal panel but I didn’t get them all down in notes. I also walked away with a list of web sites to check out for some reason or another.  Here’s some things I heard about and sounded interesting enough I looked them up:

  • Magic Seth – guy does amazing mind-reading tricks via technology
  • ninesigma – the ebay of open innovation?
  • Build it with me – connect business folks, idea folks, and technical folks
  • Techshop – community workshop with industrial tools to help get the maker out in all of us

Special thanks to Terri Griffith and Tatyana Kanzaveli for organizing the event and including me as a panelist.

Fostering a culture of innovation

I’ve been fascinated with Quora for the last few weeks.  Earlier today I posted a response to the question “How do you foster a culture of innovation in a large company?” and since I’ve mulled over this for some time, I wanted to also capture my thoughts here.  Below is what I posted as a response.

For innovation to be successful in large organizations, I think you need a strategy that considers the end-to-end lifecycle of innovations. To me this means you need an ecosystem which spans several stages and provide capabilities that allow formal & informal innovation:
  1. Get Ideas – where can we get ideas, how can we validate and rate them, can we stimulate innovative thinking in particular areas, etc.
  2. Try Good Ideas – where and how can we try out some of these ideas, who funds prototypes & pilots, how do we know if they are good, etc.
  3. Promote Winners – how can we get our promising innovations into the mainstream, who funds taking them to the next level, how easy can they integrate and/or scale, etc.
  4. Productize – is this something we can sell, is there a market for this, etc.

Across each of these stages, you need to also be mindful of the dynamics and perspectives of who is involved. Each stage of the end-to-end innovation lifecycle brings a different set of interested parties.

  • Motivations – What motivates the innovator? What motivates the early adopter? Why would a mainstream person be interested? Is this optional or required?
  • Incentives – Do we need incentives to get ideas, to rate ideas, etc? How di we celebrate successes at each stage? What are the benefits for involved parties?
  • Investments – Why should we invest time/money/resources/attention? Is the return tangible? How long before we see results?
  • Risks – What happens if we fail? Are we willing to put our money where our mouth is?

I further believe you MUST ensure connectivity and flow across each stage of the end-to-end innovation lifecycle or you will only get pockets of success. In conclusion, the innovation ecosystem is more valuable than the sum of its parts.

a ‘quirky’ enterprise innovation model

I was recently checking out quirky.com and it occurred to me some of the elements/approaches they employ might alleviate some of the shortcomings found in enterprise innovation processes.?? In a nutshell, here’s how quirky works:

  1. People pay $99 bucks to submit an idea for some kind of cool thing.??
  2. That idea then goes into a kind of contest to become the next quirky product.??
  3. The contest part is where the quirky community rates and votes for the different ideas (they call it influence products) in a certain time period.??
  4. At the end of the time period, the winning idea in the contest becomes the next quirky product.??
  5. The quirky team then builds the product in a certain period of time.??
  6. The finished product then becomes available for sale.

———-

I’m sure you’re thinking “Ok Wolf, but how does that apply to enterprise innovation…”??

Scaling a promising concept or innovation to a larger audience inside an enterprise can be very challenging.?? I believe most of these challenges are derived from a flawed design in the innovation maturation / harvesting process.?? In many cases, the burden of getting the promising innovation to the next level falls on the shoulders of the innovator or intrapreneur. There may be innovation programs in place to raise awareness, but in my experience those programs often come up short in facilitating connections between the innovator and teams that have the broader skill set to help scale the innovation’s value to a more mainstream audience.?? I’ve discussed the challenges often faced by intrapreneurs in some previous posts (here and here).

But if we consider the quirky approach as a model for enterprise innovation, there may be a more valuable way to leverage the deep skills and talents found within an enterprise.?? Each step of the quirky process is interesting in some way.

  1. Submit idea — Have a small barrier for the idea submitter to overcome which helps to keep the idea pipeline clean.?? In the context of the enterprise, allow any employee/agent to contribute ideas.?? Innovation becomes relevant for all staff… not just techies.

  2. Idea in weekly contest for next product — I’m fascinated with this idea of a brief time period to keep the contest excitement going…. adding drama week in and week out.

