IEEE Workshop on Intrapreneurship

IEEE Workshop on
Intrapreneurship
Tathagat Varma
Sr. Member IEEE, ACM

Country Head, Chinasoft International

About me
In a career spanning over twenty-seven years, Tathagat has played significant leadership and
technical roles with leading companies Yahoo!, [24]7 Innovation Labs, NetScout, Huawei,
Philips, Siemens and DRDO; including an entrepreneurial stint as a strategy and management
consultant for three years. He has built products in hi-tech domains such as Core Routing, 3G,
Digital Video, Consumer Internet, Healthcare, Network Management and Digital Technologies.
His expertise lies in building product organizations ground-up, and creating long-term high-
performing teams. He also holds the unique distinction of being the youngest Indian scientist
to spend 16 months in Antarctica as Scientist and Member of the 13th Indian Expedition to
Antarctica, where he did research on HF Radio based communication between Antarctica and
India during 1993-95.
Tathagat holds MSc Computer Science from JK Institute of Applied Physics and Technology,
Post-graduate Certificate in HR from XLRI, and Certificate in Business Studies from Cornell
University. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM, and volunteers with NASSCOM, iSPIRT,
PMI, IEEE, Agile India and various other professional organizations. He is a recognized
industry expert on Lean and Agile product development, a prolific blogger, a sought-after
speaker, a startup mentor and a published author.
He is a voracious reader, and reads close to a hundred books a year, and is currently learning
more about diverse topics such as Evolutionary Biology, Complex Adaptive Systems and
Quantum Computing.

Workshop Agenda
Session Topic Contents
Day 1 Module 1

09:00-10:30
What is Intrapreneurship? What is Intrapreneurship? Why is it important? Who is an Intrapreneur? What is
Intrapreneurial Mindset? What are the key barriers to Intrapreneurship?

Day 1 Module 2

11:00-12:30
What is the Creative process? What is the meaning of creativiity in the context of a business enterprise? How
can we establish a mindset and a culture of creavity? What are the typical
roadblocks to pursuing creave ideas inside an organizaon? How does an
organizaon recognize ROI of creavity?
Day 1 Module 3

13:30-15:00
How does Innovation happen in
organizations?
What are various types of innovation? Lean startup? Business Model Canvas?
Day 1 Module 4

15:30-17:00
Guest Talk Mr. Anuj Magazine, Director, Citrix will share his story of Intrapreneurship
Day 2 Module 1

09:00-10:30
How to enable Intrapreneurship inside
organizations?
Is there an Intrapreneurship process? What is the role of culture? How to setup
organization structure to enable Intrapreneurship? What are some typical failure
modes? How to diagnose and remediate cultural roadblocks?

Day 2 Module 2

11:00-12:30
How to measure Intrapreneurship
initiatives?
How to measure the progress and success of intrapreneurship process? How to
organize intrapreneurship process inside an organizaon? What are some typical
failure modes? How to diagnose and remediate process and structure
roadblocks?
Day 2 Module 3

13:30-15:00
Design Design an intrapreneurship program for your organization

Day 2 Module 4

15:30-17:00
Fireside chat with Guest Mr. Sundar Ramakrishnan, Founder & CEO, Sharanga Technologies will share his
perspectives, experiences and insights from his large-company experiences.

Agenda
Day 1 Module 1

09:00-10:30

Day 1 Module 2

11:00-12:30
Day 1 Module 3

13:30-15:00
organizations?
Day 1 Module 4

15:30-17:00
Day 2 Module 1

09:00-10:30
organizations?

Day 2 Module 2

11:00-12:30
How to measure Intrapreneurship
initiatives?
roadblocks?
Day 2 Module 3

13:30-15:00

Day 2 Module 4

15:30-17:00

What is Intrapreneurship?
• Coined by Giﬀord Pinchot III and his wife
Elizabeth in 1978 paper “Intra-Corporate
Entrepreneurship”

• Intrapreneur is short for intracorporate
entrepreneur
• Let’s ﬁrst understand what is
Entrepreneurship…

Entrepreneurship
• “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond
resources controlled” - Prof Howard Stevenson, godfather
of entrepreneurship studies at HBS

• Entrepreneurship is the willingness to take risks and
develop, organize and manage a business venture in a
competitive global marketplace that is constantly evolving.
Entrepreneurs are pioneers, innovators, leaders and
inventors. They are at the forefront of technological and
social movements – in their ﬁelds, in their forward thinking,
in their desire to push the envelope. They are dreamers
and most importantly – doers. - Presidio Graduate School
https://hbr.org/2013/01/what-is-entrepreneurship

Not a job, role or a title…it is the
passion, the drive, the inner calling!

Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship
“Today's large corporations are suffering from size. They are so large that the managers
making decisions are often isolated from a personal knowledge of the problems to be
solved. The traditional answer for this situation is decentralization.
Unfortunately, decentralization alone is not enough. In a hierarchical organization,
promotions can be won by social graces, loyalty to one's boss, and in general, political skills.
Courage, original thought, and ability to observe the obvious but overlooked fact, do
not necessarily lead to success.
If we are to get really good problem-solving in our decentralized corporation,- we must
introduce a system that gives the decision to those who get successful results., not to
the inoffensive. Such people will be willing to take moderate risks and will be more
concerned with achieving results than with gaining inﬂuence. These are among the
characteristics of the successful entrepreneur.
What is needed in the large corporation is not more semi-independent departments run by
hard-driving yes men'. but something akin to free market entrepreneurship within the
corporate organization. Such a new way of doing business would be a social invention of
considerable importance, both for the individuals in it, and for the productivity and
responsivity of the corporation.”
http://www.intrapreneur.com/MainPages/History/IntraCorp.html

Intrapreneurship…
• “Intrapreneurship refers to employee initiatives in organizations to
undertake something new, without being asked to do so.”

• “A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility
for turning an idea into a proﬁtable ﬁnished product through
assertive risk-taking and innovation”, - American Heritage
Dictionary, 1992

• “Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while
working within a large organization. Intrapreneurship is known as
the practice of a corporate management style that integrates risk-
taking and innovation approaches, as well as the reward and
motivational techniques, that are more traditionally thought of as
being the province of entrepreneurship." - Wikipedia

Intrapreneurship
“Intrapreneurship involves creating or discovering new ideas or opportunities
for the purpose of creating value, where this activity involves creating a new
and self-financing organisation within or under the auspices of an existing
company. An intrapreneur is a person who practises intrapreneurship.

According to this definition, a corporate manager who starts a new initiative for
their company which entails setting up a new distinct business unit and board
of directors can be regarded as an intrapreneur.

In contrast, a corporate manager who starts a new initiative using pre-existing
corporate structures is not an intrapreneur. Nor is a leader of an R&D unit within
an organisation, whose innovations are managed by the organisation.

Were this R&D leader to create a new stand-alone organisation, which performs
its own functions and sells its own products – albeit with strong continued links
to the parent firm, organisation – it would count as intrapreneurship.” - FT.com

Memo to the CEO…
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/memo-ceo-giﬀord-pinchot/
Almost every industry is
being or will soon be
disrupted.

Acquisition has proved
to be no substitute for
internal innovation.

The world is unstable.

Big companies now
innovate in partnership
with startups.

Why Intrapreneurship?
“Although addressed to you, this memo will be read by your employees, who will begin
implementing intrapreneuring with or without your support. It will go better for you and your
shareholders if you get involved in building the environment for intrapreneuring.

The young talent you need to drive innovation is not buying the old social contract between
corporation and employee. They are demanding work that is personally meaningful, work
that is aligned with their environmental values and/or concern for social justice. They expect
substantial freedom to make decisions and the opportunity to make major contributions
early in their careers.

In essence, they are demanding an intrapreneurial career. If you don't meet their needs,
they will stay with you only long enough to get trained and put your company on their
résumé. Many of the best of your older employees have similar attitudes and needs. If their
needs are not met they may retire on the job or leave to start their own ﬁrm.

Though these independent attitudes do cause problems, if you understand how to manage
them, these intrapreneurial attitudes can work strongly in your favor. Your intrapreneurial
employees, young and old, can deliver the radical increases in the volume, quality and cost
eﬀectiveness of innovation that you need to deal with today’s disruptive economy.”

How serious is the need?
Dr. William Souder spent ten years studying 289 innovations in 53 different companies hoping to
discover a process that could drive innovation success. He could not find one. Instead his
primary conclusion was, “The intrapreneur is an essential ingredient in every innovation.” The
system inevitably resists innovations that take resources from or threaten to replace the existing
ways of delivering value to customers. Significant innovation only happens when a committed
team of intrapreneurs drives the innovation though all the barriers, failures, mistakes and seizing
of emerging opportunities that mark the intrapreneurial journey.

