I was recently asked to deliver a keynote talk at the Intrapreneurship Conference in Silicon Valley last November. The conference organizers kindly asked me to cover the leading trends in the field of Intrapreneurship, also known as Corporate Entrepreneurship. To do the task justice, I sent out a wide survey and also interviewed a dozen clients as well as multi-industry
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Large companies have long realized that they don’t innovate – their employees innovate. At most companies though, the usual bureaucracy gets in the way of allowing employees to emancipate their entrepreneurial drive. A few companies have swayed their Pessimistic Patty managers to simply get out of the way, and that in itself is a huge improvement. But the boldest companies
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I recently caught up with SnapBizz co-founder, Yash Prakash to hear his amazing story of transitioning an idea originating in a corporation to a thriving startup. The promising beginning When Qualcomm started its VentureFest intra-preneurship program back in 2006 (now called ImpaQt), it unlocked the floodgates of leadership, creativity and innovation from unexpected places and people. While running the program, I
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In part I of this blog, I discussed the traditional corporate venturing models. These are several variants of corporate venturing activities than can be roughly categorized as Internal Ventures, Startup Partnering and Corporate Venture Capital. In part II of this blog, I discussed the emerging corporate venturing models, namely Collaborative Venturing and Sponsored Acceleration (aka Corporate Acceleration). The emerging models
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An idea submission program can support the four basic use cases of employee driven innovation (vs. continuous improvement of existing job responsibilities) categorized by the intersection of the key defining parameters; the inspiration for the idea submission in the first place and the ongoing intentions of the submitter. In general, an idea can be submitted in an unsolicited fashion, on
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Enter The Dragon was a landmark movie in many ways – It was the first Hollywood-Asian Kung-Fu production, it was Bruce Lee’s last completed movie (he died weeks before the official release), and it featured a never before seen diverse cast of heroes including Bruce, John Saxon and Jim Kelly. After Enter The Dragon, everyone was Kung-Fu fighting. The movie
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My days as a practitioner and student of Lean Production at AutoEuropa (VW) and MIT taught me a simple, but valuable lesson – “It’s the System, Stupid” All the different components of ‘how to do more with less’ were available (production efficiency and reliability, quality, supplier integration, employee involvement, etc.) – Toyota was the first to put them all under one
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Companies realize that they don’t innovate – their employees innovate. Companies are thus earnestly preaching: ‘Innovation is everyone’s job”! While the employees themselves want to become more innovative and entrepreneurial, they face five major structural inhibitors in attempting to do so (that only the most gifted, networked and experienced corporate entrepreneurs can overcome – unfortunately, there aren’t enough of them
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What the diagnostics business can teach us about innovation investment decisions. There are easy businesses and there are hard businesses. Then there are REALLY HARD businesses. If you ask me (and I’m living it now in my current startup, Biological Dynamics), the hardest business of all is medical diagnostics, especially for initial disease screening (is the patient healthy or
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Necrophone 