Sue Lebeck noted the following observations on successful intrapreneurship, during Chuck House’s feature presentation for the SVII Innovation Society. Very informative….

An entrepreneur“… is one who has a dream and builds an organization to achieve it.”
An intrapreneur is one who has a dream and tries to achieve it within an already existing corporation.

Entrepreneurs must ensure the technology works, and sell it at a profit.
Intrapreneurs must also get their company to let them do the innovative project to completion
- Change-creators implicitly seek to alter the current smooth operations –
there is naturally going to be resistance from internal players

Intrapreneurial endeavors are best undertaken within a “project organization” –
this can operate outside the normal operational rules.
- organized for a specific task
- people are summoned from other work, for a “brief” period
- not a task force, or a committee, but a Project
The Project Team is often not loved by the Operational Team

Innovation projects often require going against the current “best practices” within an organization
- Must prepare the company for the value the project will create
- Must organize the change/transition process
- Must organize the company for success from the project

Categories of innovation
- Leap
- Refine (refine, refine, refine)
- Combine
- Leap again

Some general principles about successful innovation players
- only a few players in an industry will win
- the earliest conceivers are typically not the ultimate marketplace winners
- those who speak, get remembered (e.g. Mead invented “Moore’s Law”; but Moore spoke about it.)

Direct rewards are not always forthcoming in the Intrapreneurial world- if you don’t get traction, you may get fired
- if you get traction, others may try to modify your idea
- if your idea works, others make take the credit
- ultimately, the greatest reward is your Sense of Accomplishment

Few winners, many hidden personal costs- financial or lifestyle sacrifices
- potential harm to family, personal life, career
- uncertainty, stress
- long hours
- often, you have to give up the business in order to see it succeed – have to let someone else take it and manage it to success

Process of Vision and Strategy Forming
- study the world – what might be needed?
- phase 1: try something and test it
- phase 2: set strategy and tune tactics (often people get stuck here, and repeat)
- phase 3: review strategy, and allow new vision to form

Changes occur in the lifecycle of an innovation – these affect the clarity of the original vision- leadership changes
- goal changes
- structural changes

Principles for anticipating (and creating) structural change- seek 10 (nth) changes in technical power
- seek 10 (nth) changes in installed base
- seek “what if…?” scenarios
- understand the dangers of “and if…” scenarios

Trust and Belief
- Laser printer sold 0 units/month for months. Peaked at 6 units/month
- after 9 years, it was rebuilt by the original (trusted) guy; terms: a 2-page contract and a handshake
- price went from $3495 in 1984, to $129 in 2008
- huge success

Timing is everything
- Laser-printer originally introduced on December 7th (Pearl Harbor)
- It was a Japanese-driven product
- it did not, at that time, succeed!

The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation
By Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price (Draft, Stanford University Press)
Principles
- Renewal
- Close to customer
- Transformation
- Staying the course
- Strategic turmoil

Intrepreneuring in Action
Principles
- make a contribution
- FAST experimentation
- easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission
- work “underground” – publicity triggers the corporate immune system
- find people to help – collaborate, cooperate, co-opt
- “know the terriroty” – deeply, zealously, passionately
- come to work each day willing to be fired

Four stages of companies
- pre-stage, seed, serendipitous (couple of people)
- startups, someone else puts in $ (about 10 people)
- one-trick pony (500+ people)
- create something that flows

Innovation often gets driven out of bigger companies
- tragic – because bigger companies have the money to invest

HP has kept going- beyond their peers
- model for success:
– built a creative organization from the bottom up
– let the market judge innovative products (even if current leadership didn’t like the product)
– changed product leadership – 6 times (though noisily, with much resistance from the top)
– gave freedom
– ran a franchising incubator
- people who left HP often started other successful companies

The HP Way
- based on worth of individual at every level
- profit shared across the company
- players endured many shifts and changes over the years
- not perfect, but players felt validated, felt like they could make a difference

About Chuck:

Risk-taking and visionary qualities often show up at a young age- it is sometimes in your blood – Chuck’s mother drove 170 miles on the autobahn in the middle of an attack situation
- Chuck and his friend Spike missed a lot of school in the 3rd and 4th grades
- Sources of stimulation that saved him
– Encyclopedia Brittanica
– TV: Lowell Thomas’ travelogue, “The War in the Pacific” (but the visual in the film did not fit with what he’d read and imagined).
– when 13, thought it an outrage that Santa Barbara and San Diego beaches were at risk, and wrote about it;
teacher doubted it was his own writing
– when 17, philosophized about the potential of transmutation of soul