It is not the right process that makes an organization innovative. It’s the close and trusting
relationships between self-motivated intrapreneurs and their management sponsors that moves
innovations forward through the inevitable resistance of any corporate system. Sponsors coach
the intrapreneurial teams, protect them and help them access resources. Good sponsors can
recognize the real intrapreneurs from the “promoters,” who look and sound good, but don’t get
the job done.

Creating an intrapreneurial organization will not only give you a major competitive advantage and
profitable growth, it will also create the legacy of happy, deeply engaged employees, suppliers
and partners committed to your company’s well being. As a side benefit it will also make a large
positive impact on society’s major problems. In total, this is a legacy that Wall Street will celebrate
and, at the same time one you can be proud to explain to your grandchildren.

So, who is an Intrapreneur?
Intrapreneurs are employees who do for corporate
innovation what an entrepreneur does for his or her start-
up.

Intrapreneurs are the dreamers that do.

Intrapreneurs are self-appointed general managers of a
new idea.

Intrapreneurs are drivers of change to make business a
force for good.
http://intrapreneur.com/four-deﬁnitions-for-the-intrapreneur/

http://www.pinchot.com/2011/11/the-intrapreneurs-ten-commandments.html
1. Ask for advice before asking for
resources.

2. Express gratitude.

3. Build your team; intrapreneuring
is not a solo activity.

4. Share credit widely.

5. Keep the best interests of the
company and its customers in
mind, especially when you have
to bend the rules or circumvent
the bureaucracy.

6. Don't ask to be ﬁred; even as
you bend the rules and act
without permission, use all the
political skill you and your
sponsors can muster to move
the project forward without
making waves.

Challenges!
• “Corporate Immune System”

• Fear of failure / risk averse / penalize failure

• Fear of Ridicule

• Bureaucracy

• Lack of rewards for risk-takers

• Constant criticism

• Frequent setbacks

• Operational constraints (resources, day job)

• Unlike entrepreneurs, no incubators / accelerators

• Often not the traditional “HiPo / Talent”

• Can be seen as bit “rough”

• …

Reﬂection
• Individually (5min)
• What are the key characteristics of an intrapreneur?

• Table (10min)
• What kind of support do they likely need?

What is Creativity?
• the state or quality of being creative.
• the ability to transcend traditional ideas,
rules, patterns, relationships, or the like,
and to create meaningful new ideas, forms,
methods, interpretations, etc.
• originality, progressiveness, or imagination
• the process by which one utilizes creative
ability

Steve Jobs
“Creativity is just connecting things. When
you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because
they didn't really do it, they just saw
something. It seemed obvious to them
after a while. That's because they were
able to connect experiences they've had
and synthesize new things.”

Edward do Bono
“Creativity involves
breaking out of established
patterns in order to look at
things in a different way.”

Ken Robinson
“Creativity is putting your
imagination to work, and
it's produced the most
extraordinary results in
human culture.”

Edwin Land
“An essential aspect
of creativity is not
being afraid to fail.”

Wikipedia
“Creativity is a
phenomenon whereby
something new and
somehow valuable is
formed.”

So, when is something
creative?
http://vandewerk.nl/boost-creative-thinking/#more-2336

What Creativity is NOT!
Creativity is NOT offensive
Creativity is NOT abrasive
Creativity is NOT complicated
Creativity is NOT easy
Creativity is NOT meaningless
http://www.thecreativealliance.com/creativity/5-things-creativity-not/#

Creative Process?
1940: A Technique for Producing
Ideas: the simple ﬁve-step formula
anyone can use to be more creative
in business and in life! – James
Webb Young

Young
“An idea, I thought, has some of that mysterious quality
which romance lends to tales of the sudden appearance of
islands in the South Seas.
There, according to ancient mariners, in spots where the
charts showed only blue-deep sea – there would suddenly
appear a lovely atoll above the surface of the waters. The air
of magic hung about it.
And so it is, I thought, with ideas. They appear just as
suddenly above the surface of the mind; and with that same
air of magic and unaccountability.”

Young
But the scientist knows that the South Sea
atoll is the work of countless, unseen coral
builders, working below the surface of the sea.
And so I asked myself: “Is an idea, too, like
this? Is it only, the ﬁnal result of a long series
of unseen idea-building processes which go
on beneath the surface of the conscious
mind?

Young
This has brought me to the conclusion that the
production of ideas is as deﬁnite process as the
production of Fords; that the production of ideas,
too, runs on an assembly line; that in this
production the mind follows an operative
technique which can be learned and controlled;
and that its effective use is just as much a matter
of practice in the technique as is the effective
use of any tool.

Young
In learning any art, the important things to learn
are, ﬁrst, Principles; and second, Method. This is
true for the art of producing ideas.
So with the art of producing ideas. What is most
valuable know is not where to look for a
particular idea, but how to train the mind in the
method by which the ideas are produced; and
how to grasp the principles which are source of
all ideas.

A Creative Process
• Gather raw materials
• Two kinds: specific and general
• In advertising, an idea result from a new combination of specific knowledge about the
products and people, and with general knowledge about life and events.
• Masticating the raw materials
• Bring facts together and see how they fit
• Mental digestive process
• Take a break!
• Put the problem away, sleep over it, do something else…
• Let your unconscious kind work on it
• Idea emerges out of nowhere!
• Just when or where you least expect it
• Shaping and polishing into a practical idea
• Share it with the world, submit to criticism
• Work like inventor to go through with applying this adapting path of the process.

But, how to streamline
“creativity”?
• Hire creative people?

• Deﬁne a creative process?

• Establish a culture of creativity?

Fostering a Culture of
Creativity
• Recognise your responsibilities as a cultural leader
• Take the bureaucracy off the people at the sharp end of the creative process
• Cheer the creative process not just the results
• Not punish failure and remember that carrot works better than stick
• Use intrinsic reward for creative people
• Celebrate and foster diversity in all its forms
• Encourage autonomy through setting output expectations for performance
whilst allowing creative people to decide the means of delivery
• Encourage free flow of information both within and into the organisation
• Ensure that healthy competitive rivalry is harnessed into collaborative
endeavour that delivers better creative solutions quicker
• Remember that your competitors are working away to be more creative than
you; thus a culture of creativity is a ‘must do’ not a ‘nice-to-have’.
http://www.normanbroadbent.com/AppContent/Defining%20Creativity%20and%20How%20to%20Develop%20a%20Creative%20Culture.pdf

Case Studies
Pixar Inc
Creativity Inc – Ed Catmull
Hallmark
Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide
to Surviving with Grace – Gordon MacKenzie
Anthem – Ayn Rand

Creativity, Inc
The animators who work here are free to – no,
encouraged to – decorate their work spaces in whatever
style they wish…The point is, we value self-expression
here.
We start with the presumption that our people are
talented and want to contribute. We accept that,
without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent
in myraid unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those
impediments and fix them.
My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment,
keep it healthy, and watch for things that undermine it.

Creativity, Inc…
When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and
hierarchy are meaningless.
…Basically, they welcomed us to the program, gave us
workspace and access to computers, and then let us
pursue whatever turned us on. The result was a
collaborative, supportive community so inspiring that I
could later seek to replicate at Pixar.
Tension between the individual’s creative contribution
and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in
all creative environments.

Creativity, Inc…
ARPA’s mandate - to support smart people in a variety of
areas – was carried out based on the unwavering
presumption that researchers would try to do the right thing
and, in ARPA’s view, overmanaging them was
counterproductive. ARPA’s administrators did not hover
over the shoulders of those of us working on the project
they funded, nor did they demand that our work have direct
military applications. They simply trusted us to innovate.
Prof Sutherland used to say that he loved his graduate
students at Utah because we didn’t know what was
impossible…When one of my colleagues at the U of U
invented something, the rest of us would immediately
piggyback on it, pushing the new idea forward.

Creativity, Inc…
I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d
experienced in academia, largely because I naively
thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure –
assigning a bunch of managers to report to me – I
would have to spend too much time managing and not
enough time on my own work. This structure – in
which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects
forward, at their own pace – had its limits, but the fact
is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated
people enabled us ti make some significant
technological leaps in a short time.

Creativity, Inc…
Experimentation was highly valued, but the urgency of for-
profit enterprise was definitely in the air.
Alvy and I decided to do the opposite – to share our work
with the outside world
The only problem was, I had no idea what I was doing.
His (Steve Jobs) method for taking the measure of a room
was saying something definitive and outrageous, and
watching people react. If you were brave enough to come
back at him, he often respected it – poking at you, then
registering your response, was his way of deducing what you
thought and whether you had the guts to champion it.

