Originally published on Medium.com.
In my former role as Director of Partnerships for MassChallenge UK, I ran a series of innovation events, enabling global leaders to share their objectives, challenges and successes with other members of the innovation ecosystem.
Guests would include representatives from companies like IBM, PWC, Google, Visa, Silicon Valley Bank, Argos and MIT among others. Provocative conversation about the common challenges of trying to incite change within large organisations would leave guests bounding out the doors, motivated once again to keep pushing against the grain.
Here's a little insight in to some of those conversations;
- It’s a challenge: everyone has their own challenges about working with (instead of against) their own innovation infrastructure, and how to ensure the company indeed becomes or stays innovative. Embedding ‘free-formed’ creative innovation within an organisation can be chaos — with millions of pounds of deals at stake, many corporations are not yet ready to take such risks.
- Compromise is key: companies that work best with startups are the ones that let entrepreneurial-minded partners ‘fly internally’. Easy to say, but big business often demands big structure and control. The compromise, as defined by the group, was ultimately giving the power and scale of the organisation to the entrepreneur(s) whilst allowing them the autonomy to fly freely.
- To contend with innovation is to introduce novelty: this poses a big problem with large organisations. The metrics available to judge this are all based on existing structures, and breaking that to introduce novelty is the real problem. The Novelty Confirmation Transformation Cycle is a structure potential aid with the propositions of ecosystem novelty and transformation.
- Culture and mindset are key: companies must be prepared to invest and recognise that the ROI in working with startups and driving innovation won’t come until significantly later on — that time needs to be allowed for this success to come later. Perhaps ‘patient capital’ can solve this, since it requires a different mindset. The tipping point being that entrepreneurial mindsets can only become embedded within organisations after generational change — with innovative entrepreneurs having risen to the top themselves. CEOs want innovation, but would rather risk-averse growth to true ‘spiky’ (and risky) innovation growth. Short term targets simply don’t mesh with innovation, compared to ‘risky goals’ — a corporation’s appetite for risk is key to this.
- Leave your role at the door: gaining true innovation for a company doesn’t typically happen unless people leave their roles at the door, as there are too many different views, titles, structures and roadblocks even within a single organisation. So people need to take 2 steps back and take their ‘function’ or ‘role’ hat off and have a discussion without any “no’s”. All agreed that this can be tricky, because startups expect speed, flexibility and freedom.
“The reason that startups can innovate, is because they’re always in a state of failure, so anything that moves them away from that actually is innovation!"