GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Jürgen Bilo  is Managing Director / Vice President cof Co-pace, the organization of Continental to incubate startups, and intrapreneurs. He kindly accepted to describe the activities of Co-pace, and the way it collaborates with startups.

Can you describe the missions of your entity, the Co-pace?

Co-pace is the start-up hub of Continental. Through our insights of the start-up ecosystem, we enable transformation, and foster new technology as well as business models in order to generate future solutions. For us technology matters, and so do teams – we create meaningful connections elevating start-ups and Continental to the next level. Furthermore, we develop forward looking initiatives to enhance intrapreneurship across the company.

What are the programs that you’re offering to entrepreneurs (Incubator, Startup Co-Operation, Corporate Venture Capital)?

What are the length and content of the Incubator and Startup Co-operation programs? How many entrepreneurs do you incubate per year? What is the mix between Continental employees, and external startups?

Co-pace offers multiple programs to entrepreneurs. The company is made up of three building blocks: incubation, co-operation, and investments.

The incubator program currently only works with internal employees, however the two other building blocks, co-operation and investments, also work with external start-ups.

• Three teams completed the incubator last year, with one team being spun-off to be its own entity and start-up.
• Currently, we have six incubator teams working in China and Mexico, and in November we started our next incubation batch, with three teams coming to Berlin to work on their MVPs. They will be part of the incubation program for 4 months, fully dedicated on a sort of hiatus from their “normal” job.
• Last year the teams were given the freedom to come up with and pitch any concept, while this year the teams were given more focused topics like Megacities. The teams are encouraged to come up with out-of-core concepts that enhance innovation surrounding mobility and promote sustainability.

• The co-operation program facilitates successful co-operation between external start-ups and Continental Business Units. It not only pre-selects, analyzes and connects the start-ups to respective contacts within the company, it verifies whether the product of the start-up works in Continental applications.
• By offering the co-operation framework we give the start-up the possibility to apply, and test their solution in an automotive environment.
• Due to our structure, corporate venture capital (CVC) is closely involved throughout the entire process and ready for the next steps in case of a successful proof of concept (PoC). Adding to that CVC also looks at start-ups without a prior connection to Continental that are not in a co-operation to analyze their investment potential.

Are the programs available in various locations over the world?

Incubation is currently taking place in Mexico City, Mexico, in Chongqing, China, and in Berlin, Germany. Last year the program was available in Munich, Germany, in which teams from ten different countries could participate.

At this point in time, we are preparing the incubator for 2019. Continental and co-pace want to make sure that all employees can participate in the incubator program, which is why co-pace is always looking to offer the program in various locations.

The co-operation program as well as CVC do not have any geographical restraints and are active in all major start-up ecosystems such as Silicon Valley, Israel, Europe and Asia.

How do you handle the scale-up phase for intrapreneurs? Are you oriented toward transitioning the intrapreneur project into an external startup, or to an internal business unit?

So far, co-pace has spun-off one concept into an external start-up. But co-pace is more inclined to transition the teams to an internal business unit which is mutually beneficial, as the employees can use Continentals extensive resources to help their concept grow rapidly and enter the market sooner. Regarding the other incubator teams, most of them have returned to their business units to work on the concept internally.

What are the outcome of your entity that you are particularly proud of? Can you name a few startups and intrapreneurs projects examples?

Generally, for being so young (born in 2017), we are very proud of all that co-pace achieved in such a short amount of time. We are proud of all the teams that have participated in the incubator, as it is not only about creating a new product that will succeed on the market, but it is also about learning, acquiring new skills, and having the opportunity to work as a start-up.

The start-up that was spun-off last year is PassiveBolt, which is revolutionizing the supply chain for smart door locks by bringing to market the turnkey smart lock mechatronic module. The team was able to create a viable product, and is now intensively working on it.

Looking at our co-operation program, we are proud to be already working on, and partially having finalized more than 10 PoCs worldwide.

What are the main obstacles you had to overpass in the set-up of Co-pace?

For the incubator program, one of the largest obstacles we had to overcome was the fact that we were removing people from their day-to-day activities for three to four months. This posed a problem because it was difficult to convince these employee’s supervisors of the benefits of letting their employees take part in the incubator.

However, this hurdle was solved in two ways. First, we got the backing of senior management, including the board to explain the benefits to the supervisors. It was important that they not only understood the benefits for the employees, in terms of learning, but also for the company. One of the goals of the incubator is to promote cultural change, and move Continental towards an innovative future. Additionally, we explained to the supervisors that the incubator time was only a delegation, which means that the employees would return to their business unit after the incubator. This way we were able to successfully overcome the obstacle, and get the supervisors on board.

What your next challenges?

The next challenges are to successfully complete the incubators in Mexico and China, and to launch the Berlin incubator. Additionally, we will be looking to set up the incubator in 2019, and make the necessary preparations such as selecting the teams, and hosting Pitch Days, and finding the right partners.

For our other building blocks, the co-operation program and CVC, we do not necessarily detect challenges but rather define goals and milestones which are quite naturally: connecting with even more start-ups to co-create even more successful PoCs.

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Evan Burton is a UX Designer, Usability Engineer, Data Science Enthusiast, finishing a master’s degree in Usability Engineering.

He’s currently writing his masters thesis on corporate intrapreneurship and innovation, with a focus on corporate acceleration and incubation, and how to best support intrapreneurs in the process of defining and developing their ideas into products or services for their company.

Evan claims that ‘one of his core research findings was that the role of coaching in these programs is very impactful. Research shows that coaches serve not only as an experienced guide, helping intrapreneurs to embrace a new way of working, but also as a crucial link to a network of experienced professionals both inside and outside the corporation. ‘

Evan will be publishing his thesis as an advanced journal paper in Creativity and Innovation Management within the next few months. In the mean time, I share here the conversation we had about the importance of coaching along the Orange Intrapreneurs Studio program.

Evan: How does the Intrapreneurs Studio work?

Nicolas: The Intrapreneurs Studio is an incubation entity for Orange intrapreneurs, where we handle basically a three-stage process:

1. First is the Online Application: Orange employees (all 150,000 employees are welcomed) apply with their innovative ideas for Orange business. We receive around 100-150 applications online, and we pre-coach during the application process around 30 projects.
2. With the second stage called Qualification,  we select 10 to 15 projects and we accelerate them for ten days:  immerging them in innovation methodology directly applied to the project so that it enrich tremensdously their project; there is a leadership part as well to make them think of what is the involvement required by intrapreneurship specifically at Orange, and there is a pitch part: at the end of the ten days, they pitch in front of a jury and a 250 people audience; the jury , among the 10 or 15 projects, selects 3 to 4 projects, and those go to the third stage;
3. The third stage Incubation, which can last from 12 to 24 months, and whose focus is to bring the idea to the market.

Evan: What are your coaching responsibilities?

Nicolas: My responsibilities are split between incubation coaching, supporting the one who are selected for incubation, and application coaching, the ones applying for the next season. We pre-coach them to be qualified for the the second stage, the ten days qualification stage.

During the application stage, the intrapreneur fulfills 10 questions from an online file, and based on this file, we select some of them for what we call pre-coaching, where we help them to enrich their application. Basically we work with them on two aspects:

• One is to help them to move from the solution to the user problem: identify who is their target, and how painful is the problem for the target;
• And second element, we connect them with other entities within Orange. Orange is a huge company (150,000 employees over 30 countries), and very often there are people working on a similar aspect of the intrapreneur project or people who could be interested in commercializing, distributing the intrapreneurs idea. So we connect people and sometimes it’s a match, sometimes it doesn’t match, but it’s another way to make the application progress;

• We start very often with online coaching where we connect by phone, and we exchange on the project: we share with them some contacts, and they make the appointments, meet the people, and enrich the project. For us it’s a very important way to test if the intrapreneur is able to be self-starter, to take initiative, and to iterate on his project . Iteration is really a key skill for the intrapreneur;
• Besides, each intrapreneur has to find out a business unit sponsor for his project: this networking is a fine way to meet this sponsoring demand;
• When the project goes to Qualification, and then to Incubation, he usually keeps the same coach.