Creativity, Inc
Deming’s approach – and Toyota’s too – gave
ownership of and responsibility for a product’s quality
to the people who were most involved in its creation.
Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could
suggest changes, call out problems – feel the pride that
came when they helped fix what was broken.
Because making a movie involves hundreds of people, a
chain of command is essential…we had made the
mistake of confusing the communication structure
with the organizational structure.

Creativity, Inc
The first principle was “Story is King”, by which we
meant that we would let nothing – not the technology,
not the merchandising possibilities – get in the way of
our story.
The other principle we depended on was “Trust the
Process”. We liked this one because it was so
reassuring: while there are inevitably difficulties and
missteps in any complex creative endeavor, you can
trust that “the process” will carry you through.

Managing a Creative Culture
Think of each statement as a starting point, as prompt
toward deeper inquiry, and not a conclusion!
If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get
ideas right.
When hiring people, give more weightage to their
potential than the current skill level.
Hire people smarter than you.
People across the organization should be free to suggest
ideas.
Source: Creativity, Inc

…
As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff
and constantly push them to contribute.
Measuring the process without evaluating the process is
deceiving.
The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than
the cost of fixing them.
Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not
to resist them but to build the capability to recover
when unexpected things occur.

…
Manager’s job is not to prevent risks, but make it safe
to take them.
Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It
is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t
screw up – it means you trust them when they do screw
up.
The people ultimately responsible for implementing a
plan must be empowered to make decisions when
things go wrong, even before getting approval.

…
The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal – it
leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather
than by their ability to solve problems.
Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them
with others.
Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
Be wary of making too many rules.
Imposing limits can encourage a creative response.
Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to
think differently.

…
An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and
resistant to change than the individuals who comprise
it.
The healthiest organizations are made up of
departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are
interdependent.
Our jobs as managers in creative environments is to
protect new ideas from those who don’t understand
that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be
phases of not-so-greatness. Protect the future, not the
past.

…
New crises test and demonstrate a company’s values.
Excellence, quality and good should be earned words,
attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about
ourselves.
Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is
more important than stability.
Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Making the
product great is the goal.

The Hairball!
“There’s a time when there is no hairball. So, where do
hairballs come from?”
Every new policy is another hair for the Hairball. Hairs
are never taken away, only added.
To tap the ability to create, you must spiritually soar
into the thin air of the stratosphere – blue sky – where
it is possible “to bring into existence” from nothing an
original concept.

Orbiting
…Then there are those few who manage to actively
engage the opportunities Hallmark presents without
being sucked into the Hairball of Hallmark. This is
accomplished by Orbiting.
Orbiting is responsible creativity: vigorously exploring
and operating beyond the Hairball of the corporate
mindset, beyond “accepted models, patterns, or
standards” – all the while remaining connected to the
spirit of the corporate mission

To find orbit around a corporate Hairball is to find a
place of balance when you benefit from the physical,
intellectual and philosophical resources of the
organization without becoming entombed in the
bureaucracy of the institution.
If you are interested (and it is not for everyone), you
can achieve Orbit by finding the personal courage to be
genuine and to take the best course of action to get the
job done rather than following the pallid path of
corporate appropriateness.

To be of optimum value to the corporate endeavor, you
must invest enough individually to counteract the pull
of Corporate Gravity, but not so much that you escape
the pull altogether. Just enough to stay out of the
Hairball.
Through this measured assertion of your own
uniqueness, it is possible to establish a dynamic
relationship with the Hairball – to Orbit around the
institutional mass. If you do this, you make an asset of
the gravity in that it becomes a force that keeps you
from flying out into the overwhelming nothingness of
deep space.

Orbiting the Hairball
Hairball is policy, procedure, conformity, compliance,
rigidity and submission to status quo, while Orbiting is
originality, rules-breaking, non-conformity,
experimentation, and innovation.
…People who have a deep passion for their ideas don’t
need a lot of encouragement. One ‘yes’ in a sea of
‘no’s’ can make the difference

Anthem – Ayn Rand
Source: Anthem, A Graphic Novel – Adapted by Charles Santino and Joe Staten

Reﬂection
• Identify 5 opportunities in your work / team / org to be
creative

• Table (10min)
• What challenges do creative people face in your org?

Accenture Study, 2013
• 93% execs believed their long-term success
depends on ability to innovate, and 70%
place innovation in Top 5 priorities.
• However, only 18% execs believe their
company’s innovation efforts deliver a
competitive advantage, a decline from 2009
study.
• Too much “invention” (not enough
commercialisation) and too much
“renovation” (in place of breakthrough
ideas)
https://newsroom.accenture.com/subjects/supply-chain-management/accenture-study-innovation-efforts-falling-short-despite-increased-investment.htm

Innovation Crisis?
• Only 5% workers in innovation programs feel
highly motivated to innovate.
• More than 3/4th say their new ideas are poorly
reviewed and analyzed.
• Less than 1/3rd measure or report on innovation.
• 81% firms don’t have resources needed to fully
pursue their innovations.
• While 55% treat IP as a valuable resource, only
16% regarded its development as mission-
critical, and only 6% employees feel so!
• 49% won’t get any benefit or recognition for
developing successful ideas.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/02/27/is-there-an-innovation-crisis-at-us-firms/#358318fc34cb

Why???
World’s dumbest idea….yes…
maximising the shareholder
value!!!
Hint: “the best way to increase shareholder value is by delivering
value to customers!”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2015/02/27/is-there-an-innovation-crisis-at-us-ﬁrms/#358318fc34cb

Every company
should pursue a
two-pronged
strategy:
exploiting and
optimizing their
current products
while harnessing
innovation as a
cornerstone of
lasting growth and
proﬁtability. A
simple but
powerful approach
to accelerating
innovation is to
leverage existing
resources within a
company:
employees.
https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/de/Documents/technology/Intrapreneurship_Whitepaper_English.pdf

Deloitte’s 5 Insights
• Intrapreneurship describes a people-centric, bottom-up
approach to developing radical innovations in-house.

• Intrapreneurship pays off many times over in terms of
company growth, culture and talent.

• It’s not about creating entrepreneurs, it’s about finding and
recognizing them.

• Intrapreneurs know the rules and break them effectively.

• Intrapreneurship requires a different management
approach.

What is Innovation?
• Merriam-Webster: the introduction of something new, a
new idea, method, or device

• Cambridge: (the use of) a new idea or method

• OECD: Innovation is: production or adoption,
assimilation, and exploitation of a value-added novelty in
economic and social spheres; renewal and enlargement
of products, services, and markets; development of new
methods of production; and establishment of new
management systems. It is both a process and an
outcome.

From Creativity to
Innovation…

Innovation Spectrum
https://hbr.org/2017/06/the-4-types-of-innovation-and-the-problems-they-solve

Sustaining Innovation
Most innovation happens here, because most of the time we are
seeking to get better at what we’re already doing. We want to
improve existing capabilities in existing markets, and we have a
pretty clear idea of what problems need to be solved and what
skill domains are required to solve them.

For these types of problems, conventional strategies like strategic
roadmapping, traditional R&D labs, and using acquisitions to bring
new resources and skill sets into the organization are usually
eﬀective. Design thinking methods, such as those championed
by David Kelley, founder of the design ﬁrm IDEO and Stanford’s
d.school, can also be enormously helpful if both the problem and
the skills needed to solve it are well understood.

Breakthrough Innovation
Sometimes, as was the case with the example of detecting
pollutants underwater, we run into a well-defined problem that’s
just devilishly hard to solve. In cases like these, we need to
explore unconventional skill domains, such as adding a marine
biologist to a team of chip designers. Open innovation strategies
can be highly effective in this regard, because they help to
expose the problem to diverse skill domains.

As Thomas Kuhn explained in the The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, we advance in specific fields by creating paradigms,
which sometimes can make it very difficult to solve a problem
within the domain in which it arose — but the problem may be
resolved fairly easily within the paradigm of an adjacent domain.

Disruptive Innovation
When HBS professor Clayton Christensen introduced the concept of disruptive
innovation in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma, it was a revelation. In his study of
why good firms fail, he found that what is normally considered best practice —
listening to customers, investing in continuous improvement, and focusing on the
bottom line — can be lethal in some situations.

In a nutshell, what he discovered is that when the basis of competition changes,
because of technological shifts or other changes in the marketplace, companies
can find themselves getting better and better at things people want less and less.
When that happens, innovating your products won’t help — you have to innovate
your business model.

More recently, Steve Blank has developed lean startup methods and Alex
Osterwalder has created tools like the business model canvas and value
proposition canvas. These are all essential assets for anyone who finds themselves
in the situation Christensen described, and they are proving to be effective in a
wide variety of contexts.

