Corporate Innovation Management: Lessons Learned

Last summer I spent half a day with approximately 40 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers at Xerox PARC, and discussed our experience with corporate innovation methodology through the1M/1M Incubator In A Box program.

A few months later, Jim Euchner, the CIO of Goodyear, interviewed me for the Research-Technology Management journal and I summarized some key excerpts from the discussion here: Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion
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Building a Fat Startup in Corporate Training: Karl Mehta, CEO of EdCast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot of room for fraud.

Karl Mehta: We solved a lot of problems in the payment and transaction space that had never been solved. We didn’t start out to solve the problem. We just wanted to provide a simple service. We built anti-fraud technologies. We built multi-account technologies. The most important things that we built was the micro-transaction capability because you could not do a transaction less than a dollar because credit card charges you at least 2.8% and 30 cents.

PayPal has the same rate. Even now, it’s difficult to do a one-dollar transaction. We figured out that by doing a prepaid aggregation we could support a transaction for as little as 10 cents. That whole technology grew and became very big. We were the underlying monetizing platform when Facebook launched Facebook Credits. >>>

Corporate Innovation Management: Organizational Challenges

Continuing with our discussion on corporate innovation methodology, in this piece, I want to highlight a couple of key organizational challenges: (1) How do ideas flow into execution, (2) Where are the push backs?

Let me call out another specific point from my previous article, Corporate Innovation Management – A Methodology Discussion, that addresses the first issue.

In my interview with Jim Euchner for the Research-Technology Management journal, I said:

JE: Are these same people, if it’s a go, charged with trying to make it work?

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Corporate Innovation Management: Unstructured Time

Google became a pioneer in the domain of corporate innovation some years ago by introducing the notion of 20% unstructured time in which employees could work on whatever they wanted.

Other large enterprises followed along, and started experimenting with their own interpretations of unstructured time.

Most came to the conclusion, including Google itself, that completely unstructured time is not productive, and does not yield innovative ideas or projects.
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Corporate Innovation Management: Changing the Culture

Most large organizations are facing the challenge of a workforce that’s gotten into a routine, a rhythm, and is not thinking outside the box. There is no excitement. There isn’t enough creative energy on a day-to-day basis, and there’s no methodology to inculcate such energy in a systematic way.

I want to call out another specific point from my previous article, Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion, that addresses this issue. >>>

Corporate Innovation Management: Methodology

Last summer, I was invited to spend half a day with approximately 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. [Business Acceleration at Scale: An Interview with Sramana Mitra]

Here, I will summarize some key excerpts from the discussion: >>>

Corporate Innovation Management: The Role of Prototyping

I want to call out another specific point from my previous article, Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion.

In my interview with Jim Euchner for the Research-Technology Management journal, I said:

My philosophy, at least in the IT space, is that we can safely assume that people will be able to build their products. Prototyping is not what we emphasize until later in the process. The first thing—the first order of business—is answering the question as to whether there is a business case for doing the project.

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Corporate Innovation Management: Tyranny of the TAM is Less Severe

I want to call out a specific point that connects the dots between two of my prior articles, From $100k-$1M: Tyranny Of The TAM and Corporate Innovation Management: A Methodology Discussion.

In my interview with Jim Euchner for the Research-Technology Management journal, I said:

If you think of entrepreneurship outside of a corporation, often business ideas with a total available market of $200 million, $300 million will get ignored. It may not be possible to bootstrap them, but venture capitalists will not fund them. These are ideal for corporate innovation.

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