  3. Idea review by community — Ideas are reviewed, collaborated on, rated, etc.?? Its the active community that defines the agenda and focus of the next great thing to be produced.?? In essence this pre-establishes that a ‘market’ for this idea exists right now.?? The enterprise leverages the community to build a portfolio of offerings the community has already validated as attractive.

  4. Weekly contest ends and winning idea is selected — After a fixed period of time, a decision to move forward or not is reached.?? That decision is derived based on employee input.?? Again, I think the “contest time period” is important here to provide the focus.

  5. Winning idea is executed by quirky team — A staffed. multi-disciplinary team then executes on the winning idea.?? In my mind, this is exactly where many existing enterprise innovation processes are weak.?? Idea folks aren’t always builder folks.?? Additionally, idea folks might not have the time, personal networks, or expertise (supply, manufacturing, marketing, sales, etc.) to execute the idea.

  6. Finished product becomes available — A place where the cool new thing can be leveraged.?? Although there’s often no money changing hands internally, perhaps there are other forms of capital (social, influence, recognition) which can serve as the ‘take’ for all those involved in the previous steps.

Ultimately a model like the above could provide a multi-audience value that complements the varied skills and traits found within the enterprise.

Value for the submitter:
  • In-depth idea evaluation.??
  • Detailed community comments and feedback.
  • Potential candidacy as the a product.
  • If chosen, the idea is executed by a defined team and becomes a product available for use in a short timeframe.
  • If it becomes a product, the idea submitter gets some form of award (monetary, patent, news story, etc.).
Value for the community:
  • Even if it wasn’t your original idea, community members divergent skills and perspectives can help to shape the idea into an even more powerful and valuable offering.
  • It is the community that is driving the decision-making as it represents the initial target market for the product produced.
  • The model appears to recognize that it takes a village to care for an idea.?? They do this by tracking “influence” for community members. In the enterprise this could manifest in the form of collaboration recognition and reputation building.
Value for the enterprise:
  • Great innovation to improve portfolio.
  • Majority of the benefits (whether financial or not).
  • Community-validated ideas prior to development expense.
  • Built-in early adopters and evangelists who supported idea from the start.

What do you think??? Where are the strengths and weaknesses of this kind of model??? What have you seen work?

Innovators: Looking for Mr/Ms Right Now?

Do you remember the last time you were infactuated?  You saw someone who caught your interest and chased after them.  You thought they were the hottest thing you had seen in some time. Your passion flaired.  Your excitement level increased.  Spending time with them or thinking about them was the best part of your day.  Your attention was largely focused on them.  You talked, you laughed, you did things together… things were going along just fine. No strings.  No commitment.  Just get together when you could and things would be cool.

But after some time other things started to get in the way.  No longer could you dedicate as much time / attention to each other. Maybe one of you wants more than the other.  Things get complicated.  They want to know where things are going… if you have a future together.  It becomes clear that if things are to continue, someone needs to get serious. 

Less calls.  Less meets. You get distance… which leads to feelings of guilt.  “Maybe we can spend some time together next week.”  “I haven’t talked to them in a week.”  It gets easier to avoid and harder to rekindle that initial passion. 

You just stop talking.  No breakups or bad feelings.  You just stop. 

Life goes on. You fall for someone else.  Rinse & repeat.

Face it… you aren’t ready for a commitment. You love the chase, the excitement, the adrenaline!  You’re looking for Mr/Ms Right Now.

———————–

Maybe this is the same chase, excitement, adrenaline that fuels innovators to innovate?  You get excited about an idea, give it some focus, even make some initial progress.  But then things deflate. Maybe its too much… maybe it needs different skills than you have…. maybe it takes up too much of your time… maybe you need more money.  Whatever the case, you lose focus and then interest and passion.  You still like it and think its cool but it just sits there… dying on the vine.

———————–

Perhaps this is why we hear venture capitalists and entrepreneurs talk about how the team is more important than the idea for a new venture.  Maybe what they are really trying to determine is your level of commitment.  They want to know if you’re flirting with your idea and playing it cool or if you are ready to settle down and get serious.  They want to know if you are looking for Mr/Ms Right… or Mr/Ms Right Now.

 

What do you think?  Good or bad analogy?