Basic Research
Pathbreaking innovations never arrive fully formed. They always begin
with the discovery of some new phenomenon. No one could guess how
Einstein’s discoveries would shape the world, or that Alan
Turing’s universal computer would someday become a real thing. As Neil
deGrasse Tyson said when asked about the impact of a major discovery,
“I don’t know, but we’ll probably tax it.” To his point, Einstein’s
discoveries now play essential roles in technologies ranging from nuclear
energy to computer technologies and GPS satellites.

Some large enterprises, like IBM and Procter & Gamble, have the
resources to invest in labs to pursue basic research. Others,
like Experian’s DataLabs, encourage researchers and engineers to go to
conferences and hold internal seminars on what they learn.
Google invites about 30 top researchers to spend a sabbatical year at
the company and funds 250 academic projects annually.

Is Innovation…
• A concept…?

• A formula…?

• A process…?

• A method…?

• A culture…?

• A state of mind…?

Innovation as a Method?
https://www.slideshare.net/karangirotra/the-renaissance-innovation-method-mba-class

Innovation as a Culture?
http://www.ntti3.com/pursuit-innovation-curating-culture-ambitious-ideas-rebellious-talent-hidden-opportunities-part-2/

Evolution of Corporate
Innovation
https://steveblank.com/2015/11/21/at-the-center-of-the-frenzy-innovation-outposts-and-the-evolution-of-corporate-rd/

Why corporate innovation
fails to deliver?
• Why some corporate innovation programs succeed, while
many (most?) other fail?

• Why individual innovators are frustrated, and why
entrepreneurial success requires heroics?

• Why innovation activities have generated “innovation
theater”, but few deliverables?

• Why innovation in large organizations looks nothing like
startups?
https://steveblank.com/2018/06/05/whats-next-for-getting-stuﬀ-done-in-large-organizations-the-innovation-stack/

Innovation Stack
• It starts by understanding the “Innovation Stack” – the
hierarchy of innovation eﬀorts that have emerged in large
organizations.

• The stack consists of:

• Individual Innovation,

• Innovation Tools and Activities,

• Team-based Innovation and

• Operational Innovation.
https://steveblank.com/2018/06/05/whats-next-for-getting-stuﬀ-done-in-large-organizations-the-innovation-stack/

Individual Innovation
• Process: Heroic

• We describe their efforts as “heroic” because all the established procedures and processes in a
large company are primarily designed to execute and support the current business model. From
the point of view of someone managing an engineering, manufacturing or operations
organization, new, unplanned and unscheduled innovations are a distraction and a drag on
existing resources. (The best description I’ve heard is that, “Unfettered innovation is a denial of
service attack on core capabilities.”) That’s because until now, we hadn’t levied any requirements,
rigor or evidence on the innovator to understand what it would take to integrate, scale and deploy
products/services.

• Examples: Innovators Alliance

• In some companies and government agencies, innovators even have informal groups, i.e. an
Innovators Alliance, where they can exchange best practices and workarounds to the system.
(Think of this as the innovator’s support group.) But these innovation activities are ad hoc, and the
innovators lack authority, resources and formal process to make innovation programs an integral
part of their departments or agencies.

• Deliverables: One-off successes, Frustration with systems

• most corporate/agency innovation processes funnel “innovations” into “demo days” or “shark
tanks” where they face an approval/funding committee that decides which innovation ideas are
worth pursuing. However, without any measurable milestones to show evidence of the evolution
of what the team has learned about validity of the problem, customer needs, pivots, etc., the best
presenter and flashiest demo usually win.

Kodak
• 1975: Steven Sasoon invents digital camera! Toaster-size prototype
captures B/W images at .01 megapixels!

• 1976: Commanded 90% of ﬁlm sales and 85% of camera sales in the US

• 1988: Employed 145,000 workers worldwide

• 1996: The peak year! It held more than 2/3rds of global ﬁlm and camera
market, and company was worth $31 Billion. Kodak brand was the 5th
most valuable global brand.

• 2012: Declared bankruptcy! Workforce shrunk to 13,000

• Kodak had “Systems Concept Center” to develop new businesses
reporting into CTO
https://www.photosecrets.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-kodak

Innovators vs.
Entrepreneurs
There are two types of people who engage in large company/agency innovation:

• Innovators – those who invent new technology, product, service or processes;
and

• Entrepreneurs – those who’ve ﬁgured out how to get innovation adopted and
delivered through the existing company/agency procedures and processes.

Although some individuals operate as both innovator and entrepreneur, any successful
innovation program requires an individual or a team with at least these two skill sets.

Innovation Tools and
Activities

Innovation Tools and
Activities
• Some examples of innovation tools are Customer Development, Design Thinking, User-
Centric Design, Business Model Canvas, Storytelling, etc. Companies/agencies have also
co-opted innovation activities developed for startups such as Hackathons, Incubators,
internal Kickstarters, as well as Open Innovation programs and Maker Spaces that give
individual innovators a physical space and dedicated time to build prototypes and demos.
In addition, companies and agencies have set up Innovation Outposts (most often located
in Silicon Valley) to be closer to relevant technology and then to invest, partner or buy.

• These activities make sense in a startup ecosystem (where 100% of the company is
focused on innovation,) however they generate disappointing results inside companies/
agencies (when 98% of the organization is focused on executing the existing business/
mission model.) While these tools and activities educated innovators and generated
demos and prototypes, they lacked an end-to-end process that focused on delivery/
deployment. So it should be no surprise that very few contributed to the company’s top or
bottom line (or an agency’s mission).

• One of the ironies of the tools/activities groups is rather than talking about the results of
using the tools – i.e. the ability to rapidly deliver new products/services that are wanted
and needed – their passion has them evangelizing the features of the tools and activities.
This means that senior leadership has pigeonholed most of these groups as extensions of
corporate training departments and skeptics view this as the “latest fad.”

Team-based Innovation
Rather than just teaching innovators how to use new tools or having them build
demos, we recognized that there was a need for a process that taught all the
components of a business/mission model (who are the customers, what product/
service solves their problem, how do we get it to them, support it, etc.) The next
step in entrepreneurial education was to teach teams a formal innovation process
for how to gather evidence that lets them test if their idea is feasible, desirable
and viable. Examples of team-based innovation programs are the National
Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps @ NSF), for the Intelligence
Community I‑Corps@ NSA, and for the Department of Defense, Hacking for
Defense (H4D).

In contrast to single-purpose activities like Incubators, Hackathons, Kickstarters,
etc., these curricula teach what it takes to turn an idea into a deliverable product/
service by using the scientiﬁc method of hypothesis testing and experimentation
outside the building. This process emphasizes rapid learning cycles with speed,
urgency, accepting failure as learning, and innovation metrics.

Limitations of Team-based
Innovation
The good news – I-Corps, Hacking for Defense and other innovation programs that focus on training
single teams have raised the innovation bar. These programs have taught thousands of teams of federally
funded scientists as well as innovators in corporations, the Department of Defense and intelligence
community. However, over time we’ve seen teams that completed these programs run into scaling
challenges. Even with great evidence-based minimal viable products (prototypes), teams struggled to get
these innovations deployed at scale and in the field. Or a team that achieved product-market fit building a
non-standard architecture could find no way to maintain it at scale within the parent organization.

Upon reflection we identified two root causes. The first is a lack of connection between innovation teams
and their parent organization. Teams form/and are taught outside of their parent organization because
innovation is disconnected from other activities. This meant that when teams went back to their home
organization, they found that execution of existing priorities took precedence. They returned speaking a
foreign language (What’s a pivot? Minimum viable what?) to their colleagues and bosses who are
rewarded on execution-based metrics. Further, as budgets are planned out years in advance, their
organization had no slack for “good ideas.” As a result, there was no way to finish and deploy whatever
innovative prototypes the innovators had developed – even ones that have been validated.

The second root cause emerged because neither the innovator’s teams nor their organizations had the
mandate, budget or people to build an end-to-end innovation pipeline process, one that started with
innovation sourcing funnel (both internal and external sources) all the way to integrating their prototypes
into mainstream engineering production. (see below and this HBR article on the innovation pipeline.)

Operational Innovation
Having skills/tools and activities are critical building blocks but by themselves are
insufficient to build a program that delivers results that matter to leadership. It’s only when
senior leaders see how an innovation process can deliver stuff that matters – at speed—
that they take action to change the processes and procedures that get in the way.

We believe that the next big step is to get teams and leaders to think about the innovation
process from end-to-end – that is to visualize the entire flow of how and from where an idea
is generated (the source) all the way to deployment (how it gets into users’ hands).

Second, we’ve realized that while individual initiatives won “awards,” and Incubators and
Hackathons got coffee cups and posters, senior leadership sat up and took notice
when operating groups transformed how they work in the service of a critical product or
mission. When teams in operating groups adopted the innovation pipeline, it made an
immediate impact on delivering products/services at speed.

