There are many keys from:
the proper definition of scope and areas,
the expectations setting,
the adequate selection of teams and skills,
the timing and teaching of those teams
the linking to financing and venture capital if needed
the internal expert guidance…
What worries you the most
...and avoiding the risk of overcomplicating it. I have worked with a large multinational defense, ITC and cyber provider last year, and they just superimposed another structure on their bloated legacy layout and expected it to work.
For a project to be a success, the right scoping is a key. It’s out of the scope that various deliverables, human resources, capex, opex and timelines are defined.
My strong view is that fostering innovation requires a culture that accepts failure, as long as this is “fail fast” so that teams can go back to square one and work on something else. Example: Silicon Valley is the graveyard if failed, innovative startups. Keywords are vision, guts. Also,my view is that teams that are working on innovation should workon solving real customer pain, and not just on pushing technology, simply because they can…
Great comments above, and I would add; what is the goal the company/client wants to achieve? When you ask a few of their C-level what their definition is of ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ as well as what the expected investment & outcomes will be, the answers will vary considerably. The terms are such a hype that no organisation wants to be left behind and jumps on the bandwagon without properly thinking about the WHY, then the HOW, and WHAT.
Above all these aspects do not evolve in a vacuum but are an integrate part of a wider ecosystem such as government (regulations), the investor community, academy (research data), partnerships, etc…
I advise my clients to first have a good understanding of what it implies to become innovative and foster entrepreneurship and why it does or doesn’t work (yet) in their organisation. When its not solid committed and funded as well as integrated in the strategic goals the chance of failure will be high.
Great comments above. Thanks for your insights all. Here’s my my 2 cents.
There could be a Intrapreneurship Idea Life Cycle(say IILC)and every good idea should run through it.
For example:
1. Collection of ideas in the organisation with some patent like protection by publishing it somewhere with the proposer’s Identity attached to it.
2. Independent voting by appropriate audience or in social media.
3. Shortlist top ideas for evaluation.
4. Pre-project evaluation to determine the effectiveness of the project before executing it.
5. Reap the benefits
Vision of the leaders in an organisation is crucial to the success of the company. Recently in the news - “Bill Gates has conceded that his “greatest mistake ever” was failing to put Microsoft in Android’s position as the world’s biggest “non-Apple” mobile operating system.”
Intrapreneurship is something to be nurtured in any organisation. There should be routine and dedicated activities for this IILC.
In my view Vodafone, Nokia, Ericsson etc should be where AWS is now. They had the infrastructure and could have easily been there by now.
Intrapreneurship is the key word, for me. Unfortunately, “acting like an entrepreneur not being one of these” is impossible. Nevertheless, if you want some sugestions about innovation (and some of the answers above are brilliant), think about what among all the innovative things your organization can do are more valuable for the customers, being that these “things” should be part of the value added chain or to directly sell “as a service/product” to them.
Awesome answers above. I would only add one more data point. One word. Enthusiasm! If management and execution teams are not enthusiastic about the proposed changes, however obvious or rational, they won’t fly.
two points are most critical:
1. create the new venture in a separate unit, ‘fenced’ from the Business-As-Usual organization of the large corporate and run it like a startup
2. make sure you got backing from the top of the organization, as the BAU organization can see it as a thread and will work against it. without top management support it will fail
I agree with most of the answer above but wanted to highlight two key areas that need to be manage carefully which are:
1. Resources.
This includes finding the right person to do the job, train them and then motivate them so they can perform as we expected.
2. Communication
It is very important to manage the communication to avoid ‘lost in translation’ which lead to project failure.
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