When Apple launched the iPhone in 2007, small and medium business from over 30 industries were disrupted. Navigation system vendors, camera manufacturers, calendar planners, pocket calculators - you name it. Collateral damage hit even some large companies: Kodak (bankrupt), RIM (sold and gone), Nintendo (lingering). As if Apple came out of space for them and invaded their territory.
And to add insult to injury: Apple didn't even consider those companies as competitors. They were not and are not on Apple's radar. No industry is safe from change. The iPhone was not just an innovation in technology, Apple innovated around it in product performance (better than a cell phone), product system (apps platform), profit model, network and other dimensions. Most companies focus on one or two dimensions and not on a more holistic approach.
You can either ignore that and think you are safe, or you can actively seek ways to anticipate change, act, and stay ahead. The earlier you internalize that the question is not whether change is coming but when, the better you can prepare your enterprise for the disruption. And hopefully it's you leading it.
This is what this regular newsletter from Silicon Valley and Enterprise Garage is about. Giving you the insights of the latest trends, prepared in bite size ways, and giving you a tool set to ready breathe the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley into your organization. Read on and contact us.
There is a kind of pyramid where Intrapreneurship - the art of being an entrepreneur within an organization - sits on top. It includes the basic needs of knowledge, curiosity, drive and intelligence, which then can result in creativity, when this is practiced and time taken for it. The outcome of creativity is ideas that - when executed well with the right persistence and the occasional pivot - lead to innovation.
Intrapreneurship takes all that and packages that with everything a startup founder also needs to create a company. Resources and resourcefulness, business plan, marketing, brand, product, service, the right connections and sponsors in the company, and a good dose of luck. But luck only hits the prepared.
This is what I call the INTRAPRENEURSHIP PYRAMID. We at Enterprise Garage know an awful lot about the building blocks of the pyramid. If you are in the Silicon Valley, join our Intrapreneurship-Meetup group. If you live abroad and eager to learn more, read some of articles below or contact us.
"We don't have the right mindset or culture for innovation." - "We find it difficult to bring ideas from concept to market." - "We don't have the guts to take a risk." - "People are afraid to try anything innovative. Failure is punished severely, so just don't stick your neck out."
Are these familiar sentences that you hear in your organization? If you nod in agreement, here is a first step on the path to an innovative culture: watch your language and start noticing what choice of words kills innovation. In my blog I start out with how you can become more aware to innovation killing language and change that element to a more positive approach.
"We don't know our customers well enough, even though many here think we do."
I have seen that way too often: we know our customers and we anyways are too busy to talk to customers. No time for two weeks of customer interviews and observations, but time enough for six months of product development with the surprise realization that nobody needs that product. Six months wasted. Who could have predicted that?
Design Thinking is a methodology that starts with customer observation and interviews as exactly the first of a several phase process. Former SAP CTO Vishal Sikka and now CEO of the Indian outsourcing software giant Infosys initiated a company-wide Design Thinking training program with the aim to foster creativity and build better solutions for infosys' customers. Within 9 months of taking reign, 36,000 out of 170,000+ employees underwent the multi-day training. And this bold measure noticeable changed Infosys' culture and results (read more in the article from the Enterprise Irregulars).
This should be your call to action: how to create a more innovative organization is something you can learn (surprise!) - and we teach that in workshops.
A delegation from the EU parliament visited us this week with the goal to understand how European startups can be better supported in their efforts on going global, creating a foothold in Silicon Valley, and generally learn what good policies are for a more innovative Europe.
The ambiguity that our guests display is fascinating to watch. They are always intrigued and excited of what they see, at the same time the burden of their history, upbringing, and cultures makes them scared. Like a cute child searching for a parent hiding somewhere, knowing daddy will scare them with funny noises, but still seeking out this excitement. Also seeing that what the world considers as the hottest SV companies (Google, Paypal, Facebook) have here already that shallow aftertaste of them being "legacy companies," with the real innovation going on at the Bitcoin startups, in co-working spaces, and at meetups.
I can totally empathize with our guests. After all, that was me 14 years ago when I moved from Europe over here. And it's beautiful to see how people often beaten down in their daily routines at home open up and blossom when they are here. My hope is that those who had a chance to visit us bring a bit of that back home and make their worlds better. This is beneficiary for everyone, including the Silicon Valley.
While talking about visiting here: Check out the upcoming Food Tour that will explore the culinary hotspots of Silicon Valley. Only few tickets are left for August 19th-21st!
NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - is a new segment that I am about to introduce with innovative mashups from other disciplines. Sometimes this mashup is not safe for work, because it has stuff in it that you won't want to get caught at work with, other times it's so mind-blowing that if you expressed such a forward thinking idea in a boardroom, you'd be looking for a job in no time.
Anyways, today we have a a crazy example from the arts. Metube: August sings Carmen 'Habanera' starts out pretty normal and quickly twists into a wild ride on the party-rollercoaster. And as I learned only this week: the creative minds behind that mind-twister are based in my hometown Vienna/Austria. THAT explains a lot :-) Enough said, watch it now!