Then there is a ten days qualification stage where we provide face to face coaching to 10 to 15 projects, it’s quite a preview of what will be the incubation coaching.

• For these projects, we present them some innovation tools like the value proposition canvas, the business model canvas, and the minimum viable product concept, and during this 10 days we apply these concepts to the project;

• It’s very much concrete training: we explain them in one hour the new concept, for example the BMC, and during the rest of the day, they go on, and they fulfill their business model canvas. Or they write down what kind of MVP they want to do, and they do that with the help of coach who challenge their ideas;
• There are about 4 to 5 coachs for the 15 projects, but the intrapreneurs progress also with the help of their colleagues. It’s very much teamwork. So one intrapreneur is helping another intrapreneur and create this way a kind of classmate and graduating class, which they give a name to. The first intake was named David Bowie, the second one Gabrielle Chanel!

Evan: Can I ask you how involved the coaches are in this phase? Are they actually working directly on the products or are they just kind of overseeing what kind of role?

• Nicolas: They do both, they facilitate efficient workshop, keeping explaining the innovation methodology, explaining the theory. But once the intrapreneur starts fulfilling, they go from one group to another, and they challenge the in-depth, the value proposition, the customer target, the synergies with Orange, the resources required, or the appropriateness of the MVP that the intrapreneur has in mind.

• And we have also a good exchange during one day among these 10 days on leadership. We take the intrapreneur and let them think over what it is to be an intrapreneur at Orange? What responsibility does it involve to conduct an internal startup, a small innovation team, budget monitoring, team spirit development, building a common vision. What are the rules that can be hacked at Orange, and what are the rules that you should not: because most of the intrapreneur candidates have no experience in managing an annovation project, this is very important;

• And last, we coach them on the pitch that they will deliver at the end.

Then we have the coaching for the those who are selected for incubation:

• So it’s only 3 or 4 projects, the intrapreneur is fully allocated to his project, and each project has a dedicated coach: so you can go for more in depth coaching, and for a longer period of time (12 to 18 months);

• Compared to the first stage coaching, while it’s online interaction during application stage, it changes during the incubation: the selected people come to our premises at Orange Gardens or are based in premises dedicated to innovation. And so we can work with them in real life, and we can work on personalized coaching on innovation methodologies that go from customer insights, product development, to team construction, and business development within Orange;

• Thus, a second aspect is the networking again. We help them to connect with other Orange people to develop their network to attract external sources to the project, and especially in this stage we help them to staff project;
• Third element, we help them to keep a good dynamic. So we listen to their problem, we try to suggest solution, to put things in perspective, to inspire them: the objective is to let them develop their project in an environment of trust. This is the human relationship part and last element;
• Finally, we really try also to coach on test and learn approach, very much about the iteration of their concept, and getting things done, and being rather a doer and not only a thinker.

Evan: Okay great. Can you tell me a little bit about the qualities that you look for in coaches, what you think makes a good coach and what, their qualities are well?

Nicolas: The 4 dimensions that we have in mind for an intrapreneurs’ coach profile correspond to the 4 activities previsously descrive: innovation skills, networking within Orange, human relationship abilities, and the being ready to work.

Intrapreneurs’ coachs have to leverage innovation skills: background in the innovation division can be appropriate. They have to develop the network of the intrapreneur: a good knowledge of Orange local entity or miscellenous entities is something that is valuable, so we look for some people who have experience in the company. Visibility within the company, and also some experience in leading an innovation project, is a nice match.

Evan: how important do you think the coachs are for the intrapreneurs?

We had a first experience for the incubation during season 1. We had some kind of light coaching, and after six months, we realized that intrapreneurs were really lacking coaching. Insufficient coaching leads to fuzzy result.

They were lacking the coaching in terms of methodology, they had some trouble identifying what was the MVP, and how to have user testing MVP. You know, it’s not enough to build the minimum viable product, you have to get the users to validate it! It’s more a marketing approach to on-board people on your MVP: targeting the user and recruiting, onboarding the users to interact with the MVP turn to be tricky. Another difficulty  was to really sort out a minimum product, as intrapreneurs have a tendency to add always more features. It’s a kind of reinssurance.

So for season 2, we have decided to implement more tight, and intense coaching. We see the intrapreneur face to face much more often on their project, on a weekly basis.

We also have once a month an kind of replication of the work that we do during the qualification stage. I mentioned that we work in groups, in teams, intrapreneurs working on their project and also on the project of all the other intrapreneurs, was a very fruitful configuration. We extended this with cross-projects meeting: in incubation for season 2, we have set up this kind of meeting to prolongate the spirit of the qualification, and to let intrapreneurs enrich the work of one another. We have regular cross project meeting on a monthly basis. It’s a one-day or half-day meeting on the canvas, on how to onboard on the MVP, and the how to structure a business plan, that kind of things, and we call to this meeting all the older projects that are being currently incubated, to share experience.  It’s been key for us to maintain the spirit of the graduating class.

Innovation is a discipline, and it requires the help of coach for intrapreneur to become innovators.

Evan: Maybe just a few more words about linking to the company. Could you dig into that a little deeper like how you actually connect people to the to the company to other employees.

Nicolas: It’s connecting the project to Orange business entities, and investigate synergies: what kind of opportunities is creating the intrapreneur’s project for his business partner?

Basically the intrapreneur comes up with an idea and you will have to work on 2 main aspects:

• One aspect is turning the idea into a product service (and an elegant user experience) and for this they will require resources from mainly Orange Innovation division (a large entity of about 3,500 people), and guiding principles from their coach. We help the intrapreneur staff project with Ux designer, CTO, developer, product marketing, business developer, that’s one kind of connection about staffing or getting full-time associates and part-time contributors on your project; the role of the intrapreneur (with the help of his staffing coach) is to go to  those resources, and attract some of them to work on a slightly different innovation project, which is his intrapreneur project;

• The other aspect is helping the intrapreneur to get support to commercialize his project to the end users or  B2B market. From the beginning the intrapreneur has to have a business unit to sponsor his project. Often the business unit entity involve several people several people to meet, and build a collaborative relationship with them. Various entities can help in the commercialization of the project so you have to explore;
• That is the networking part, on one side aggregating associates, on the other side identifying channel of commercialization, dedicated salesforce, point of sales, marketing support, and so on.

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Darren Plested is Head of Business Development & Lab, at INFINITI, the luxury brand for cars, with powerful elegant design, technological power and performance, and in-car connectivity.

INFINITI has recently opened the INFINITI LAB, dedicated to “world’s boldest innovators as they work to advance our lives”. Darren gives us an hand to explore the LAB.

1) Hi Darren,  would you tell us about the mission of the INFINITI LAB? Is this mission aiming at solving a specific expectation at INFINITI, like opening your innovation endeavor to external ideas, and startups, or enhancing INFINITI branding?

[DP] INFINITI is driven to ‘Empower the Drive’ both on the road and in life.  We recognize that historical success is not enough in today’s rapidly changing landscape and we need to continuously be looking forward for the next innovative idea.

We’ve historically been a world innovation leader with numerous world first technologies in our cars that have come from internal R&D, but we created INFINITI Lab 3 years ago with the aim of empowering the worlds entrepreneurs to be the best they can be, and tapping into this external world of innovation to accelerating our innovation drive even further.

2) Could you introduce us to the 4 programs you’re offering to entrepreneurs?

[DP] INFINITI offers 4 programs to startups, and entrepreneurs:

1. Ideate – Experience start-up life over 54 hours to kick-start your journey to entrepreneurship;
2. Validate – The fastest way to evolve your early stage start-up to take flight over 4-6 weeks;
3. Elevate – Take your start-up to the next level with the full support of INFINITI Global HQ in Hong Kong in a 3 month program;
4. Integrate – Join forces with INFINITI to develop pioneering business solutions and achieve global scale over 8 weeks;

3) What are the main areas of interest of each program?

