future of work

Should the project use a lean start-up, design thinking approach? It may be in vogue and my preferred method, but its not always the best option. To work out the answer, start by asking where you are in the journey of strategic choices (Roger Martin)? 

Let’s be clear. This is not a blog for start ups. The intended audience is intrapreneurs. Specifically, the intrapreneurs who make things happen. The unsung ‘hustlers’ of the business world. 

Wikipedia defines this class of people as those who operate within existing organisations, but act like an entrepreneur. In other words, someone (or a team of people) who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea or concept into a profitable product through intelligent risk-taking and innovation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapreneurship). 

While the mindset may be the same as a more traditional entrepreneur, what sets them apart is the environment in which they operate and, as a result, the particular flavour of decisions they have to make. They need to be able to see opportunity and withstand significant pain to get ideas up, over the line, and successfully implemented. This may explain why, in Eric Ries’ book, The Lean Startup, (http://theleanstartup.com)  he opens by talking about finding that the people really hungry for answers when it came to his methodology were people already innovating within existing corporates. Let’s examine why that might be. 

The biggest upside of being an intrapreneur is simple: you have resources at your immediate disposal, the kind most entrepreneurs can only dream of. I’m talking about the existing organisational ecosystem with its assets, money, people, capabilities and partnerships. In the right setting, a team can be mobilised quickly, physical and virtual working space made immediately available and capital is still (in many ways) easier to access. From day one, you can have a budget, team, space and access to potential customers.  By borrowing from their existing organisation, intrapreneurs are set up to make faster and better progress than most start ups. 

However, it’s worth noting access to resources is never - and should almost never - be endless. Unless you are replicating NASA in the sixties and looking to do something as big as landing someone on the moon, no one should have a blank cheque. In fact, limiting resources promotes resourcefulness. As Deloitte’s ‘Scaling the Edges’ report points out, by limiting budget to the narrowest extreme it promotes the kind of attitude, behaviour and decision-making that fuels innovation (http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/center-for-the-edge/articles/scaling-edges-methodology-to-create-growth.html). Nothing quite binds people together like having to overcome seemingly unfair constraints. 

This now brings us to the real downside of being an innovator within an existing organisation. In a nutshell, the shackles are higher. Despite all the resources being there, things take longer. The extraordinary amount of time dedicated to internal stakeholder engagement and the requirement for a tight, pre-determined business case with little room for variation post funding release, is the dumb achilles heel of corporate innovation. Just ask a VC, who’s focus is on the founding team they will invest in, domain expertise and understanding of the customer, not the product, as the product will invariably change. For the intreapreneur, internal politics, cumbersome processes and lack of appetite for failure or cannibalisation are key challenges that really can de-rail them. 

It is these unique factors that leads me to believe that a question like ‘how might we set corporate innovation up for success unique?’ is a meaty and important problem worth solving. Where are the roadblocks? What are a company’s unique advantages? How will design thinking and lean start up concepts turn existing approaches on its head? And what can we unashamedly steal from our start up counterparts?