Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion

Last summer, I was invited to spend half a day with ~40 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers at Xerox PARC, and discuss our experience with corporate innovation methodology through the 1M/1M Incubator In A Box program.

A few months later, Jim Euchner, the CIO of Goodyear, interviewed me for the Research-Technology Management journal. It’s a comprehensive discussion that those of you thinking about corporate innovation may find interesting. For the month of May, the interview is accessible free of charge at the journal’s website.

Please read: Business Acceleration at Scale: An Interview with Sramana Mitra

Teaching Employees To Be Entrepreneurs Will Become Standard Fare

Teaching employees to be Entrepreneurs will become standard fare in corporate America.

I wrote an earlier piece on this topic Why Corporations Should Train More Intrapreneurs, back in October.

In today’s post, I want to discuss some trends we’re seeing in our work with various corporate partners who are either already implementing or considering internal programs for teaching employees entrepreneurship.

First, consider what an entrepreneur does.
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What Corporate VCs Need To Do Differently

Corporate venture capital takes many different forms. The most common one is to help the parent company keep its fingers on strategic innovation. Typically, this includes both adjacent revenue opportunities, as well as new business areas, including some that may be disruptive to the company’s core business.

My main observation about what corporate venture capital needs to do differently from generic VC is around how the subject of TAM (Total Available Market) is considered.

In ordinary venture capital, more often than not, the goal is to identify billion dollar, hyper fast-growth business opportunities.

These, though, are extremely difficult to find.

There are, however, many more $100 million, $200 million business opportunities out there.
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Why Corporations Should Train More Intrapreneurs

Consider this scenario:

A large technology corporation has a few hundred products that are sold to thousands of enterprises and small-medium businesses.

Because of the fast pace of change in technology, every single product in the portfolio experiences market pressures of various kinds. Competition from startups. Integration requirements with external products. Architecture changes in the technology stack. New capabilities due to new discoveries.

How does such a corporation stay on top of the constant need to innovate, and not get disrupted by an upstart?

My answer: Train the Intrapreneurs.
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The 10 New Trends in Corporate Innovation Management

Last year, we launched a program called the 1M/1M Incubator-in-a-Box. Part of its goal has been to stimulate corporate innovation and intrapreneurship. It has exposed us to a broad range of technology companies and their innovation goals, strategies, and processes. While most of what we have learned is confidential, I will synthesize some trends we’re seeing in this domain.

1. Culture Change: Most major technology companies recognize the fact that they have a certain amount of disadvantage when it comes to innovation. Cultures, as companies become larger, become stodgy and uninspiring. The more innovative talent ends up leaving for smaller companies, or to become entrepreneurs. One of the primary goals of a formal corporate innovation program is to generate excitement and create energy around the concept of innovation such that innovative talent stays.

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Trend Spotting: Entrepreneurship Inside Corporations

There is a real trend developing right now of corporations becoming crucibles of innovation and entrepreneurship in a systematic way. In this post, I will discuss four specific sub-categories of this trend that we’re seeing, and for all practical purposes, participating in.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to switch gears a bit and ask you to put on your Chief Innovation Officer hat on. Let me give you a bit of context about why I want to go in this direction. In our incubator program, one of the areas we’re doing a lot of work on right now is corporate incubation, in partnership with some of the largest companies in the technology domain. We are seeing interest as well as projects. Actually, some of these projects are already in full swing where we are doing incubation of entrepreneurs. In the same way, we invite entrepreneurs to come in to the One Million by One Million program to learn how to build a business, some of our corporate partners are sponsoring intrapreneurs to come in to One Million by One Million and get their projects incubated.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Naveen Sharma, Chief Innovation Officer, Retail, Xerox (Part 1)

We have two interesting discussions in this interview with Naveen: one about Big Data and a second one about Corporate Incubation. As you know, in 1M/1M, we’re working on Corporate Incubation quite extensively. Naveen throws light on Xerox’s strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Naveen, let’s start with a bit of your background and also by setting the context of the old Xerox versus the new Xerox.

Naveen Sharma: First of all, thank you for this opportunity. My name is Naveen Sharma. I have a dual role in Xerox. I manage a resource lab in one of Xerox’s innovation center, which is in Webster, New York. Concurrently, I also have a role as the Chief Innovation Officer, Xerox Retail. As part of my Chief Innovation Officer role, I’m tasked to develop and deliver new innovations that can eventually become new Xerox services. Most people would associate Xerox with printing services, but over fifty percent of our revenue now comes from services. It’s an area that is growing as we take a vertical approach.We are looking to bring some innovations in retail IT, as well as IT applied to some of the specific domains, such as industrial, hospitality, or media.

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