An operating group can be a corporate profit and loss center or anything that affects
revenue, profit, users, market share, etc. In a government agency it can be something that
allows a group to execute mission more effectively or in a new disruptive way. Operating
groups have visibility, credibility and most importantly direct relevance to mission.

Target, Canada
Factor 1: Lack of intrapreneurial learning and validation: No validation of the offering (the new
business’ product) took place in Canada, in order to explore regional differences and most importantly to
identify these aspects that would appeal to Canadians. Instead, the company went right on, opening 133
stores in Canada.

Factor 2: Ill-suited metrics and KPIs for a corporate start-up. Metrics to track progress should be
modified to fit the new business initiative, rather than mimic the indicators of the existing company.

Factor 3: Unqualified intrapreneur? What was really the company’s choice for the intrapreneur to
manage the initiative? The identification of a qualified intrapreneur within the company, or the selection of
an existing leader, selected on the basis of past successes, however irrelevant, assigned to the
intrapreneurial attempt at hand? If the latter, then the intrapreneurial attempt was at risk right from the
start.

Factor 4: Enforcing corporate systems and processes. A common mistake in setting into motion
intrapreneurial initiatives, is that of enforcing existing management systems, which in the case of Target
turned into making the Canada start-up behave like an established business right from the start.

Factor 5: Rigid adherence to strategy. No adjustments to strategy whatsoever have been attempted,
even when from early on it was clear that many of the outlets were backfiring in Canada. All effort, energy
and money went into making the strategy work, rather than adapting.
https://training.intraprise-project.eu/en/module-1/unit-2-intrapreneurial-stories-and-case-studies

Innovation Mechanisms(?)
• Time Oﬀ

• Demo Days

• Hackathon

• Maker spaces

• Shark Tank

• Internal Incubators

• External Accelerators

• Open Innovation

• Innovation Outposts

• Ventures

• M&A / Corp Dev

Time Off
• Give some time oﬀ to employees for them to pursue their
own ideas, experiments, etc. and hope that something
useful would come out of it.

• 3M: 15%

• Google: 20% (now discontinued)

Demo Days
• Demo day is a mechanism for “founders” (or intrapreneur)
to present their “company” (or idea) to the “investors” (or
senior management) by demoing the progress of their
idea

• It allows the “investors” to understand the progress on
their current “investments” so far, and make informed
decision whether to
https://www.ycombinator.com/demoday/faq/

Maker space
A makerspace is a collaborative work space inside a school, library or separate
public/private facility for making, learning, exploring and sharing that uses high
tech to no tech tools.

These spaces are open to kids, adults, and entrepreneurs and have a variety of
maker equipment including 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines, soldering
irons and even sewing machines. A makerspace however doesn’t need to include
all of these machines or even any of them to be considered a makerspace. If you
have cardboard, legos and art supplies you’re in business.

It’s more of the maker mindset of creating something out of nothing and
exploring your own interests that’s at the core of a makerspace. Some of the
skills that are learned in a makerspace pertain to electronics, 3d printing, 3D
modeling, coding, robotics and even woodworking,

Makerspaces are also fostering entrepreneurship and are being utilized as
incubators and accelerators for business startups.
https://www.makerspaces.com/what-is-a-makerspace/

Shark Tank
Shark Tank is an American reality
television series that premiered on
August 9, 2009, on ABC.[1] The show
is a franchise of the international
format Dragons' Den, which
originated in Japan in 2001.

Shark Tank shows
aspiring entrepreneurs as they
make business presentations to a
panel of ﬁve "shark" investors, who
then choose whether to invest as
business partners.

Internal Incubators
• Setup an “incubator” inside a company to help with the
following objectives:

• Create a “safe space” for internal ideas to be explored

• Create an incubation space for external startups

• Act as matchmaker for the company to scan the
horizon and explore opportunities

• Examples: Cisco, NetApp, Target, Oracle, SAP Startup
Studio, Societe Generale, Yahoo!, Airbus Bizlabs, etc.

External Accelerators
• External Accelerators typically run a season (~3-6
months) where a cohort of startups is mentored and
graduated. They (mostly) take some equity in return.

• Globally: Ycombinator, TechStars, NUMA

• India: NUMA, Google Launchpad, TechStars, Microsoft
Ventures, NSRCEL IIMB, Axilor

Google Launchpad
• Speed dating format

• 5-Day event

• Day 1: Product Strategy

• Day 2: UX

• Day 3: Tech / Architecture

• Day 4: GTM

• Day 5: Investor Pitch + Pitch / Demo Day

Innovation Outpost
For decades large companies have set up R&D labs outside their corporate headquarters, often in
foreign countries, in spite of having a large home market with lots local R&D talent. IBM’s research
center in Zurich, GM’s research center in Israel, Toyota in the U.S are examples.

These remote R&D labs oﬀered companies four beneﬁts.

• They enabled companies to comply with local government laws – for example to allow foreign
subsidiaries to transfer manufacturing technology from the U.S. parent company while
providing technical services for foreign customers

• They improved their penetration of local and regional markets by adapting their products to the
country or region

• They helped to globalize their innovation cycle and tap foreign expertise and resources

• They let companies develop products to launch in world markets simultaneously

However, most of these Innovation Outposts are at best another form of innovation theater – they
make a large company feel like they’re innovating, but very few of these outposts change a
company’s product direction and fewer impact their bottom line.
https://steveblank.com/category/innovation-outposts/

Ventures
• Companies typically setup an investment structure to
invest in startups.

• It could range from taking some small stake in the
company to taking a majority stake

• Biggest advantage is being able to get help on ﬁnding the
right market ﬁt for their product as well as mentoring,
especially on scaling up (in B2B).

• Examples: Google Ventures, Intel Capital, M12 (Microsoft
Ventures),

M&A
• Companies often look for easier (but costlier!) route to innovation by simply
acquiring the companies.

• Sometime they buy companies to acquire complementary technology, while
sometimes it might be to simply acquire customers!

• Sometimes it is friendly and mutual, while sometimes it could be hostile!

• A form of acquisition is “acqui-hire” where the acquisition is done with sole
purpose of hiring the talent.

• Google: 200+ (including >1 per week during 2010, 2011)

• Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook, Intel, Yahoo!, etc., etc.

• Interesting, a KPMG study found that 83% merger deals did not boost shareholder
value! HBR estimates this number to be between 70% to 90%!

Reﬂection
• Recollect at least one successful and one
“unsuccessful” example of innovation from your
organization

• Table (10min)
• What are the impediments to innovation in your
organization?

Guest Speaker
Anuj Magazine is currently Director (Technical Operations) at Citrix,
India. As a part of his charter, he is responsible for site-wide
technology specific initiatives such as Innovation outcomes,
Customer briefings, Technology ecosystem collaboration, Technical
relationships with Universities, Employee/Customer/Partner product
and technical readiness, among other areas. 
In his previous roles, he was Director, Product Engineering, handling
diverse technology areas such as Product Globalization, Security.
Prior to Citrix, he has worked in the Software Product-based
organizations such as McAfee and Quark, playing various Software
Product Engineering roles. 
He holds a Master’s degree from BITS Pilani and General
Management diploma from IIM, Bangalore. 
He is a 15-time full marathon runner, an avid sketchnote artist and
also ardently supports the cause of improving Olympic sports in India
by evangelizing and supporting Olympic Gold Quest, a not-for-profit
organization. He holds a professional qualification as a Handwriting
Analysis Expert. He is a voracious reader, blogs frequently on various
interest areas at, http://anujmagazine.blogspot.in and wrote
previously at Techwell.com.
Anuj Magazine

Reﬂection / Day 1 Wrap
• List down 2-3 (or more!) “aha” moments from the
session

• Table (10min)
• What are the major disagreements with what we
discussed?

Factors to consider
• Structure

• Process

• Culture

Corporate Incubators
• Isolated from the company tend to have limited success!

• Tend to work when

• Objective is cleat at the outset

• Senior leaders are committed to the presumed
outcomes

• Organization is strategically prepared for the new
business that will ultimately result.