Retail, Social Innovation, Smart Cities, Women in Tech are some topics of the past Startups Week-Ends: are you focusing on specific thematic areas for the future?

[DP] Our themes change and evolve with demand and need.  We align the needs of our internal corporate strategy and key trends we see evolving in the market and find consensus in what’s we feel is both important and urgent in delivering short to mid term value for both INFINITI and the world at large.

Regarding the part of the program where startups will work with the Renault-Nissan Alliance, you mention enhancing the customer journey: what are your next areas of interest?

[DP] We just completed a 6 week Validate program in Toronto focused on ‘Smart Cities & IOT’ and our next program will be our 3 month Elevate program in Hong Kong beginning in Sept. themed ‘Premium Connected Mobility’.

Infiniti is part of the Alliance Group together with Nissan, Renault & Mitsubishi, which together is the largest Automaker in the world.  In Jan of this year the Alliance created a $1billion Alliance Ventures fund that will be investing in start-ups over the next 5 years.  We align closely with Alliance Ventures and together we have identified 5 key areas of focus for the immediate future: Autonomous Drive, Electric Vehicles, Connectivity, New Mobility and Enterprise 2.0.

Finally, regarding the Integration stream, is Smart Mobility the recurrent topic?

[DP] Yes Smart Mobility is a current focus along with the 4 others mentioned above.

4) How are entrepreneurs selected to be part of the programs?

[DP] Start-ups are selected by a selection committee comprised of our Global executive mngt team, our local mngt teams in the host markets and our Alliance Ventures investment team.

How many seats are open?

[DP] We target to have 8-10 start-ups in each program.

Do you target external startups/entrepreneurs only, or do you plan to host also intrapreneurs, that is to say INFINITI employees?

[DP] Both.  In addition to the 4 programs mentioned above, we also have an Intrapreneurship program for our internal employees run independent of the external programs.

5) How do you recruit your INFINITI mentors?

[DP] We initially recruited Mentors through a simple opt in email request and were surprised at the overwhelming interest to partake.  We now use a much more targeted approach where we focus on the specific needs of the start-up and match them with a Mentor with the highest level of expertise in that area with the aim of providing the start-up with the absolute maximum amount of value.   As an example, if the start-up is looking to scale and build sales volumes, we’ll match them our sales and/or marketing experts.

6) There are LABs in Hong-Kong, Toronto, Dubai, and Singapore: what is your strategy of deployment? Are you mainly focused on Asia – a doorstep to China-? Are you trying to be close to startups, or close to INFINITI consumer markets? When do you open a LAB in Europe?

[DP] Our primary programs is our 3 month Elevate program which is hosted in Hong Kong next to our Global Head Quarters.  We operate ‘Satellite’ Labs in other global locations based primarily on the start-up ecosystem in those markets, as well as Infiniti’s presence there as we believe having our executive teams being involved in each program adds value to the Entrepreneurs involved.  We then select a winner from each of the satellite programs and invite them to join us at our Global Elevate program in HK.  We have plans to have future Labs in China, USA, Israel and Europe.

7)How will you transform the work completed in the LAB into tangible business for INFINITI? Is the pitch at the end of the Integration program the main connection with the core corporation? Have you one or two examples of startups positively impacting INFINITI business, or other exemplary case study that illustrate the benefit of the LAB?

[DP] I have responsibility for both the Infiniti Lab as well as a dedicated Business Development team that is focused on working with the start-ups selected for our programs to drive these innovative solutions into the business where it makes sense.

One example of this is with a great company called Visionaries 777 who is focused on cutting edge AR/VR solutions.  V777 came through our HK program in 2017 and together we created an AR/VR car configurator experience that was used to launch our all new QX50 at the LA Motorshow last Dec to great success!

Another is with a company called Pantonium that came into our Singapore program with a very strong dynamic routing & planning optimization algorithm currently employed in the Non-Emergency Medical space, and during our program, co-developed a corporate car pooling solution that will be piloted in our North American offices in the coming months.

8) No successful LAB without a great team, could you present your team, and its organization?

You can find our Lab team here :  https://www.infiniti.com/pursuing-potential/infiniti-lab.html

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Martin Bell is a global startup advisor, angel investor, and Founder & CEO of Bell Ventures. He was previously with Rocket Internet SE, and helped build, scale, and assess ~50 companies. He came up recently with a new tool for startups, the 100 Task Startup playbook. He kindly accepted to us on a tour to the playbook.

1) Hi Martin, would you share with us how you came up with the 100 Task Startup playbook?

The “100 Task Startup” playbook is the product of my vast experience in building — or overseeing the building — of great companies.

In my previous company, which pioneered Berlin’s thriving startup ecosystem, I was chief architect of a system that allowed us to launch companies in 100 days max. In one year, we led over 20 companies through this proven system, once in only 28 days.

Over the past years, I’ve consulted over 30 private and public sector entities. Along this journey, I wanted to answer the question: What makes a startup a success? Specifically, I wanted to discern

• which tasks are skipped by ventures that fail and, 
• which tasks are essential to those that succeed.

Admittedly, I got a little obsessed and excited in the process. Yet despite the complexity, I distilled the truly necessary steps into a comprehensive yet reasonably-sized playbook.

Those steps can be distributed into three stages:

• Setup,
• Launch,
• Scale.

Each of the 3 stages has 5 elements. They include, among others:

• Plan mission
• Develop MVP, and
• Optimize Functions.

Then, diving into a level of detail that is actionable, I essentially identified 100 tasks necessary to build a successful startup!

I know that prescribing 100 tasks can sound overwhelming, but I wanted the Playbook to dive into the nuts-and-bolts of building companies. By breaking it into 100 concrete tasks, the Playbook is not stuck hovering at a stratospheric high level. Most frameworks propose only 3, 5, or 7 generic steps.

In fact, the Playbook provides both the high-level and the nitty-gritty. Importantly, it offers the bird’s-eye view with its 3 broad stages, while simultaneously offering the option to deep-dive into 100 specific tasks, which are categorized not only into one of 3 stages but also into

• sub-stages,
• types of task,
• functional areas, and
• timing.

2) Who is the target for this tool? You write “the playbook presents the granular steps a major organization needs to setup a systematic company-building structure”, is the primary target large corporations who want to build a launchpad/incubator for ventures?  Is the playbook only for entrepreneurs, or can it be used by intrapreneurs? 

Primarily, the target of the Playbook is any major organization. More specifically, it targets any major organization that wants to setup a systematic company-building structure — a “launchpad” or an incubator — that is capable of launching and scaling multiple ventures. As Clayton Christensen’s classic The Innovator’s Dilemma argues, radical innovation — the type that will one day save the corporation — needs to happen outside of the parent in a separate environment due to people, processes, and P&Ls that stand in natural conflict with one another. ”. How to establish a “launchpad” that is capable of launching and scaling multiple ventures is explained in stage 1, Setup.

It’s important to note that the Playbook differentiates itself from the plethora of startup literature out there because it’s from the viewpoint of a major organization, not from a stand-alone startup. While on the poster the Playbook calls its target “corporates”, the Playbook is actually relevant to any public or private sector entities — governments, universities, NGOs, investors, and of course corporates — who want to transform their own innovative ideas into successful companies.

In addition, a huge side benefit is that the vast majority of the 100 Tasks are relevant for any stand-alone startup.

Thus, the Playbook is so versatile that it can be utilized from the viewpoints of various types of organizations.

3) Is it better suited for some specific industries, BtoB vs BtoC, or e-commerce, online food delivery, marketplaces, fintech, and urban mobile on-demand?

The Playbook is industry-agnostic and proven for B2B or B2C organizations. How is that possible? It’s possible because I gathered all important steps to successfully build great companies fast. Then, I went through painstaking analysis in order to distill it into only the “least common denominator” steps that are relevant relevant for any organization.