Innovation Lessons: It takes time to transition

One important lesson I’ve learned the hard way is that transitioning an innovation to a new team takes much longer than one would expect. In fact, sometimes it seems transitioning the innovation takes longer than building the innovation itself. This seems counter-intuitive.

Why?
image

You created this great whiz-bang thing but might not be able to continue working on it (you know, the day job gets in the way). So you set off to find someone that’s willing to adopt your baby. Now you need to transform from an innovator and become a detective. I call this the Sherlock Stage. You scour your network, your users… frankly anyone that ever asked you about your innovation. You start turning over rocks looking for help. If you’re lucky, you find folks that are interested…. but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

 

imageNow you need to sell.

The people you are talking to now believe your innovation is conceptually interesting and potentially valuable…. but they need to figure out what you got and how it aligns with what they have or need. Now they start asking about feedback, usage, documentation, etc. This provides evidence to them that “buying” your innovation is a worthwhile investment for them in terms of their resources, goals, capabilities, etc.

Be warned. This is often a one-sided negotiation because you have a higher motivation to find a “buyer” than the folks you are courting as you are essentially asking them to take on responsibility. They will ask you to come back after you do this or that or that. So you often leave these conversations with more work… and you already don’t have time. This happens because as you were focused on building your innovation that you cut corners in order to achieve your vision (limited documentation, non-scalable design decisions, etc.).

OK… so let’s assume after all this you find a team that is going to adopt your innovation. Congrats you made the sale… but the details of the “financing” needs to get worked out. In other words, the team that has agreed to adopt your innovation needs to figure out how to balance absorbing your innovation into all their existing projects and business commitments.

stopwatch

Now is when the waiting and uncertainty begin.

My dad used to always say “beggars can’t be choosers” and that comes to mind. Since you are asking another team to take ownership of your innovation, it becomes harder to influence the speed at which that transition is executed. After the often-times lengthy planning process occurs, hopefully you’ll begin to see more transition. This means that some of the folks involved will start to look at the details of your innovation. This also means they’ll start to realize all the corners you cut when you pulled your innovation hack together. Not following the proper corporate guidelines, not using the “trusted sources”, passing inappropriate data, etc. Any of these things might present unanticipated (and perhaps insurmountable) challenges to the team adopting your innovation.

So a few things might happen.

  1. They might be coming back to you – There may be even more questions and requests for assistance coming your way. Perhaps this will require even more of your time than you had initially invested in creating the in novation to begin with. You’ll begin to wonder why you should even bother with transitioning if it takes so much time, is hard, and is fraught with risk.
  2. They might go silent – Watch out if they go silent. They may abandon the effort as the challenges coupled with their ever-changing business priorities may not align. Your innovation may suffer the fate of countless others… death. If this happens, you might have to start all over again at the Sherlock stage…. or give up entirely.
  3. They might step up – I hope you find yourself here. The adopting team believes and are committed. They take on the challenges and fight the good fight to bring the glory of your innovation to the next stage. They rally the right resources and get things moving.

The common theme in all these scenarios is that they take much longer to work out than you might have guessed at the beginning. Even then, there’s an emotional roller coaster every step of the way and death for your little innovation seems to be around every corner. Its hard to estimate how long it will take even if all the stars and planets align just perfectly. With that said, I’d recommend you plan at least as much time on making your innovation successful as you spend on creating your innovation. So if it took you 3 months to build it and achieve some early adopter success, plan on at least 1-3 times as long for it to get picked up by another team to help take your innovation to the next level.

My experience tells me the best you can do is to get smart about the hard road ahead and try to think about the next stage if your innovation is initially successful. Think about what success will look like when creating your innovation AND when you need to find a new home for it.

Anatomy of a Hackday project

It’s hard to believe it was less than a week ago when I first started focusing on a concept I called Butterfly in preparation for HackDay at IBM.  Now we are less than a week in and we have a working prototype in its third iteration, a project wiki, some reasonable documentation, and lots of ideas on how to go farther….  all thanks to an ad-hoc team of seven collaborators in six different time zones around the world.  It’s been beautiful.  We are hoping to find some more collaborators to help out.