Success Factors of
Corporate Incubators
1. Leadership and an innovation culture willing to commit

2. System-wide resources and

3. A governance process that can deliver on a clearly articulated

4. Mandate and scope for breakthrough innovation. An inclusive

5. Organizational structure with interfaces between diﬀerent parts of the company
incorporates the

6. Processes and tools and

7. Metrics and rewards required for an innovation cycles that takes longer than
incremental product innovation.

8. Lastly, companies need Skills and talent that are diﬀerentiated from traditional R&D or
new product development roles.
https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-myth-of-the-intrapreneur

Corporation Innovation
Labs
• Tech: HP Labs, Google X, Xerox PARC, Microsoft Research Lab, Google The Garage, TCS Innovation Labs, Oracle
Labs, IBM Research, Avaya Research Labs, Autodesk Labs, Philips Design, Amazon Lab 126, Cisco Hyper Innovation
Living Labs (CHILL), Symantec Research Labs, SAP Co-Innovation Labs (COIL), Accenture Innovation Centers

• Telecom: AT&T Labs Advanced Technologies, Verizon Innovation Centers, Nokia Bell Labs, Vodafone Innovation Park
Labs, Deutsche Telekom Silicon Valley Innovation Center, AT&T Foundry, Huawei Wireless X Labs,

• Finance: Visa One Market Center, DBS Asia X (DAX), Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT), Wells Fargo Labs,
JPMC FinLab, Citi Innovation Labs, Capital One Labs, Deutsche Bank Labs, FIX Innovation Labs,

• Retail / FMCG: Coca Cola Development and Innovation Lab, IKEA Space10, Staples Labs: Velocity, Innovstapation,
Development, The Home Depot Innovation Center, CVS Digital Innovation Lab, Lululemon Labs, Neiman Marcus
Innovation Labs, Walmart Labs, Sephora Innovation Lab, Kohl’s Digital Center, Target Technology Innovation Center,
Lowe’s Innovation Lab, Sears iR Labs, Tesco Labs, DuPont Innovation Centers, Nike Innovation Kitchen, Unilever
Foundary,

• Auto / Aerospace: Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, Volkswagen Automative Innovative Lab (VAIL), Panasonic
Automotive Innovation Center, Ford Research & Innovation Center,

• Health: McKeeson and Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Cardinal Health Fuse, Johnson & Johnson Innovation
Centers,

• Media: IPG Media Labs, The New York Times Research & Development, Comcast Labs,

• Consulting / Advisory: Deloitte Analytics, McKinsey Digital Labs, BCG Innovation Center for Operations,

• Insurance: America’s Health Insurance Plan (AHIP) The Innovation Lab, Anthem Innovation Studio, Metlife LumenLab,

• Energy / Industrial: Southern Company Energy Innovation Center, Georgia Paciﬁc Innovation Institute, thyssenkrupp
Elevator Research, Emerson The Helix Innovation Center, CAT Data Innovation Lab,

• Travel / Hospitality: Marriott Pop-Up Innovation Lab, Delta The Hanger, AccorHotels Disruption & Growth,
https://www.cbinsights.com/research/corporate-innovation-labs/

Why?
• Core capability (execution) becomes core rigidity (

• Risk-averse leadership: A study of CEOs and CFOs
reported that to avoid missing their own quarterly earnings
update, 80% were willing to forgo R&D spending!

• Working on innovation projects is often considered less
attractive or “time out”

• Average life span of new ventures group in large
companies is just over four years! And people working in
there are not treated well when that group dissolves!

Why Corporate Incubators?
• Can’t depend on a few motivated individuals alone! Need to instiutional
innovation as a permanent function of the company

• But innovation can’t be in silo!

• Needs to be groomed as organizational capability

• Companies needs to develop bench strength for innovation!

• Sustained capability for innovation

• Talent / human capital

• Ideas

• Process, tools, frameworks, policies

Some notable examples…
• 1940s:
• Lockheed Martin Skunkworks

• 1970s:
• 3M Post It Notes

• Xerox PARC

• 1980s:
• Apple Macintosh

• Sony Playstation

• 1990s:
• Java language

• 2000s:
• Google Gmail

• Facebook “Like” Button

Lockheed Martin’s
Skunk Works
• 1943: Visionary Clarence “Kelly” Johnson got the green
light to create an experimental engineering department to
begin work on the secret XP-80 Shooting Star jet fighter.
Johnson and his team designed and built the XP-80 in
only 143 days, seven less than was required. It was this
project that marked the birth of what would become the
Skunk Works with Kelly Johnson at its helm.

• What allowed Johnson to operate the Skunk Works so
effectively and efficiently was his unconventional
organizational approach. He broke the rules, challenging
the current bureaucratic system that stifled innovation
and hindered progress. His philosophy is spelled out in
his "14 rules and practices."

• “We Are Defined Not By The Technologies We
Create, But The Process In Which We Create Them." -
Kelly Johnson
https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-we-are/business-areas/aeronautics/skunkworks.html

Kelly’s 14 Rules and
Practices
1. The Skunk Works® manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a
division president or higher.

2. Strong but small project offices must be provided both by the military and industry.

3. The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of
good people (10% to 25% compared to the so-called normal systems).

4. A very simple drawing and drawing release system with great flexibility for making changes must be provided.

5. There must be a minimum number of reports required, but important work must be recorded thoroughly.

6. There must be a monthly cost review covering not only what has been spent and committed but also projected costs to the conclusion
of the program.

7. The contractor must be delegated and must assume more than normal responsibility to get good vendor bids for subcontract on the
project. Commercial bid procedures are very often better than military ones.

8. The inspection system as currently used by the Skunk Works, which has been approved by both the Air Force and Navy, meets the
intent of existing military requirements and should be used on new projects. Push more basic inspection responsibility back to
subcontractors and vendors. Don't duplicate so much inspection.

9. The contractor must be delegated the authority to test his final product in flight. He can and must test it in the initial stages. If he
doesn't, he rapidly loses his competency to design other vehicles.

10. The specifications applying to the hardware must be agreed to well in advance of contracting. The Skunk Works practice of having a
specification section stating clearly which important military specification items will not knowingly be complied with and reasons therefore
is highly recommended.

11. Funding a program must be timely so that the contractor doesn't have to keep running to the bank to support government projects.

12. There must be mutual trust between the military project organization and the contractor, the very close cooperation and liaison on a
day-to-day basis. This cuts down misunderstanding and correspondence to an absolute minimum.

13. Access by outsiders to the project and its personnel must be strictly controlled by appropriate security measures.

14. Because only a few people will be used in engineering and most other areas, ways must be provided to reward good performance by
pay not based on the number of personnel supervised.

3M Post It Notes
Dr. Spencer Silver, a 3M scientist, discovered the formula
for the sticky stuﬀ back in 1968. But it was Silver's
colleague, Art Fry, who ﬁnally came up with a practical use
for it. The idea for repositionable notes struck Fry while
singing in the church choir. His bookmark kept falling out of
his hymnal, causing him to lose his page. So, taking
advantage of a 3M policy known as the "bootlegging"
policy, Fry used a portion of his working hours to develop a
solution to his problem.

After years of product development, 3M introduced the
concept of Post-it® Notes in four major markets in 1977.
But, without actual samples in hand to try, consumers didn't
catch on. A year later, 3M blanketed the Boise, Idaho,
market with samples upon samples of Post-it® Notes. After
trying the notes, more than 90 percent of users said they'd
buy the product themselves. The test was a success! By
1980, Post-it® Notes were being sold nationally.
http://solutions.3m.com.hk/wps/portal/3M/en_HK/post-it/index/post-it_past_present/history/the_whole_story/

3M
• “Grow and Divide”

• “Make a little, sell a little”

• “15% time devoted to innovation”

• In 1983, 3M’s chairman, Lew Lehr, said: “For many years the
corporate structure [at 3M] has been designed speciﬁcally to
encourage young entrepreneurs to take an idea and run with
it. If they succeed, they can and do ﬁnd themselves running
their own business under the 3M umbrella. The
entrepreneurial approach is not a sideline at 3M. It is the
heart of our design for growth.”

3M Bootlegging Policy
To foster creativity, 3M encourages
technical staﬀ members to spend up
to 15 percent of their time on
projects of their own choosing. Also
known as the "bootlegging" policy,
the 15 percent rule has been the
catalyst for some of 3M's most
famous products, such as Scotch
Tape and — of course — Post-it®
Notes.。
http://solutions.3m.com.hk/wps/portal/3M/en_HK/post-it/index/post-it_past_present/history/the_whole_story/

Xerox PARC
• 1970: Founded by Xerox under Dr. Georke Pake with the charter to create “The Office of the Future”

• 1971: Creates Later Printing

• 1972: Designs Object-Oriented Programming language SmallTalk

• 1973: Creates Alto PC (with mouse), Ethernet, record first video image on computer

• 1974: “WYSIWYG”

• 1975: GUI

• 1979: Pioneers use of ethnography in HCD, invents NLP,

• 1980: Develops optical storage

• 1982: Designs first optical-based LAN

• 1988: Ubiquitous Computing

• …

• Since inception, it has created

• US$ 1 Trillion in new industries

• US$ 60 Billion in startups

• 6,000 patents
https://www.parc.com/about-parc/

Intrapreneuring at Apple
“The Macintosh team
was what is commonly
known now as
intrapreneurship—only a
few years before the term
was coined—a group of
people going in essence
back to the garage, but in
a large company.” -
Steve Jobs, 1985
https://www.newsweek.com/jobs-talks-about-his-rise-and-fall-207016

Sony Playstation
In 1984 while attending a presentation at Sony’s Information Processing Research Center, Ken Kutaragi was
amazed by Sony’s System G, a workstation that provided TV broadcasts 3-D computer graphics in real-time.
Kutaragi-san envisioned providing this high level of 3-D computer graphics to console gaming and ultimately
dominating the video game industry.

