Culture, Mindset & Compromise — Keys to Corporate Innovation
by Rekha Mehr, Director of Partnerships, MassChallenge UK
“The reason that startups can innovate, is because they’re always in a state of failure, so anything that moves them away from that actually is innovation!”
This was just one of the great statements from around the breakfast table on Friday morning at our third Innovation Breakfast at Tobacco Dock.
This series surfaces the latest thinking in innovation, by bringing together key industry players from across the global ecosystem to share their objectives, challenges and successes.
As you will know by now, MassChallenge is all about helping entrepreneurs win and working with our corporate partners to get under the skin of innovation is a real focus in helping us do this.
Representatives from Silicon Valley Bank, Visa Europe Collab, Which?, Argos and MIT, among others, gathered over coffee & croissants to discuss unlocking innovation in and across their organisations. I’d like to share a few things that struck a chord with me.
- It’s a challenge: everyone has their own challenges about working with (instead of against) their own innovation infrastructure, and how to ensure the company indeed becomes or stays innovative. It was also noted that embedding ‘free-formed’ creative innovation within an organisation can be chaos — with millions of pounds of deals at stake, many corporations are not yet ready to take such risks.
- Compromise is key: companies that work best with startups are the ones that let entrepreneurial-minded partners ‘fly internally’. Easy to say, but big business often demands big structure and control. The compromise, suggested by the group assembled, was that ultimately giving the power and scale of the organisation to the entrepreneur(s) but also allowing them autonomy to fly free, was key. That there MUST be a compromise.
- To contend with innovation is to introduce novelty: and that poses a big problem with large organisations. The metrics available to judge this are all based on existing structures, and breaking that to introduce novelty is the real change. Participants discussed an interesting framework, the ‘Novelty Confirmation Transformation Cycle’: a structure dealing with the propositions of ecosystem novelty and transformation.
- Culture and mindset are key: companies must be prepared to invest and recognise that the ROI in working with startups and driving innovation won’t come until significantly later on — that time needs to be allowed for this success to come later. It was agreed that perhaps ‘patient capital’ can solve this — since it requires a different mindset. The tipping point being that entrepreneurial mindsets can only become embedded within organisations after generational change — with innovative entrepreneurs having risen to the top themselves. CEOs want innovation, but would rather risk-averse growth to true ‘spiky’ (and risky) innovation growth. Short term targets simply don’t mesh with innovation, compared to ‘risky goals’ — a corporation’s appetite for risk is key to this.
- Leave your role at the door: gaining true innovation for a company doesn’t typically happen unless people leave their roles at the door, as there are too many different views, titles, structures and roadblocks even within a single organisation. So people need to take 2 steps back and take their ‘function’ or ‘role’ hat off and have a discussion without any “no’s”. All agreed that this can be tricky, because startups expect speed, flexibility and freedom.
The beauty of MassChallenge as that we can take some of the pain out of these challenges by acting as a bridge between startups and large organisations.
This means that startups can retain their agility while the large organisations can use the bridge as a crossing between the innovation ecosystem and HQ.
To enquire about attending a future Innovation Breakfast (the next scheduled for 3rd December) or to partner with MassChallenge, please do contact me directly at: