Outtakes from Intrapreneurship Conference Silicon Valley,

November 2016

The Culture Design Group

We all think that Intrapreneurs have the most exciting and challenging roles of any organization, one of those roles where some days you have to feel like you are just making it up as you go along. That is for a very good reason: there is no handbook, and the entire business function is new. The best and only way to figure it out, is to get out there and talk to other innovators, connect about what’s working and what isn’t. Talk about real things that are happening in other companies, and connect. That is exactly what happened at the SV2016 Intrapreneurship Conference. Three days of sharing, learning and connecting. A crucible of ideas and thoughtfulness about all aspects. From innovation models, to stakeholder strategies. From funding to recruitment. Scores of topics that downloaded more information than you could have possible absorbed in a year’s worth of books, podcasts and articles. The following pages share some highlights and insights from the conference.

Only in Silicon Valley: The Changing Face of Intrapreneurship

Taking place in the heart of disruptive innovation, a big takeaway from the conference was how Silicon Valley is changing from an innovation dealer to an innovation rival. Mark Zawacki illustrated how silicon valley used to simply enable companies. Now the tech is being used to compete with them, forcing everyone into the innovation game.

The conclusion is the necessity of investing in change and embracing a culture of disruption. In this new world, all companies have to be creators, not just brokers.

The conference included a series of field trips to local companies. Attendees got the opportunity to see both the rapid innovation of young startups, and methods of preserving an innovative spirt at more established companies.

Among these was a trip to Rocketspace, an incubator matching startups with corporate partners. These Strategic partnerships can operate much the same way that simply purchasing tech used to.

Making Intrapreneurship Work at a People Level

Buy-in, stakeholders, story telling. The hardest part of what we do is often The people part.

Without the ’soft’ skills, it is virtually impossible to get the hard work done.

The ideas die on the vine, the best projectsDon’t get funded, and the people who should be your biggest advocates, hideIn the recesses.

Ricardo Dos Santos discussed the direction of intrapreneurship. A key point was a requirement to democratize innovation.

Even in the forward thinking creative fields, elitism can be a plague on innovation. Good ideas can come from anywhere within your company, and opening up channels for those ideas is your fastest route to finding the right plan to develop.

One recurring theme was the ecstasy and the agony of our fast changing world. New advances in technology mean we not only have to question where we’re going in business, but where we’re going as a planet and a species.

Carin Watson of Singularity University sees the change as hopeful at both a corporate and global level. As technology reduces scarcity, it becomes easier to synthesize a social mission with defense of the bottom line. And with millennials gaining increased purchasing power, that social mission will become a powerful business tool.

Mark Randall of Adobe figured out a counterintuitive way to promote innovative ideas: fund them before the idea is even had. Each of their Kickbox innovation kits comes with $1000 to explore an idea and help prepare a pitch. Working on the philosophy that no business task comes without a timetable, budget, or structure, each Kickbox provides those as a way of promoting creativity.

Cisco also leveraged different strategies in funding to fix an innovation problem. In order to stop nepotism and disengagement in an internal innovation contest, they introduced a token economy to let employees crowdfund ideas. By giving ownership and providing a return on investment in good ideas, smart ideas rose quickly.

Managing Expectations: one of the things that they forgot to mention when you took on the role.

Of course, not every company understands the need for innovation on a cultural level. Sometimes the most important ideas are rejected because they violate a comfortable inertia. Colin Johnson of Aerion Corp. characterized this phenomenon as an organizational immune response.

Corporate leaders often react to innovation much the same way as a body responds to an organ transplant: get rid of the unnatural object, even if necessary to survival. Johnson explored the ways to get around this resistance and push through necessary change.

Particularly in this new age of rock star innovation, when companies like Google and Apple use disruption as a marketing technique, the urge can overwhelming to innovate for it’s own sake. Madhavan Ramanujam, partner at Simon-Kucher & Partners, and author of Monetizing Innovation spoke eloquently about the fundamentals of building new businesses, and resisting that temptation.

He explained a series of simple rules to guide new projects to meet revenue goals and position products to meet their potential. In the end, it comes down to understanding your products value, and understanding your consumers needs at a fundamental level.

Finding Real Meaning, Not Just Fluff.

No matter who you talked to at SV2016, there was an agreement that innovation needed to me moved to the heart of the corporate structure. In the old model, the lab was a safety, built to support and streamline a set production. But that world has changed and flipped.

With customers valuing innovation above all else, and change coming quicker than ever, production must follow innovation, plain and simple. Research and development, not honing and refinement, is the new model for growth.

It’s worth remembering, though, the importance of having multiple sources for bright ideas. That’s not to say they should be separate though. Ideas grow and develop when they mash together with other ideas.

tThe author Matt Ridley calls this “Ideas Having Sex”. By enabling transparent communication between all levels and departments, ideas have the opportunity to meet one another and make something great.

Traditional business structures make it hard to innovate. The ground is moving fast enough that what we think of as stability is fragility.

By removing barriers to change, and embracing a new culture of disruption, rapid change isn’t a storm to be weathered: it’s wind in your sails.

Of course, a key benefit to any conference is finding people with shared values. The intrapraneur tribe believes there are no endings; only opportunities to reinvent themselves and their companies. We believe that pursuing change is the only way to maintain relevance in an ever accelerating world

Of course this doesn’t happen by chance. We need to come together to create these new beginnings. Collaboration is going to be both how, and why we survive.

AboutGapingvoid

Gapingvoid is a Miami-based consultancy that helps companies increase employee engagement and connect people more deeply to mission, values and purpose. Since 2007, gapingvoid has designed, articulated and speeded the adoption of organizational culture for many of the most forward-thinking companies, worldwide. The concept is simple: inspiring alignment and engagement in employees will improve creativity, agility, productivity and innovative outcomes, which impact bottom line results. Our world is full of change projects that no one pays attention to. Gapingvoid uses a unique combination of language and visuals that connect people emotionally to your organization’s most important outcomes.

www.gapingvoid.com @gapingvoidculture@gapingvoid.com305-763-8503