Betting just on one innovation project to succeed is like putting all eggs in one basket. You wouldn't do that. But this is what companies actually do. Well, not intentionally. Companies may have an innovation portfolio with trying to get ideas through innovation process stages. But instead of viewing and incentivizing the macro-scale, executives tend to quickly dive deep and punish on a micro-scale. I give some examples in a new article titled Micro-scale vs. macro-scale Innovation Evaluations. Check it out.
And then the Obama administration announced that they are opening an innovation outpost on wearable technology in Silicon Valley. They are not the first ones as Eilif Trondsen from SBI and Silicon Vikings has meticulously analyzed in his report. Daimler, Ford, Western Union, and dozens of other companies from around the world have an outpost here. Sometimes only 2-3 people, other times several hundred. The goal is always the same: pick up new trends, scout technologies and partners, and infuse those into the company. It's a tough job for outposts. They are often considered by the folks in other locations - namely headquarters - as the ones that have all the fun, while the real work is done back at HQ. Been there, done that. But dedicated outpost staff doesn't give up and stays a thorn in the flesh ;-)
Silicon Valley is the most expensive place imaginable to produce cars. But still, then there is Tesla being manufactured exactly here. And the Consumer Report magazine just did the most unusual thing ever: testing the new Model S P85D with not just the insane, but also the ludicrous mode (acceleration from 0-60mph in 3.5 seconds) forced CR to go beyond their top rating scale that maxes out at 100. The CR magazine gave Tesla 103(!) points.
On another note: did you know that all Google's self-driving cars combined drive every week 10,000 miles? It's rather easy to have your autonomous vehicle drive on highways. But as soon as construction zones come it's getting tricky. And when you drive in city traffic with people, bikers, dogs, and the occasional senior citizen in a wheel chair chasing a duck family in the middle of the road (watch it at 11:13 in this video), it gets really tough. That's why it's so crucial to have the cars drive and drive and drive and collect experiences with all these crazy scenarios.
Design Thinking has seen all the buzz in companies and this is good. Only recently politicians started to get interested in this empathy-based methodology, as with the German minister of labor visiting Stanford d.school. And you'd wish this would've happen sooner.
Empathy is sooo needed, given the refugee crisis that is unfolding on the shores of the rich European Union. I wonder if tragedies such as 71 dead Syrian refugees found in a truck in Austria (my home country) or the hundreds of people drowning every year in the Mediterranean Sea crossing from war-stricken Libya and Syria, could be avoided or at least minimized by applying SV methodologies such as Design Thinking to the biggest problems of our times.
At least I think we should give it a try, because the old means of doing politics seem to be more and more catastrophic failures. Sorry for those thoughts, but this has been quite upsetting me over the course of the last months.
When a large German company started an Intrapreneurship program, they sent their top talents for a few months to Silicon Valley to learn newest techniques and breath the spirit. And yes, the top talents really got inspired. But the German company stopped the program after only a couple of years. Because, as it turns out, within a year of their SV visit, all the top talents had left the company. Why? Because management had forgotten to initiate a larger culture change and to set up a structure where their newly inspired top talents could thrive and apply the lessons learned. Organizational inertia proved too strong to unleash the power of the top talents and it became easier to do that outside.
Outposts or training people the Silicon Valley way is insufficient, when the Silicon Valley mindset is not applied over time to the rest of the company. And recent German books about the Silicon Valley do not help with that perception either. They frame the SV as being filled with overachievers that back home nobody has a chance to compete with. The only solution seems to be to have the EU or government do something to protect Europe: with laws, regulations, and lawsuits. Christoph Keese's book Silicon Valley reflects that fearmongering and can be easily summarized in one sentence: "Journalist fears Google." While in reality there is a lot that Europe can learn and there are small changes in the mindset and application of techniques that can replicate parts of the success with the special skills and talents of Europe. This is what my upcoming (German language) book is talking about, titled Die Silicon Valley Mentalität (The Silicon Valley Mindset). With interviews of the many driven and talented small entrepreneurs from here and abroad, with the elements that form the mindset and are applicable to Europe. And with many stories and examples that show how this works. I'll keep you updated about my book coming out later this year.
Articles I liked (or wrote) around INTRAPRENEURSHIP:
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - is not a spelling mistake. It means Search for *Extinct* Extraterrestrial Intelligence and came out of the morbid discussion among astrobiologists whether alien civilizations haven't contacted us because once alien societies reach a certain level of civilization they tend to self-destruct. Ironically, the idea of searching for ruined civilizations began at an academic workshop on “Building Habitable Worlds.”
In a recent paper researchers outline a guide of how to detect signs of extinct civilizations including nuclear glow, dust in the planets atmosphere, or artificial debris in case the alien civilization managed to pulverize their own planet. Well, let's hope that we are not becoming once such an extinct civilization ourselves. You can read the article here.