Example innovation led by Chuck
April 1, 1982 – Chuck earned the “Medal of Defiance”
… “awarded in recognition of extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty”
“In total defiance of adverse market studies and surveys concluding the existence of a worldwide market of no more than 50 total large screen electrostatic displays, Charles H. House, using all means available – principally pen, tongue, and airplane to extol an unrecognized technical contribution, planted the seeds for a new market resulting in the shipment of 17,769 large screen displays to date.”
- used by: first artificial heart transplant; first moon walk; first movie special effects; Engelbart; Kay

There are a number of elements to consider when you are planning to launch a learning community. First things first: to ensure participation organize your learning community around some startegic initiative in your organization; and define clear roles and responsibilities for the community facilitator, users, and sponsor.

While designing an online collaborative experience, besides identifying the learning objectives of the course, selecting the contents, preparing the learning materials, setting up the communication system, it is important that the instructional designer devotes special attention to the creation of the learning community and to its social structure: this includes identifying the most effective strategies and techniques to be enacted in order to promote the collaboration among the actors, designing how to organize groups and sub-groups in the various phases of the activities, and defining the most appropriate modalities of interaction, etc.

I like the approach of the Learning Labs and Innovation. I suggest that you start with launching a prototype. Use an iterative design and development approach as a vehicle for communication and requirements definition/refinement. In this approach the participants provide input and ideas to the evolution of the design. This approach helps users to conceive of how a solution could work, particularly from a user interface point of view. Ultimately, as iterations conclude, incorporate the user feedback into the overall design. At this point a pilot may or may not be executed as a means of fine tuning the whole solution before launch. This method would be a perfect opportunity to test the more intangible aspects of the design such as usability, change readiness, barriers to adoption, implementation timing, methods, required support, and integration with other aspects of change.

When put into a learning context, communities provide an environment for connecting people to other people’s stories and experiences, as well as mentoring, all of which result in better and faster learning and the sharing of tacit knowledge within an organization.

When creating collaborative learning communities, it is important to consider more than just the technology. The first step is to clarify the business objectives and how your strategy translates into group and individual competency requirements. From there, learning objectives may be defined that support competency gaps.

In summary learning communities can offer their members:

Learning and capacity development (empowering employees to take charge of their own learning and development)
Create opportunities for informal learning
Staff Interacting with experts
Exchange of knowledge and resources
Enabling the emergence of best practices

It is clear to me that more and more organizations will start building communities into their business startegies. Although choosing a good platform is important, what really is going to matter is strategy, service, support, and know-how.

According to a recent study by Accenture, organizations that focus strongly on interpersonal skills learning are on average 27 percent more productive and have 40 percent higher revenue growth than their competitors.

In-depth knowledge and the required skill sets are necessary conditions for success and promotion; however, most successful people have certain personalty traits and practice a certain life style behavior that facilitates continuous growth and learning. The following are suggestions from the Harvard Business Review article titled “How The Best of Best Get Better and Better”, and Dr. Kenneth Nowack a licensed clinical psychologist:

• being conscientious and achievement oriented
• having a long term perspective
• identifying and deploying hardwired talents and strengths
• blocking out distractions
• practicing forgiveness and redirecting anger to more constructive feelings
• utilizing the support of others
• seeking candid feedback
• stretching development
• reflecting on ways to improve and celebrating success
• actively acknowledging stress and practicing stress reduction techniques
• maintaining regular sleep cycles
• taking time for physical activities

One of the first things required to be successful is self-awareness and the key to making self-awareness work is versatility. Research by Tracom found that managers who exhibited higher versatility were 27 percent better at leading teams and twenty five percent better at coaching others. With an increasingly global marketplace, the growing emphasis on social networking and connectivity, and the younger generation expectations from the workplace, more organizations are realizing the importance of team units. Therefore, interpersonal skills and working well with others is becoming more important in the emerging collaborative working environment. According to another Tracom study organizational, time management, and behavioral skills not only have a direct effect on the individual’s productivity, but also they are tied to improving bottom line successes.

Keeping this in mind learning organizations can leverage the work styles, choices, and techniques of their successful employees to improve the overall productivity of their work force.

Training Tips and Techniques

There are many techniques learning organizations can use to train employees on the self-awareness, versatility, and interpersonal skills necessary for workplace success.

• techniques for putting the individuals in the right mindset for self-awareness
• training and assessment of individuals work styles and personality traits; provide real life examples and how the materials and cases are related to their everyday work routine
• building in metrics to monitor the behavioral change
• celebrating and rewarding success at the specific achievement point
• deploy relapse prevention strategies when necessary

Source: CLO Magazine