More important than the Playbook’s vast applicability is that the Playbook embodies the fact that innovation success is all about the execution. In that respect, the 100 Tasks stand in stark contrast to the vast majority of the literature on entrepreneurship. Unlike such typical literature, the 100 Tasks focus not only on the ideation, but much more on so on the execution of that idea.

Political economist Joseph Schumpeter is the intellectual father of entrepreneurship and innovation. His definition of innovation is that “innovation is the commercial spread of ideas”. Therefore, while most people use the term “innovation” to mean “invention”, Schumpeter’s definition goes much further, underlining the fact that real innovation is about the successful execution of that initial idea.

To illustrate, Thomas Edison is not only the most prolific inventor of modern times, but he is more importantly one of the most prolific innovators. In his famous quote, he maintained that “innovation success is 1% idea and 99% execution”. Coming from Edison, that means a ton.

I agree with Schumpeter and Edison that the idea is the most important step, but that there are many many other steps as part of the execution that follow.

Thus, the 100 Tasks do focus on the ideation part in stage 1, the Setup stage. In that stage, several tried and true frameworks are cited in the 100 Tasks. Examples are the Three Horizons, Four Steps to the Epiphany (i.e. Customer Development), Design Thinking, Business Model Canvas, and of course Lean Startup.

However, the 100 Tasks, especially stages 2 and 3, focus on the execution of that idea, an area in which there is a dearth of literature. The Playbook fills that critical void to make sure entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs don’t inadvertently drive their idea off a cliff.

4) Could you present the 3 main stages of the playbook?

The 3 stages — Setup, Launch, and Scale — are successive. That means, that one must complete one stage in order to move onto the next one. It’s analogous to a stage-gate® at the end of each stage.

Stage I: SETUP

In this crucial foundational stage, the launchpad infrastructure, capable of building multiple startups, is set up by the organization.

Meanwhile, the entire ideation journey is traveled:

• a long list of ideas is turned into a short list,
• from the short list one decides on one idea to validate, and
• once that idea is validated the startup is ready to move onto the next stage.

The setup stage groups its tasks into the following 5 sub-stages:

1. Plan Mission
2. Staff Launchpad
3. Collect Ideas
4. Validate Ideas
5. Make Starter-Kits

Stage II: LAUNCH

In this stage, a validated idea is commercialized, or brought to market. The company’s various functions are systematically built in order to rapidly achieve go-live (i.e. first revenues). Functions are built to last, while focusing only on the must-haves that are launch-critical.

The launch stage groups its tasks into the following 5 sub-stages:

1. Staff Temporarily
2. Develop MVP
3. Build Functions
4. Set Up KPI Reports
5. Go-Live

Stage III: SCALE

This stage is the one in which the live company’s functions are optimized, or set up for success, so that the company can grow sustainably. It is very much about leveraging data to find adjust the business model to find product-market find, and about implementing best practices.

At the end, the startup is ready to be independent, externally funded, best practices have been implemented, fully staffed, and it can stand on its own feet.

The setup stage groups its tasks into the following 5 sub-stages:

1. Staff Permanently
2. Learn From Data
3. Optimize Functions
4. Best Practices
5. Independence

5) Innovation is about iteration: how do you instill iteration in the playbook checklist, and do you help the user to measure if a task is fulfilled completely, or only 20% or 50%?

I agree 100% that “innovation is about iteration”. While the Playbook is all about “getting sh*t done”, it’s iterative and agile at its core!

A task should eventually be fulfilled 100%. You should not leave the tasks “Define goals”, “Build supply chain”, or “Phase in OKR system” incomplete. I sincerely believe that either a task is 100% done or it’s not done. In the eyes of the market, if it’s done you succeed, if it’s 20% or 50% done you fail.

However, solutions should not be over-engineered. Staying with the percentages theme, I’m a strong advocate of the 80%/20% rule (Pareto principle), which posits that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes,  when it comes to building companies fast in an iterative way. Remember: it needs to be done, not perfect.

When looking at the 100 Tasks poster, note that the tasks run in parallel. It’s agile, not waterfall. That means that tasks do not need to be fulfilled 100% before moving on to the next one. What matters in the 100 Tasks is the sequence of the tasks. It purposely places tasks 1) with long lead or setup times and 2) on which many outcomes depend on EARLY.  Many intrapreneurs or entrepreneurs fall prey to starting some tasks like these — “Kick off hiring roadmap”, “Incorporate legal entity”, “Set up a bank account”, “Specify MVP”,  or “Institute sales funnel” — far too late.

The iterative, lean-startup nature of the 100 Tasks is clearly reflected in the Milestones section at the bottom of the 100 Tasks poster. More specifically, whenever there is a second arrow that points to a previous milestone, it means that if a certain milestone was not achieved in full one needs to go back. For example, if one does not achieve “Validated Venture”, one should dispose of that idea and pick the next best one on the “Short List”. Or: if the “Go Live” (i.e. launch) fails, then one should re-do its “Stress Test” in a more comprehensive manner.

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Innovation labs or rapid innovation centers are developing at fast pace. Hereafter, we prolongate the previous review of Innovation Labs, with an industry point of view.

Each archetype can inspire the managers in charge of creating an innovation lab, and arm them to compose their own recipe for success.

4 types of Innovation Labs from an industry perspective

Sharing the point of view from the man on the field with schoolar research conducted by Pierre Foullon, an enlightened student at Dauphine and Telecom Paristech Master IREN, we’ve come across 4 types of innovation labs, sorted on specific target criteria:

1. Disruptive lab searchs for new business models;
2. Rapid innovation lab looks for agility, and speed;
3. Open innovation lab aims at cooperation;
4. Innovation culture lab propagates a culture of audacity across the company.

Following the description of the 1) Disruptive Labs, and 2) Rapid Innovation Labs, we move now to the 3) Open Innovation Labs, and 4) Innovation Culture and Intrapreneurship Labs.

3) Open-Innovation and Co-Creation Labs

These labs have a focus on collaboration with start-ups, partners or users, involving information sharing, and co-design to innovate. This model is more commonly referred to as Open Innovation. Open innovation can happen at the front-end of the innovation process, during the ideation phase, later on, during the development process, by combining technologies, components, and know-how for example, or at the end, during the commercialization process, by sharing customer base, and distribution channels.

A) Airbus BizLab is an aerospace incubator based on an open innovation model combining both Airbus startups, and intrapreneur skills. It is lead by Bruno Guttieres.

The incubation program takes place over 6 months, allowing startups to share their knowledge with experts from the group in various fields. The most innovative projects are selected and financed by the firm. All actors are encouraged to share their experiences and skills to increase added value, and innovate both quickly and qualitatively. By welcomeing internal projects as well as start-ups projects, Airbus wants to stimulate internal innovation concurrently to opening the innovation engine to other ecosystems, and moving beyond the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome.

B) The Mixer is a start-up accelerator belonging to the UniBail group, the largest commercial real estate company in Europe. It offers a support for 16 weeks whose main objective is to accelerate business between startups and Unibail.

After a selection period, entrants have access to the teams, infrastructures and portfolios of the commercial real estate group. The program is organized under 6 main themes: co-development with Unibail, coaching and mentoring, funding of strategies, prototyping, hosting of startups and events. These 6 axes foster relationships with the real estate giant to form future commercial partnerships.

C) Orange Fab network of accelerators follows a similar objective: it covers 12 locations, and offers a 3-months accelerator program, searching for startups with existing products, looking for growth and distribution opportunities, mainly in the telecom and digital industries.

D) The Village by CA belongs to the same category: the open-innovation incubator set by Credit Agricole bank and headed by Fabrice Marsella looks at detecting and supporting the next French unicorns in FinTech, and other industries. It brings startups closer to  large companies (Sanofi, PSA, Sodexo, Avril, BETC…), which want to transform their models.

BNPP bank operates start-ups accelerator programs BNP Fintech and BNP Innov and Connect in a dedicated innovation space WAI.