Having noticed the poor sound quality of the Nintendo Famicom (NES), Ken Kutaragi persuaded Sony’s
management to design and manufacture a powerful sound chip for Nintendo’s upcoming 16-bit console, the Super
Famicom (SNES). This provided Kutaragi-san a foot in the door to further his aspirations of developing a powerful
video gaming console.

The sentiment at Sony HQ was that management did not want to be involved with video gaming because it was
considered a ‘toy’ and would tarnish their brand perception of being a superior high end electronics manufacturer.
Regardless, the tenacious Ken Kutaragi persuaded Sony management to design a proprietary CD-ROM unit for the
SNES which would add processing power to the gaming unit making it the most powerful console at the time. The
deal that materialized was Sony would design a CD-ROM add-on for the SNES and a standalone CD-ROM /SNES
console titled “PlayStation”. Sony Imagesoft would license the CD-ROM software, Sony DADC would manufacture
the CD media, and Nintendo would retain the licensing and manufacturing of all cartridges. Nintendo did not look
favorably on this deal as it cut them out of control of the potentially lucrative and expanding CD-ROM business but
since Sony was the exclusive supplier of the SNES sound chip, they were in a precarious position.

During the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show, Sony proudly announced that it was partnering with Nintendo to
release the SNES CD-ROM Play Station add-on and several games were already in development.   However, later in
the show, Nintendo contradicted Sony’s announcement by publicly announcing a separate deal with Philips to
release a CD-i add-on for the SNES.   Behind closed doors before the CES, Nintendo and Philips had agreed to a
joint effort of developing a CD-i add-on for the SNES. This new Philips arrangement was more lucrative for Nintendo
and for the first time ever, as part of the deal Nintendo allowed Philips to use their IP to develop games for the CD-I,
a non-Nintendo console. Although the press was shocked by Nintendo’s snub of Sony at the CES, Sony’s
management had advance knowledge of the Philips deal before the show but continued with their announcement.
After further negotiations between Sony and Nintendo, the “PlayStation” deal was finally called off.   Ken Kutaragi
was angered by Nintendo’s actions and approached Norio Ohga, president of Sony, explaining that Sony should
proceed with development of their own video game console.   Ohga-san was furious that Nintendo broke their deal
and told Kutaragi-san to “Just do it!”.

Ken Kutaragi embarked on a secret mission to design a new video game console using cutting edge 32-bit
technology which provided powerful 3-D graphics and sound that would rival workstations costing thousands of
dollars. The code name for the new console was “PS-X” which stood for “PlayStation X” as a reminder of
Nintendo’s betrayal. The video gaming landscape would change forever as a result.
http://playstationmuseum.com/history/

Facebook “Like” Button
• July 13, 2007: consider bunch of options (star,
plus, thumbs up, etc.) and call it “awesome"

• July 17, 2007: initial working prototype built

• Aug 22, 2007: the name “like” is proposed

• Oct 30, 2007: FriendFeed adds “like” feature

• Nov 12, 2007: Ready to launch but review with
Zuck doesn’t go well.

• Feb 9, 2009: Facebook launches “Like”. The world
accuses Facebook of stealing the idea from
FriendFeed.
https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-history-of-the-Awesome-Button-that-eventually-became-the-Like-button-on-Facebook

Google Gmail, circa 2001
Does the world need another free webmail?
• First version of Gmail was literally written in a day!
“It wasn't very impressive -- all I did was take the
Google Groups (Usenet search) code (my
previous project) and stuff my email into it -- but it
was live and people could use it (to search my
mail…)"
• Code was live from day one!
• “I would just write the code, release the feature,
and watch the response.”
• Re-wrote the frontend about six times and
backend three times by launch (Apr 1, 2004)
• Code for content-targeted ads was written in a few
hours and tested on ~100 unsuspecting
Googlers!
• It was a “Googlette”!
https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.in/2009/01/communicating-with-code.html
http://neilpatel.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/image083.png
http://time.com/43263/gmail-10th-anniversary/

Googlette?
“The startup within the startup”
• “What is a Googlette? It’s a new business inside of Google that
is just getting started as “the start-up within the start-up”.
We’re looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial manager
capable of offering direction to a team of PMs working on a wide
array of Googlettes. You will deﬁne Google’s innovation engine
and grow the leaders of our next generation of businesses.”
• Georges Harik, one of Google’s ﬁrst 10 employees, held the roles
of director of Googlettes and distinguished engineer. As director
of Googlettes, his team was responsible for the product
management and strategy efforts surrounding many nascent
Google initiatives including Gmail, Google Talk, Google Video,
Picasa, Orkut, Google Groups and Google Mobile.
http://kottke.org/03/08/google-and-the-fabulous-googlettes https://www.gv.com/team/georges-harik/

Why an Innovation
Process?
“When organizations lack a formal innovation pipeline process, project approvals
tend to be based on who has the best demo or slides, or who lobbies the hardest.
There is no burden on those who proposed a new idea or technology to talk to
customers, build minimal viable products, test hypotheses or understand the
barriers to deployment. And they count on well-intentioned, smart people sitting in
a committee to decide which ideas are worth pursuing.

Instead, what organizations need is a self-regulating, evidence-based innovation
pipeline. Instead of having a committee vet ideas, they need a process that
operates with speed and urgency, and that helps innovators and other
stakeholders to curate and prioritize problems, ideas, and technologies.

This prioritization process has to start before any new idea reaches engineering.
This way, the innovations that do reach engineering will already have substantial
evidence — about validated customer needs, processes, legal security, and
integration issues. Most importantly, minimal viable products and working
prototypes will have been tested.”

Key constituents
• Idea sourcing: what might be interesting or worth investing into?

• Curation: why is this idea interesting, who might be potential customer, are there any existing efforts
already underway, build initial MVPs, understand any financial / legal / security issues, etc.

• Prioritization: what should be the priority of chosen ideas based on organizational mission, vision and
goals?

• Solution exploration and hypothesis testing: go through phase to deliver evidence for defensible,
data-based decisions about the idea, build its business model and validate problem/solution fit and
even the product/market fit (at least on paper!), validate the initial MVPs, etc.

• Incubation: teams need to refine their MVPs further based on the feedback, Incubation requires
dedicated leadership oversight from the horizon 1 organization to insure the fledgling project does not
die of malnutrition (a lack of access to resources) or become an orphan (no parent to guide them).

• Integration and Refactoring: At this point, if the innovation is Horizon 1 or 2, it’s time to integrate it
into the existing organization. (Horizon 3 innovations are more likely set up as their own entities or at
least divisions.) Trying to integrate new, unbudgeted, and unscheduled innovation projects into an
engineering organization that has line item budgets for people and resources results in chaos and
frustration. In addition, innovation projects carry both technical and organizational debt.
https://hbr.org/2017/09/what-your-innovation-process-should-look-like

Prioritization Tecniques
• McKinsey Three Horizons model

Three Horizons Model
• Horizon one represents those core businesses
most readily identified with the company name
and those that provide the greatest profits and
cash flow. Here the focus is on improving
performance to maximize the remaining value.

• Horizon two encompasses emerging
opportunities, including rising entrepreneurial
ventures likely to generate substantial profits
in the future but that could require
considerable investment.

• Horizon three contains ideas for profitable
growth down the road—for instance, small
ventures such as research projects, pilot
programs, or minority stakes in new
businesses.
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/enduring-ideas-the-three-horizons-of-growth

http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/08/innovation-for-now-and-for-the-future/

https://www.future-of-leadership.org/el/home/news-detail/the-4-levels-of-innovation-culture.html

Creating an Innovation
Culture
• Practice “innovation parenting”

• Bust hierarchy

• Encourage the unreasonable

• Don’t die of indigestion

• Cultivate external relationships

• Hire and best - and fast
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-ﬁnance/our-insights/creating-an-innovation-culture

IDEO
https://www.ideo.com/case-study/nurturing-a-creative-culture

Google
The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea,
typically not understood by people around them and their executives.—Eric Schmidt, Chairman, Google

Some of the most frequent questions we get from CEOs and leaders of other companies are: How does
Google innovate? Can innovation be planned? Can it be taught? We think that company culture and
innovation can’t be separated. “You have to have the culture,” says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, “and
you need to get it right.”

