Intrapreneurs

A short while ago, in a conference room far, far away… It is a period of market disruption.

Startups, with strange names and funded by venture money, have won their first victory against one of your fellow incumbent market leaders.

During the battle, startups managed to steal customers by breaking various unspoken rules of your industry, and are now preparing to “scale up” their offensive.

Pursued by your CEO and under attacks from these same startups, you race back to your desk in the bowels of the corporate headquarters building, custodian of the magic mandate and special project that can save your company and restore market share to the galaxy enterprise…

You have been tasked with transforming the company, to innovate, to disrupt, and at least 3 other important yet vague sounding buzzwords; to be “like a startup”.

  Congratulations, you’re an Intrapreneur!
  welcome to the party.

In conference rooms, board rooms, or in the hallways of any trade show or conference, it’s the word on everyone’s lips: Innovation!

Innovation is everywhere in writing too, from white papers, magazines, academic research, and that fancy deck your consultants put together, to seemingly everyone’s LinkedIn profile, you can hardly read more than a few paragraphs anywhere without seeing the word or a symbol of it (a dumb incandescent light bulb most of the time)

The problem is: innovation books are by and large terrible; innovation consultants are by and large terrible; innovation podcasts and videos are by and large terrible; and most innovation content is essentially a sales pitch for a software tool, powerpoint template, copyrighted process, or another consulting engagement.

Innovation is like cooking, anyone can follow a recipe and make one dish, but to become a real chef you need to understand the chemistry between ingredients, and the best tool for each job. So throw away these books that try to convince you to run every innovation process with one magic tool, or that make the same recommendation to every reader regardless of industry, size, culture, etc. and learn by doing, or in this case by playing.