4) Innovation Culture & Intrapreneurship Lab

To spread a culture of innovation within corporations, many tools are developed involving participatory innovation, crowdsourcing of ideas through challenges, and enticing intrapreneurship and entrepreneur spririt among employees. This way, corporations mobilize collective intelligence as well as they recognize employees contribution, and develop their engagement. These innovation programs can also be seen from a cultural transformation point of view.
A) Market leader in tires, Michelin has been under increasing competitive pressure from globalization in recent years. The industry knows many innovations (bi-gum tyres, tri-gum tyres, spherical tyres etc.). To keep pace with the times, Michelin’s innovation center has set up various tools to help spread a culture of innovation, such as InnovaGo, Innov’up challenges, Bibspace social network or the Michelin Incubator Program Office.

Some achievements:

1. A partnership with Symbio FCell, a start-up specialized in fuel cells;
2. Michelin Twill tire used on agricultural vehicles;
3. Wecare a smartphone app for vehicle maintenance.

B) Safran Snecma FabLab

Something likes to point out Fabrice Poussière, founder of the Service Innovation Factory FabLab, which contributes to breathe a culture of service, digital, innovation, and agility in a hardware manufacturing environment.

Its main objective is to welcome every employee’s ideas. To do this, the group works closely with startup Aktan to transform ideas with high potential into business through all stages including prototyping.

Fabrice shares some precious lessons:

• Motivation is often as interesting as the idea;
• Mistakes are shared, best practices also: failures are seen as the source of future success;
• True value comes out of the information collected;
• Managers are part of the ecosytem: the idea has to get their buy-in just like from any other partner of the ecosystem.

Service Innovation Factory FabLab is structured in separate spaces: a ‘meeting area’ to welcome start-ups from the outside world, a ‘welcome area’ to greet newcomers with creative ideas, ‘prototyping area’, ‘fixed and free offices’, and ‘piloting headquarters’.

Service Innovation Factory FabLab gave birth to:

1. SFCO2 a service to help airplane commanies reduce their fuel consumption;
2. A Data Sandbox carrying works on Big Data;
3. A remote endoscopy project, letting you help the local operator who’s controlling the airplane engine;
4. A tablet artefact with Microsoft.

C) Orange Intrapreneurs Studio

Orange studio addresses employees who have a powerful creative idea, and incubate them to transform their idea into an offering, enriching Orange’s portfolio. Orange puts substantial resources to make it a success: employees are 100% dedicated to the project during 12 to 18 months, they receive resources (coders, designers, budget), they are incubated in innovation places, and they have the support of an intrapreneurs coach.

Other remarkable iniatives have been developed by:

• Vinci with its Leonard open laboratory, balancigg 4 pillars (technological watch, prospective analysis / foresight on autonomous car, smart city, and digital infrastructures & buildings, intrapreneurs and cross-business innovative projects incubation, and tailored start-ups acceleration)
• Lufhansa IT with its Invent IT Intrapreneurs program, involving employees crowdfunding.

Summary

The table below shows how the different innovation labs in the field rank into the typology, and what kind of tools and approaches they use to reach their goal:

To conclude, the final table matches the different typologies reviewed in this serie of articles:

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Did you miss Part One or Part Two?

Innovation labs or rapid innovation centers are developing at fast pace. Hereafter, we prolongate the previous review of Innovation Labs, with an industry point of view.

Each archetype can inspire the managers in charge of creating an innovation lab, and arm them to compose their own recipe for success.

4 type of Innovation Labs from an industry perspective

Sharing the point of view from the man on the field with schoolar research conducted by Pierre Foullon, an enlightened student at Dauphine and Telecom Paristech Master IREN, we’ve come across 4 types of innovation labs, sorted on specific target criteria:

1. Disruptive lab searchs for new business models;
2. Rapid innovation lab looks for agility, and speed;
3. Open innovation lab aims at cooperation;
4. Innovation culture lab propagates a culture of audacity across the company.

Following the description of the 1) Disruptive Labs, we move now to the 2) Rapid Innovation Labs.

2) Rapid Innovation Labs

Innovation centers focused on speed have emerged from several observations.:

• The globalization of markets now allows for wider competition. For instance, Samsung (South Korea) faces Apple (USA) on the international market;
• Speed can bring a competitive advantage by giving the practitioner the ability to react quickly to competitors, enter new markets, and become a threat to incumbents;
• Speed is a sine qua non condition for customer attraction (due to increasingly rapid obsolescence) and agile iteration, to optimize relentlessly the customer experience: the second release of the iphone, which included 3G, was much more convincing tah the first release, based on low-speed network, for whats regards the Internet navigation.

The model developed by Nicolas Bry, focused on rapid innovation, has four fundamental principles:

• Autonomy, the engine of creativity and speed;
• Creative tension or the art of translating ideas into experimentation by adopting an collective and iterative framework based on testing and development; assuming that fuzziness does not help the innovation team, and that time-boxed projects put a positive tension on the team;
• Strategic alignment: being different does not mean being separate, innovation team needs alignment with the core, create desire for change, unfolding opportunities deriving from the innovations developed, involving a shared innovation portfolio, and nurturing a network of innovation peers and relationships, to facilitate innovation acceptance;
• Modular design allows innovation to be split into modules. In the same way as APIs in IT, this design makes it possible for others to create value on top of your platform, and it creates an innovation capital that can be reused on several projects and thus allow an ecosystem to prosper.

Here are some entities focused on rapid innovation:

A) Skunk Works

“We are defined not by the technologies we create but the process in which we create them.” Kelly Johnson, member and first team leader of the Lockheed Skunk Works.

Skunk Works is the Advanced Development Program (ADP) division of Lockheed Martin.  This internal organization aimed at stimulating the group’s innovation, and developing new technologies, particularly in the aerospace sector. Probably one of the oldest “Lab” (founded in 1943), the group remained famous for its capacity to innovate. Indeed, Skunk Works is at the origin of many famous planes such as the F-22.

The division bases its operation on autonomy. Formerly led by Kelly Johnson, the Skunk Works unit is based on Kelly’s 14 rules.

In a rapidly changing landscape, by focusing on its capabilities and experience in innovation, the group managed to provide its customers with cutting-edge technology, always more innovative in its chosen field, and at rapid pace.

Lockheed Martin Skunk Works secret formula was the rapid development of disruptive solutions through high autonomy, and modular operations.

B) O2 Enterprise Lab

Innovation within the O2 Enterprise Lab division is driven by strong values of speed and quality.

The mobile phone industry has undergone many changes over the last decade. The competitive landscape has evolved to give way to players constantly seeking innovation capable of inventing new solutions quickly.

Agility has become the watchword of this innovation center. The main objective here is the development of beta products to penetrate the market quickly. The center enables external players to test new products which, once selected, will move on to the industrialization phase.

Once again, autonomy is a key enabler, and management remains very light. Thus, the objectives and strategy of the center are defined by the entity itself without any intervention from the parent company. Operation are therefore similar to those of a start-up. Ideas are prototyped quickly (a few days) after presentation and selection by the management team, according to defined criteria and available resources. To take an example of rapid innovation through this center, VOiP on mobile was deployed on the market in just 4 months under the O2 Connect brand.

Openness is another key principle of O2 Enterprise Lab: open at the front end and in execution, open apis, open source, beta testing. Openness is also necessary as O2 Lab lets others bring the product through industrialization.

According to Shomila Malik, former Lab Director, the main levers to accelerate innovation are as follows:

• Autonomy: One of the key factors for being able to work quickly is to reduce the number of decision-makers;
• A hierarchical support: necessary for the project that a sponsor gives it visibility and priority;
• Mutual trust and progressive cooperation between core co and creative lab: to get buy in, it helped that it was a small change at first. Getting ‘buy in’ is not a push but a pull: creating desire first. The biggest challenge is definitely to bring back the creative product in the organisation; it require a shared ground among stakeholders.

C) Airbus Protospace

The birth of Airbus Protospace follows the threat of uberisation of the sector (Space X).