Butterfly

Here’s how the story unfolded (so far)….
I was recently trying out the StumbleUpon toolbar and found it really interesting and fun.  And it showed me stuff I would have never come upon.  And it occurred to me we have the same challenge / opportunity inside the enterprise.

  • What if we could provide a simple & fun way to help users explore the wealth of high-quality items tagged by staff?
  • What if we could weld together several of the wonderful internal web 2.0 tools to provide value for users, communities, and tool owners?
  • What if it was easy to create, easy to use, and got more powerful the more it was used?

Sure “stumbling” from site to site on the web is fun but it got me thinking about whether there was more value in the context of a business environment.  I’m pretty familiar with the challenges we all face when trying to find information, expertise, or new ideas.  There are lots of popular social tools being used inside my company.   Unfortunately, today its not very simple to converge my need to find high-quality content with all the tools that are available to assist me… there are too many options and they all have different learning curves.  Stumble lead me to think we could merge together my personal/professional interests with several internal data sources and incorporate some kind of rating/quality assessment based on social/community input.

But how to do it?  It seemed to me that we already had many of the puzzle peices available in the form of APIs.

  • Content: We have multiple sources of tagged content
  • Interests: Users can select from the Top 100 tags or enter their own keyword.
  • Ratings: We have a ratings widget that allows users to give stars.
  • Social networks: We have several “friending” applications
  • Blogs: We have existing vehicles for users to be able to comment / blog on things.

Since I’m not an especially astute coder I needed some help to figure that part out. I posted a ‘help wanted’ entry on the Hackday blog. To the rescue comes a group of folks around the globe who were intrigued by the idea and willing to give it a try.  It wasn’t until 3pm ET on Friday (Hackday) that we had our first informal conference call…. with just a few of the interested parties.  Well, turns out having the call so late on a Friday was a blessing. With the weekend right around the corner and an interesting challenge, our more technical collaborators found some time to noodle around over the weekend.

By Monday afternoon, the first prototype was born…. our butterfly was now out of the cocoon!  The Butterfly toolbar was created and the main algorithm for randomizing pages (what we call ‘flutter’ for boucing from site to site) was working!  When I installed it and Fluttered for the first time it brought back some coffee sites…. because part of my ‘About me” in one of our profile systems said I was into coffee.  Not only was I getting bookmarked pages but my profile preferences were implicitly built from my one of my social profiles.   Now we are onto something.

Yesterday afternoon the team met for the second time and by then they had incorporated some ratings capabilities and stubbed out the other elements of the toolbar.  Ideas started swirling around about getting more sources of interesting content…. so now we want to see about pulling in user-tagged content from other repositories.  We are also working to evolve the UI and enable the other stubbed out features.

Is Moore’s Chasm theory telling intraprenaurs something? Are we listening?

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Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is written with a specific focus of marketing high tech products to mainstream consumers. It cautions how many high tech new ventures fail in reaching mainstream adoption primarily because those companies don’t evolve their marketing strategies to cater to the tastes and preferences of a the very pragmatic early majority audience whose motivations and risk tolerance differ significantly from their existing visionary/early adopter clients.

I believe there is some wisdom in Moore’s pages for internal innovation teams as well. Complementing Andrew Chen’s recent blog, it seems we largely lack a consistent process or approach with respect to stimulating demand with more pragmatic and conservative user communities inside the firewall. Some firms have great internal programs for gaining early adopters and refining some of their technical innovations. But what happens we the pilot ends? Where is the graduate program that guides those early successes into more mainstream audiences?

Don’t get me wrong… being successful with innovator and early adopter types accounts for nearly 16% of the user population. In a firm with 300,000+ employees, 16% represents nearly 50,000 users. Reaching 50,000 internal users is remarkable and should be celebrated as an incredible success in and of itself.

BUT if we can break through to the early majority types, that is where the significant economies of scale and ROI really kick in. By gaining traction in the early majority, the usage would grow from 50k to 150k users. That is 3 times the value at nearly the same cost to support just 50,000 users.

Sure there are some internal innovations that have made it to the “big show” primarily through viral growth inside the firewall. But there are many other promising capabilities that seem to plateau and don’t quite make it to the more mainstream internal user. I believe we can overcome this adoption challenge through marketing innovation rather than technical innovation.