So how do you create a culture of innovation? Google doesn’t have a secret formula, but we have distilled
our thinking into a set of basic principles—ideas we believe can be adapted and applied at pretty much
any organization, regardless of size or industry. You will ﬁnd here eight principles of innovation and how
we apply them inside Google.

1. Think 10x

2. Launch, then keep listening

3. Share everything you can

4. Hire the right people

5. Use the 70/20/10 model (dedicated / related / unrelated to core business)

6. Looks for ideas everywhere

7. Use data, not opinions

8. Focus on users, not the competition
https://gsuite.google.co.in/intl/en_in/learn-more/creating_a_culture_of_innovation.html

Agenda
Day 1 Module 1

09:00-10:30

Day 1 Module 2

11:00-12:30
Day 1 Module 3

13:30-15:00
organizations?
Day 1 Module 4

15:30-17:00
Day 2 Module 1

09:00-10:30
organizations?

Day 2 Module 2

11:00-12:30
How to implement and measure
Intrapreneurship initiatives?
roadblocks?
Day 2 Module 3

13:30-15:00

Day 2 Module 4

15:30-17:00

Innovation Frameworks
•Design Thinking

•Lean Startup

•Business Model Canvas

Design Thinking
Design thinking is a process for
creative problem solving

Design thinking utilizes elements
from the designer's toolkit like
empathy and experimentation to
arrive at innovative solutions. By
using design thinking, you make
decisions based on what future
customers really want instead of
relying only on historical data or
making risky bets based on
instinct instead of evidence.

Why Design Thinking?
“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation
that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of
people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements
for business success.” — Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

Thinking like a designer can transform the way organizations
develop products, services, processes, and strategy. This
approach, which IDEO calls design thinking, brings together
what is desirable from a human point of view with what is
technologically feasible and economically viable. It also allows
people who aren't trained as designers to use creative tools to
address a vast range of challenges.

Divergent and Convergent
Thinking

“There are no facts inside the
building. Get out of the building!”

http://diytoolkit.org/tools/business-model-canvas/

Earlyvangelists are a special
breed of customers willing to
take a risk on your startup’s
product or service. They can
actually envision its potential
to solve a critical and
immediate problem—and
they have the budget to
purchase it. Unfortunately,
most customers don’t fit this
profile.
Early Adopter
+
Internal Evangelist
Earlyvangelist

Minimize TOTAL time
through the loop

“A startup is NOT a smaller version of
a large company” – Steve Blank

So, what’s a “Startup”?
Isn’t a startup the proverbial “garage” where new and crazy
ideas are born and baked?
• A startup is a human institution designed to create a new
product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
• Size of company, the industry, sector of the economy —
none of it matters!
• The goal of a startup is to ﬁgure out the right thing to build
- the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as
possible.
• Startup success can be engineered by following the
process, which means it can be learned, which means it
can be taught.
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

OK, a “Lean Startup”?
Startups are meant to be “lean”, so what’s that?
• Lean Startup is a new way of looking at the
development of innovative new products that
emphasises fast iteration and customer insight,
a huge vision, and great ambition, all at the same
time.
• It is a set of practices for helping entrepreneurs
increase their odds of building a successful
business

Lean Startup Principles
How do we manage lean startups better?
• Entrepreneurs are everywhere
• Entrepreneurship is management
• Validated learning
• Innovation accounting
• Build-measure-learn

So, who’s an “Entrepreneur”?
Aren’t these the young and restless techies who live in garages?
• A person who sets up a business or businesses,
taking on financial risks in the hope of profit.
• Entrepreneurs who operate inside an established
organisation sometimes are called “intrapreneurs”
because of the special circumstances that attend
building a startup within a larger company.
• Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity
without regard to resources currently controlled.
http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/the-best-definition-of-entepreneurship.htmlThe Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Validated Learning
You mean learning isn’t often “validated”
• Learning is the essential unit of progress
for startups.
• The process of demonstrating empirically
that a team has discovered valuable
truths about a startup’s present and future
business prospects. It is more concrete,
more accurate, and faster than market
forecasting or classical business planning.
• I call this validated learning because it is
always demonstrated by positive
improvements in the startup’s core metrics.
• It is not after-the-fact rationalisation or a
good story designed to hide a failure.
• It is the principle antidote to the lethal
problem of “achieving failure”: successfully
executing a plan that leads nowhere.
Traditional Learning
Validated Learning
https://leanstack.com/3-rules-for-building-features-in-a-lean-startup/The Lean Startup - Eric Ries

Innovation Accounting
How do you determine “health” of a startup?
To improve entrepreneurial
outcomes, and to hold
entrepreneurs accountable,
we need to focus on the
boring stuff: how to measure
progress, how to setup
milestones, how to prioritize
work. This requires a new
kind of accounting, speciﬁc
to startups.
Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics

Build-Measure-Learn
Accelerate the feedback loop and learn faster
The fundamental
activity of a startup
is to turn ideas into
products, measure
how customers
respond, and then
learn whether to
pivot or persevere.

Minimum Viable Product
No, we are not going to ship a poor-quality product!
http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2009/08/minimum-viable-product-guide.html
The minimum viable product
(MVP) is that version of a new
product which allows a team
to collect the maximum
amount of validated
learning about customers
with the least effort.
It is that 20% of the product
that allows 80% of riskiest
assumptions to be validated.

Pivot or Persevere?
How do we continue, especially when goals aren’t met?
http://theleanstartup.com/principles
Once the MVP is established, a
startup can work on tuning the
engine. This will involve measurement
and learning and must include
actionable metrics that can
demonstrate cause and effect
question…When this process of
measuring and learning is done
correctly, it will be clear that a
company is either moving the drivers
of the business model or not. If not, it
is a sign that it is time to pivot or
make a structural course correction
to test a new fundamental hypothesis
about the product, strategy and
engine of growth.
https://www.alexandercowan.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Scientiﬁc-Method-Lean-Startup-Pivot-or-Perseve

Design
• Task: Design an Intrapreneurship program for your
(ﬁctional) organization

• Time: 45 minutes

• Each team gets 10 minutes to present + 5 min Q&A /
feedback

Fireside chat
Sundar is the founder and CEO of Sharanga Technologies - a startup working in the
area of security and management for highly scalable IoT networks. Apart from
Sharanga, Sundar is also in the board of directors of two other startups in an
advisory capacity, one of which he has successfully led through two rounds of
funding.

Previous to this, Sundar worked for over 16 years at Cisco in various capacities and
business units. Among other things, he led the R&D efforts in Identity, Security and
Terabit-Scale Routing. His engineering organization built products that bring in
revenues of over $1.8 Billion per annum for Cisco.

Sundar has led teams through the ideation, technology selection, pitching process
and conversion to products via the “internal startups” Cisco Technology Fund.
Cisco’s Autonomic Networks and Cisco IOx were both born out of this process.
They earned revenues of about $75M during the last fiscal year. The Autonomic
Networking solution also won Cisco’s very prestigious Pioneer Award in 2014.

Sundar was also involved as a mentor in the Cisco Launchpad program – a
platform for startups to benefit from Cisco’s innovation ecosystem and connect
with Cisco’s partner community.

He holds patents in the area of network security and network management. He has
published papers in industry journals, and has been an invited speaker at
technology symposiums and conventions.
Sundar
Ramakrishnan

Recap
• Recollect at least one successful and one
“unsuccessful” example of innovation from your
organization

• Table (10min)
• What are the impediments to innovation in your
organization?

References
• http://intrapreneur.com/

• http://www.pinchot.com/perspective/intrapreneuring/

• https://www.ft.com/content/556c3a46-8fdf-11e3-aee9-00144feab7de

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapreneurship

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gifford_Pinchot_III

• https://www.sup.org/books/extra/?id=26674&i=Chapter%201.html

• https://hbr.org/2014/07/act-like-an-entrepreneur-inside-your-organization

• https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/when-big-businesses-push-the-startup-button/

• http://www.intrapreneurshipinstitute.com/intrapreneurship-case-studies/steve-jobs-the-ultimate-intrapreneur-and-
entrepreneur/

• https://training.intraprise-project.eu/en/

• http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=intrapreneurship

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/memo-ceo-gifford-pinchot/

• https://hbr.org/2014/07/act-like-an-entrepreneur-inside-your-organization

• https://steveblank.com/2018/06/05/whats-next-for-getting-stuff-done-in-large-organizations-the-innovation-stack/

• https://hbr.org/2017/09/what-your-innovation-process-should-look-like

• https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/de/Documents/technology/Intrapreneurship_Whitepaper_English.pdf

• https://youtu.be/6pm1bbLMqZE

• https://youtu.be/AnCc9_uQOkg

• https://vimeopro.com/ideo/value-videos

• https://www.slideshare.net/timbrown/ideo-values-slideshare1/

•

IEEE Workshop on Intrapreneurship

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