Protospace can be defined as a corporate FabLab. It provides each employee with the necessary tools, collocating design and prototyping skills, and to create on the Skunk model, materializing quickly emerging concepts. Prototyping is therefore rapid.

Similar to many centers, the management is close to the “startup” model, and openness is welcome whether through startups, universities or large companies to bring together diverse skills. As proof, 500 projects are born from Protospace since its creation in 2013. Successful initiatives include a solution for easy-installation of airplane seats, right-on time process for sharklets manufacturing, and an inspection drone.

Speed is at the heart of the complex. Operating on an agile model, the team encourages to create and iterate according to its motto “Lead by Demonstration”. “Protospace is a a zone where ideas are assessed on facts, creative projects can be derisked, and failure is allowed.” claims Vincent Loubière, Lead Technologist in the Emerging Technologies and Concepts team at Airbus, Founder and Leader of Airbus ProtoSpace.

Seb corporate Fab Lab ranks also in this category of innovation lab oriented toward acceleration.

Did you miss Part One or Part Two?

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Click here to read Part One

Innovation labs or rapid innovation centers are developing at fast pace. Hereafter, we prolongate the previous review of Innovation Labs, with an industry point of view.

Each archetype can inspire the managers in charge of creating an innovation lab, and arm them to compose their own recipe for success.

4 type of Innovation Labs from an industry perspective

Sharing the point of view from the man on the field with schoolar research conducted by Pierre Foullon, an enlightened student at Dauphine and Telecom Paristech Master IREN, we’ve come across 4 types of innovation labs, sorted on specific target criteria:

1. Disruptive lab searchs for new business models;
2. Rapid innovation lab looks for agility, and speed;
3. Open innovation lab aims at cooperation;
4. Innovation culture lab propagates a culture of audacity across the company.

Building on the sharp paper completed by Pierre Foullon for his research, let’s dig in into this typology, with some illustrative corporates for each type:

1) Disruptive Labs

Disruption combines a breakthrough business model with a gap in knowledge: through revisited value proposition, and original “value network”,  it induces a change in use and consumption habits. One of the most famous breakthrough is the iPhone which brought Apple company at the forefront of mobile market. Nespresso, Swatch, Sony radio transistors, Nitendo Wii, digital photography versus Kodak, are other famous examples.

A disruptive lab aims at snorting disruption, and bringing its company ahead of it, or  by anticipating disruptors threats as well. Thus it fights to avoid Christensen’s dilemna: “… many companies in the past have focused their attention on meeting customer needs in the present by focusing on “cash cow” products in the BCG matrix. By placing too much emphasis on the need to meet customers’ present requirements, they are not anticipating future needs and their presence is declining in the markets. One of the most striking and probably the most famous example remains Kodak and the arrival of digital photography.”

Disruptive innovation centers are therefore present in companies whose priority is to renew their markets, and position themselves as leaders with creative business models.

Below are some examples of disruptive innovation centers:

A) Kamet is a startups studio dedicated to the creation of disruptive insurance companies. This incubator was created by AXA Assurances in 2015. Its objective is “to imagine, initiate, launch, and escort several disruptive InsurTech projects”. This creation followed the arrival of the digital revolution and the processing of data, that threat to disrupt the insurance value chain.

Stéphane Guinet, Kamet’s founder, presents Kamet as a startup that builds startups. Kamet has developed a specific process to develop new business models: every 6 months, it unearths 40 ideas for new businesses, selects 8 of them, and staffs creative projects with seasoned entrepreneurs; following preliminary prototypes, 4 ventures are selected to be incubated over one year, benefitting from the agility of the studio, while having at their disposal AXA’s know-how and expertise throughout the world.

First Kamet seeds are:

1. Giving access to best French medical doctors to expats through videoconferencing (Qare);
2. Offering drivers to replace their tires, collecting their vehicle at the office (Fixter, the UBER of car maintenance, funded by AXA with m€ 6);
3. Reinventing occupational health-care with data (Padoa funded by AXA with m€ 5).

B) Created in 2012, Breakthrough Innovation Group (BIG) of Pernod Ricard is a team of 10 people based in Paris, and headed by Alain Dufossé, BIG’s Managing Founder and Director. The group’s objective is to shake up usage by developing new products and services that will radically change and improve the consumer experience: BIG would work at inventing conviviality’s future.

BIG disruptive innovation center is based on Blue Ocean strategy,  capturing new demand in an uncontested strategic space. BIG has scoped out 6 ‘opportunities platforms’, incorporating societal changes like feminization, end of traditional nuclear family, individuals living on their own, especially women, expenses for amazing entertainment, intense social life online and offline, and how it impacts Pernod’s activities: thus, the fact that women prefer wine to strong liquor, because of wine’s sophisticated smell and transparencey, correlated to their growing position in society, is likely to result in a negative impact for Pernod-Ricard traditional alcohol business.

One of the first projects is the Gutenberg project, a 2.0 cocktail bar consisting of an elegant library of “container books”: each of them is holding a sealed bottle of spirits, all connected to a service platform which provides a whole range of tutorials about mixology (cocktail recipes, personalised offers, etc.), and automatically triggers refuel according to the container level.

C) Google X, the “Moonshot Factory”, is a center of breakthrough innovation, and more specifically breakthrough technologies. “The projects target huge problems, and invent and launch “moonshot” technologies with a view to make the world a radically better place.” explains Astro Teller, founder of Google X. X is a team of inventors and entrepreneurs from a wide variety of backgrounds. One of their most important principles is to run as fast as they can at all the hardest parts of a problem, and try to prove that something can’t be done: X actively embraces failure.

Among the projects graduated, we find the Self-Driving Car (Waymo), Smart Contact Lens, Loon project, Google Glass, Google Wing allowing delivery by drone.

D) The i-Lab is Air Liquide’s innovation laboratory. i-Lab has two main missions:

• Identifying disruptive innovations, representing threats or opportunities on core business, that challenge the ‘operational excellence’ mould; and then, refining market positioning accordingly, discussing strategic scenarios with business units;
• Detecting opportunities for new business, outside of mainstream activities, ‘the third horizon of innovation‘, involving completely new product/service and/or revisited business model.

Gregory Olocco, I-Lab founder at Air Liquide, explaans how the i-Lab “combines a Think-Tank with a Corporate Garage approach”:

1. It maintains an active watch to identify and understand new usages. It evaluates the impact that key social trends may have on the future behavior of the end users and the associated value chains, and analyzes new organizational and technological trends;
2. The i-Lab brings together employees from diverse nationalities and educational backgrounds, ranking from anthropology and biology to design, science and other disciplines. Focusing on end-users usages, these intrapreneurs materialize ideas,  and carry out early-stage user tests with prototypes using cutting-edge equipment for 3D printing, laser cutting or digital modeling.

The i-Lab incubates the proofs of concept until maturity to validate the value created and then, supports their development outside the i-Lab by relying on the Group entities. Connected to innovation ecosystems, projects tackle issues like air quality, hand in hand with the Parisian incubator AirLab, or make medical oxygen accessible to small health posts and health centers in Africa with the Access Oxygen offering.

The place has its own rule and culture, a mix of:

• frugal innovation, and social innovation;
• entering the skin of a ‘big data’ start-up, and showing it could kill a current business;
• design skills, intrapreneur mindset, human dimension, cultural diversity;
• no fixed desks, a place to share, more than to work;
• going against the consensus view, speaking of usage and not IP, or tech.

Click here to read Part One

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Innovation labs or rapid innovation centers are developing at fast pace.

Just last week I was discussing about the set-up of an innovation lab in one African country where Orange operates. It often comes to the following 4 questions:

1. What is the aim of the lab, and how will it operate?
2. How to on-board and communicate?
3. How to select the projects?
4. How will it transform ideas to business, what will it deliver?

In this context, building on previous article related to open-innovation centers trend, I reached to sketch a typology of innovation labs, with 4 archetypes. Each of them illustrates a different intent, with a key pattern:

1. Disruption;
2. Speed;
3. Openness;
4. Innovation culture.

Each of them can inspire the managers in charge of creating an innovation lab, who can replicate one of the models, or improve the recipe, combining the different frames to design their own identity.

Let’s go first through some previous typologies that are presented in the innovation litterature.

4 types of innovation labs by Sihem Jouini

Sihem Jouini, an associate professor at HEC Business School and head of Innovation Design Majeure (PIC), defines innovation labs as follows:

• Innovation labs are designed to generate business opportunities, and execute actual exploration of valuable opportunities. The activities undertaken within the unit can progressively impact the current business units;
• They are spreading a culture of innovation, and innovation methodologies;
• They vary from a strict separation from the core company to a tight integration, leveraging the core co resources.

She sorts out 4 types of innovation labs (Ben Mahmoud-Jouini 2009, Ben Mahmoud-Jouini, Charue-Duboc 2012):

1) Explorator (BIG from Pernod Ricard, Valeo, i-Lab from Air Liquide)

The explorator lab aims at exploring adjacent or breakthrough activities, creating new markets, also called game-changers. It includes the following stages: opportunities identification, drawing on societal trends, concepts generation, knowledge acquisition, exploration strategy, actual exploration, hand-over to business-unit or spin-off / start-up creation. Communication can be internal as well as external: an explorator lab is a strategic move that can promoted outside.

Resources takes the form of a a legitimate lab manager mobilizing internal and external networks, a mix of employees and new hires, an autonomous budget, an openness to the ecosystem, establishing partnerships, and leveraging open innovation challenges.

2) Catalyst, Enabler (Snecma, SEB, Thales)

The catalyst lab coaches projects submitted by intrapreneurs or business units. It is working at promoting transversal initiatives across divisions, it monitors selection process, provides methodology, facilitates workshops, and supports up to POC delivery.

Resources are mixing innovation expert, and business expert. Internal communication to attract corporate entrepreneurs is a main endeavour. Budget is allocated as realization progresses.

Seb Fab Lab

3) Facilitator (Innovation Room, Renault Creative Labs)

The facilitator lab is a dedicated room to stimulate creativity, creativity methodologies, training, light coaching, innovation culture. Internal communication targets all employees to entice idea sharing.

4) Connector (Essilor Digital Studio, BNP Paribas)

The connector lab is managing a community of innovators (fellows, correspondents), and organizes events for sharing experience. Internal communication is moulded in community management as its objective is to grow the community.

4 corporate entrepreneurship models from Wolcott and Lippitz

Another typology by Wolcott and Lippitz ranks innovation labs according to their budget allocation, and organizational ownership. It highlights 4 archetypes: the opportunist, the advocate, the enabler, and the producer. The advocate, enabler, and producer are quite close to the facilitator, explorer, and catalyst types reviewed previously.

4 Explorative Innovation Units by Ralph-Christian Ohr and Frank Mattes

Ralph-Christian and Frank focus on explorative innovation units, working at playing field 3 of innovation:

1) Innovation Center is a Unit that supports business units in finding adjacent or even radical (technology) innovations and also explores entirely new growth options. The spawned innovations are mostly ‘physical’  (i.e. not primarily ‘digital’) or ‘digitally-enhanced’ in nature (e.g. smart surfaces). It meets the previous definition of Explorer.

2) Incubator stands for Unit that accommodates internal early-stage innovation ventures (often tied to Intrapreneurship) and provides critical services and resources for them to thrive. It meets the previous definition of Catalyst.

3) Accelerator accommodates external early-stage startups, and provides critical services, access to corporate assets/resources, and often funding capital to them, in return for stakes in the startup. This scope is reflected by e.g. Continental’s “co-pace” mission: “We broker, empower and leverage connections between emerging companies and businesses at Continental. Further we facilitate co-creation, from concept to proof of application”.

4) Digital Lab drives Digital Transformation by leveraging digital basic technologies (e.g. Big Data, AI, Blockchain etc.) for ‘Core Business Transformation’ (e.g. through process optimization or improved customer experience) and ‘New Business Creation’ (e.g. by developing X-as-a-service or data-driven business models).

Continue to Part Two

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Johannes Nuenning is VP of the Deutsche Telekom incubator, targeting employees who want to realize their idea, and become entrepreneurs: yes, en-trepreneur, and not necessarily in-trapreneur! Johannes acts as business angel for corporate entrepreneurs, developing entrepreneurship, and creativity mindsets within this large corporation. He kindly takes us through the mission, and the organization of this ambitious accelerator.

Attracting, and supporting Corporate Entrepreneurs

UQBATE was founded by Johannes in 2011 and since 2015 is part of the Innovation department of Deutsche Telekom, at corporate level, and embraced by Claudia Nemat, member of Management, Technology and Innovation board: she believes that “rebels matter because monocultures crack under pressure”. Claudia hired Johannes to set-up, and manage UQBATE on her behalf as member of her team “Telekom Open Spaces”.

Today, UQBATE is a 3 months accelerator program for Telekom employees who want to realize their idea. It’s an open platform, where ideas can grow also outside of the company. Every employee can join: “we don’t care where you come from” says Johannes. “There is no limit regarding the ideas. It’s 3 months approach designed to support entrepreneurs and their product, which might well be an non-Telekom product. Because we learned that the vast majority of ideas reflect the ‘common knowledge’ of a 21^st century Telecommunications Company anyway.”

Makers

The program is focused on the project  development, no management overhead. UQBATE provides freedom in the first place. The framework is here to empower Deutsche Telekom people, helps them find the team, with internal and external teammates.

“We believe in openness: UQBATE supports our Corporate Entrepreneurs to find teammates everywhere; because the heterogeneous fit of a founding team is crucial for its success. We are inviting also external experts, innovation hubs, and investors to join our platform.”

Various people can come and contribute, like former entrepreneurs; other contributors like coders, and designers turn to be more difficult to find internally. UQBATE empowers people to find people, or do it yourself: “by starting to do it yourself, you’ll increase process speed; we encourage team to do crappy stuff, and it works”. It reminds me of the word quirky as they say at Google Creative Lab.

Changing the mould

As UQBATE targets entrepreneurs, it skipped the request for a business unit sponsoring of the entrepreneurial idea. The hand-over to business unit is by experience  very hard to manage: UQBATE decided to skip this interface, and focuses on “choosing people who want to go from A to Z on their passion project”. It’s also a way not to be influenced by the corporate model, and “keep openness for all ideas”. “Telekom people naturally come up with telecom ideas, linked to the corporate knowledge, it’s a pattern we need to reshape, ideas need to evolve”.

Excubation (creating a startup out of the company based on the corporate entrepreneur idea) doesn’t involve predefined equity stakes for Deutsche Telekom: entrepreneurs hold 100% of the shares, and Telekom can become an investor later, if it makes sense to cooperate. One example of this is eParkomat, a car parking platform (without owning a single parking lot). It leverages Telekom technologies, data, and was funded by Volkswagen and Deutsche Telekom KraKow, one year after it was founded, as announced at Geneva car show.

Acceleration, and networking

The initial design phase includes random / serendipity maturation of the idea, participation to meet-ups or events, boaling down the idea, learning to pitch it in one sentence,  and application for acceleration scholarship, including an idea evaluation template (below).

Then comes the Scholarship stage: “people come to the incubator for the incubator, they are dedicated 100% for 3 months time via a job-visiting; at the end of it, they can continue or go back; they have to convince Telekom or external investors to support them, and carry on, typically as a side project to their bread-and-butter-job, for the time being”.

The rythm is intense: they learn and practice lean startup, take part in a bootcamp, present to weekly reviews with scholar teams, benefit from individual coaching every 2 weeks, attend lectures on business case, growth hacking, and so on,… Telekom people, and external are invited to lectures meet-ups: networking is key.

