I closed the previous post from my keynote
at the Idean 2013 UX Summit with the observation that when employers say they
want more innovation, what that really means is they want more
intrapreneurship.
But paradoxically – and problematically
– I’ve also found that while company leaders are being upset by a lack of
innovation, at the same time their employees often feel frustrated because they
believe that they aren’t allowed to be entrepreneurial.
From my perspective, this is due partly to
management fears, both justified and imagined, and partly to important
differences between entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.
To begin with, it isn’t easy to be entrepreneurial inside a company – that is, to be
intrapreneurial. The very structure of
all but the smallest companies presents major obstacles.
As an example – If the
marketing person in a startup gets an idea for a new kind of product, she’s in
direct contact with the person who okays building a prototype and probably in
the same room with the designer and coder who are going to work on it and maybe
even the finance person who helps cost it out.
That’s assuming they’re even separate people.
In a bigger, more
established company, it’s completely different – a marketing person with an
idea may have no one but the head of marketing to talk to about it, and she might
even be afraid to broach the subject at all because new products aren’t part of
her job description. And in a very big
company she probably wouldn’t get higher than someone a level or two above her within
the marketing department, who would likely have concerns of his own about
moving a non-marketing ball forward. No
wonder she’s frustrated.
And even in the unlikely
event there’s a person to talk to, there’s the question of support for the hard
work that developing the idea will inevitably involve. Thomas Edison wasn’t exaggerating by much
when he so famously said, “Invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
Everybody who’s
responsible for innovation inside a company will tell you that any attempt to
encourage a consistent level of innovation will fail if it doesn’t truly have
senior management support. For more than
five years I’ve been talking to people in many industries who are in charge of
facilitating innovation – whether they call it that or R&D or something
else. And the truth is that very few of them get the
kind of support you’d expect.
Because often enough, senior
management, whether they’re aware of it or not, doesn’t really want meaningful
intrapreneurism. They perceive it as
disruptive. They’re threatened by the very
freedom it implies. They’re afraid of conflict
and other dislocations of the organization and its core business.
You can just hear it – “Migod
I’m going to have 10,000 entrepreneurs.
How is any work going to get done?”
So they’re saying – I want
innovation, and at the same time they’re saying, in effect, “Put your head down
and focus on your job.”
Solving this is all the
harder because some of senior management’s fears aren’t entirely wrong. Any serious innovation IS inherently
threatening or disruptive to some constituency in the company. Imagine someone coming along with an idea that
could obsolete or replace what you do, and you’re not part of it… How would you
react to that?
So it’s not completely
wrong to see innovation as threatening or
disruptive. At the same time, a lot of the fear is just a
reaction to the anticipated effects of change.
Because, of course, innovation means change.
The thing is, change is
going to happen one way or the other – the question is, are you driving it, or
is it driving you?
This is the second of four posts on innovation, entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship from Idean's 2013 UX Summit.