Four Red Flags That You Are Managing Innovation as a Hobby Rather Than A Business Activity
I am seeing an increasing number of articles on the topic of innovation within organizations that blur the line between innovation and intrapreneurship. Mistaking innovation with intrapreneurship can be a very costly mistake for leaders looking for growth. We should not confuse innovation with intrapreneurship. You can have a very innovative company, but if the innovations sit on the product development shelf, are forgotten in the R&D basement, or fail in the market place, you are no further ahead.
Here are four signs that you might be running an innovation hobby:
Your employees claim that your company has a very innovative culture and yet are hard-pressed to name half a dozen innovations that have had a material impact on your business activities or that have led to new business lines being launched.
Your company can account for all your R&D and innovation spending but cannot provide the same level of financial details on the benefits that these innovation investments have had on your business.
You can identify lots of innovators in your business, but can’t point to any intrapreneurs.
The people working on your innovations cannot explain how these innovations support your stated corporate strategic objectives.
Intrapreneurship is the set of business activities that are used to turn innovations into profitable, finished products and ultimately result in the launch of a new line of business or of a corporate startup. Intrapreneurship ensures that an innovative idea, prototype, alpha/beta version is validated with customers, and that a business model is developed and refined to establish how the disruptive idea will grow into a business. Ultimately, it is via intrapreneurial activities that a company will validate that enough customers are willing to pay for an innovative product, that this innovation can be delivered to customers in a reliable and consistently repeatable manner, and that the company can do so while still making a profit and achieving sustainable growth.
The intrapreneur must have the business, management, and leadership skills to establish a solid growth strategy, build a strong team, selectively leverage the parent company’s assets and resources, stay close to the new market and its customers to listen and learn from them, and be ready to adapt and modify (or pivot) any aspect of the strategy to reflect what is being learned. The bottom line is that without innovation, intrapreneurship has nothing on which to build a new corporate start-up, and, without intrapreneurship, innovation activities within companies can become a very costly hobby.
I am very passionate about this subject, so much so that I will be publishing a book later this year on the challenges of intrapreneurship, titled The Twelve Labours of the Intrapreneur – Overcoming the Obstacles Within.