In a nutshell, UQBATE provides:

• Workshops
• Networking Events
• 3-Months Scholarship: Freedom & protection in terms of budget, mentoring and co-working space
• Alumni network
• Access to external experts (investors, innovation experts, startups)

Demo days take place 2 times a year, in Telekom headquarters lobby: “it’s a hack to make the program visible!”

6-9 teams are hosted concurrently per batch, and 2 batches are set-up each year.

After-acceleration

“Day One after acceleration, going back to business is a schock, it takes a few months or weeks to accomodate; some start their own business; entrepreneurs make their own decision, that’s what entrepreneurs do.”

Currently UQBATE is working on the design of this next stage: allocating 100% to employees to build their own start-up, with a return-to-company ticket as a Plan B; and, creating a startup ecosystem of friends, mixing a corporate accelerator of startups (like Hub Raum) with corporate entrepreneurs.

Tools

UQBATE has developed, and shared online, simple but effective tools to guide the entepreneurs: application form, job visiting form, business model canvas, idea development guide, idea evaluation template, sample first mailing template, market research tool.

Business Impacts, and Success stories

“UQBATE is a movement to democratize Telekom’s organization. While entrepreneurs are free to take their own decisions, employees are depending on other’s choices. Hence, we must let our people act freely in order to accomplish the digital transformation of our company.”

Actually, 2 main outcomes come straightforward to Johannes’ mind:

1. People learn more than they ever learned before at UQBATE;
2. Their projects bring potential suppliers, partners, customers to live: they have 3 business impacts.

“With an army of corporate entrepreneurs, our company will be more reponsive!”

In this context, it was meaningful to build UQBATE as an open platform, and start its venture outside.

Regarding the success stories:

• 25 projects supported since the start of the 3 months accelerator in 2017;
• 30 to 50% are internal projects, who are not sure to be startups, people don’t want to leave the company;
• 20+ events run in 2017, with 1,200 attendees overall (thereof 30% TeleKom external);
• 7 companies founded since 2017, 10 in total since 2011;
  • below’s image shows an extract of the startups initiated (see also review of Alumni);
  • eParkomat is an examplary stories beacuse they have financial, and build trust; indeework has completed 2 contracts with Telekom; Pferdeapp, an IOT service for horse owners, took only 3 months to complete MVP and Prototype, and manage to close potential investors: speed and effectiveness is what rules their 2 cofounders.

In term of lessons learned, this scholarship is in his third batch. It provides “an unfair advantage for corporate entrepreneurs compared to startups: marginal cost of both experiments and experience is zero, and as in this sense time equals money, it is powerful; it’s frugal innovation: we just provide limited budget (up to 5,000 €), and they start with nothing but their passion and expertise; it comes down to the essential: you need to do just what you have to do, by yourself; beyond that, the true impact is the people that are set free”.

Johannes develops a very personal relationship with the scholars: “I feel like a priest, embedded in coworking spaces!”

Compensation

“We pay with trust, with the opportunity to make your own staff, become yourself, instead of being managed by bureaucraty; it’s a system designed for entrepreneurs, people are taken seriously, for grown-ups: the way they are treated means a lot; you can not pretend being an entrepreneur, you are or you are not, being on your own is the best job you can have, this is the true reward.”

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Fabrice Marsella is head of the Le Village by CA Paris or the village’s Mayor as they say! Benoît Bourdin is Deputy Head of Le Village, and responsible for Partners & CA Group connections / International Network.

The Village is the startup accelerator initiated by Credit Agricole (CA) Banking company which looks at detecting and supporting the next French unicorns in FinTech, and other industries. They kindly accepted to share the learnings of the Village venture after 3 years of operations.

1) Hi Fabrice & Benoît, could you kindly explain The Village offering which targets startups, but also corporations (partnerships for cross-learning, incubation of intrapreneurial employees, events organization), in a truly open innovation philosophy?

Fabrice: Seven years ago, in a context of this digital revolution, Credit Agricole Group understood that it could not stay alone if it wanted to accelerate the innovation, and the transformation of its businesses and its organisations. When I talk about innovation and transformation, I mean the ways to improve the customer relationship (more immediacy, more personalization…), take the opportunities of the new economy (ie. the sharing economy…), and upgrade our industrial tools (AI, blockchains…).

Benoît: We understood that we need to be closer to startups, in all sectors, more agile and more experts than us, and closer to other large companies (Sanofi, PSA, Sodexo, Avril, BETC…), which want to transform their models too. And it works, because we involve motivated corporations : they need  to accelerate their transformation, and want to collabore with startups ; and we target mature startups : as they have their solutions or products, and start to sell them, they are able to discuss with the top management of corporations. After the first Village in Paris, we launch other villages : 23 villages are opened in France today.

2) You’ve accelerated over 300 startups over 3 years. How did you manage to onboard them? How is the network implementation helping to attract startups locally? What are your selection criteria, and are you focused on some specific industries? Are you setting-up a jury to sort out candidates?

Benoît: When startups apply for Le Village by CA, they look for to be a part of a very rich ecosystem. They benefit of subsidized prices for the rent of offices and facilities ; they benefit from experts’ support, about communication, marketing, human ressources, sales, fund raising etc…And above all, they benefit from our ability to connect them with corporations. It’s attractive ! Startups can stay two years in our villages. It’s quite long and we have the time to know them, understand their business and plan a real support.

Fabrice: We select startups with four macro-criteria in mind : the innovation feature, the strengths of the team, the business model, and what they could bring to the ecosystem (we avoid competitors). But we also select startups with just the idea : « I believe in it or I don’t ».

Benoît: And during the committee of selection, organized six or seven times per year, there are all of our partners around the table, and we decide together. For each candidate, it’s five minutes for the pitch, five minutes for Q&A, and five minutes for the deliberation, and we vote with the hand, the majority wins ! Intuitive and efficient !

3) Concurrently, 800 events are organized on a yearly basis, it’s huge! Is it open to partners and resident startups only, what is the process to stage an event at The Village? What kind of events take place at The Village, and how do you attract the audience?

Benoît: Indeed we organize a lot of events, and several kinds of events. The Village by CA is designed for it : auditorium, lab, pitch room… For example startups could organize the launching of a new product for journalists and clients, one of our partner could organize a hackathon with collaborators for its intrapreneurship program or we could facilitate a workshop for our startups about the power of phoning prospection.

A lot of events are opened to external people : some inspiring testimonials of successful entrepreneurs, some workshops or some big events like the restitution of the barometer of the relationship corporates / startups. We communicate to our networks, in particular on social medias, like Twitter and LinkedIn : it’s powerful because our community is larger day after day. But mainly the events concerns specific invited people.

4) How do you connect startups to the business within the Crédit Agricole line of services, and with your partners? How to streamline the process from the startup idea to the transformation into business?

Fabrice: There is no secret. It’s very simple : we discuss with startups for understanding their needs and their ressources, we discuss with large companies, CA Group, its clients, our partners and other stakeholders (VCs, public actors…) for understanding their needs and ressources, and we connect people. With a lot of goodwill, energy and proximity, it works !

Benoît: Of course, large companies in France have changed their processes and mindset to be able to work with startups. And startups are no more frightened. At the end of the day, everybody shares the value. It’s a virtuous circle.

5) There wouldn’t be a successful Village story, without a brilliant Village team, the Village People 🙂 : could you present the various team members, and their roles?

Fabrice: We are a small team, independent, agile, and we have a transversal organization. Exactly like a startup !  Of course, some members are more focused on the support of startups, others on the organization of events, others on the international networks or legal stuffs… But each can do a lot of things and help others on a task. We are passionated people!

6) One more thing… If you had to start again an incubator, what are the things that you would not do, and what the actions that you would emphasize?

Benoît: The Village by CA Paris, and the others in our regions, have been build step by step. It’s a test and learn process. We work with a lot of goodwill, and each of our actions are useful. Eventually one thing that is not enough emphasized until today is the support to the creation of jobs in our Villages. It’s so positive ! 600 jobs only in Paris, in 4 years !

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