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

Open Innovation with the Crowd: Crowd Innovation

Editor’s note: This is part 2 of a 2 part series. Read part one part one here.

Crowd Innovation follows a similar path to Participative Innovation (previous post here) except that it leverages on the creativity of Internet users. Here we explore the third way of Open Innovation that Professor Chesbrough describes as: “creating new business models arising from opening up the process, opening the doors to co-creation, and customer communities driving a business.” (crowd)

• Thus, Dell, Starbuck, Lego, Intel, Casino, Sosh, Total Tilt have set online platforms to collect ideas to improve their offerings; Lego has probably the most advanced process in term of fairness with the idea’s owner: after reaching 10k supporting votes, your project enters a special phase called the LEGO Review; if approved, it goes into production, is shipped around the world and released for sale, and you receive a royalty on sales (1% of the total net sales);

• Merck Serono is a terrific example of multiple open innovation initiatives with various communities: internally with Innospire Idea Competition, and Innovation Boost 2015; externally with Innovation Cup, Open Compound, Open Call for drug discovery, and Outcubation;
• At Imagine with Orange, we created a slightly different reward: based on the request that some ideas’ owner wanted to move forward on the implementation of their idea, we provide coaching on ‘innovation design’ – guidelines cover design thinking/lean start-up, marketing mix, value proposition pricing, and business model innovation- to make the idea turn into reality: share your ideas, Orange is helping you to give them life; this coaching now includes participation to training sessions of the Orange Fab, Orange corporate accelerator, access to Lab Orange product testing facilities, and exposure across relevant Orange marketing events; some contests have been directly followed by Hackathons were Imagine’s winners were able to form a team, dig into the potential of their idea leveraging collective intelligence, and unearth an MVP.

The selection process for best ideas can be a bottleneck if you collect many ideas, and rely only on a jury composed of a few people. Therefore, we recommend to leverage the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, and take into account the comments and votes shared by the community to let the selection rise: the community is shaping the innovation.

The main difficulty, compared to participative innovation which is played in ‘closed garden’, is to reach out a sufficient number of people willing to share their creative ideas with you: it requires a strong brand awareness, and active community management, curating and challenging the ideas, social media presence, and nimble connections with targeted influencers. We, at Imagine with Orange, are passionate about innovation from all over the world, and I suppose that’s the reason why +1000 ideas from 29 countries have been shared on the platform over one year.

Blurring the lines

Participative Innovation and Open Innovation with the Crowd seem separated by the boundaries of the company. But innovation knows no borders, and some companies are experimenting innovations platforms where employees meet with the crowd to generate creative ideas. Thus, they add internal and external communities, cross different points of view, and foster group-wide emulation.

• 3DS FabLab created a community on a social platform, MADEin3D™, to share one’s project, get challenged, receive support, and expose it outside of the company boundaries, at international scale, tells Frédéric Vacher. 13 000 Dassault Systems employees are invited to connect, as well as 200 000 designers from all around the world, through international challenges;
• Airbus BizLab welcomes internal projects as well as start-ups projects relates Bruno Gutierres, and coaches both through a 6 months acceleration program: the objective is to stimulate internal innovation concurrently to opening the innovation engine to other ecosystems, and moving beyond the Not Invented Here syndrome;
• Decathlon Creation organizes co-creation from ideation stage to product development explains Vincent Textoris: following a Discovery stage where the community shares ideas and elects the best ones, the project moves to the Contribute stage, where idea owner and Decathlon product manager will meet and collaborate, from Specifications to Prototype;
• With Imagine with Orange, we have experienced a cross-process where Orange Labs employees were able to share the non-confidential part of their projects with the international Imagine community, getting immediate and accurate feedback, and letting the voice of the customer enter the innovation process from the very beginning; in the long run, we believe a campaign  with Imagine should be a mandatory ‘Feedback Loop’ for a start-up or an intra-preneur, a ‘Test and Learn’ step to gauge market appetence, and collect meaningful insights from massive idea sharing.

Open Innovation ecosystem

It’s funny how Open Innovation, which was intended for going outside, is now coming back within the company walls with Participative Innovation. Actually, there seems to be endless ways for practicing open innovation, which is absolutely fine. Just be aware to build something consistent in the end, from your corporate and start-ups partners point of view, as well as for your employees, and facilitate the teamwork which lets one initiative nurture another.

image credits: Lego, leadingcities.org; bigstockphoto.com

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

Participative Innovation

Editor’s note: This is part one of a two part series. Read part two here.

Participative innovation relies on the objective to make innovation part of every employee’s job. It often translates trough an idea box, initially looking like a mail-box. In the digital world, the idea box has changed into an idea sharing platform, with social features where the community can submit ideas, comment on them, and vote for their favorites.

Thus, the selection process can mix:

• most appreciated ideas based on employees votes; the benefit of the public prize is to maintain a widespread involvement: people realize they can have an impact with their vote;
• a jury selection, involving internal managers of the company, and sometimes external experts. It is an opportunity to involve business units managers in the selection process, so that they can express their ‘buy-in’ upstream, and support ideas’ implementations later on.

Then comes the time for the reward: what’s more exciting than to see on’s idea turn into reality. It sounds natural to put the idea’s owner in capacity to transform his idea into a project: after all, he should the most motivated person to work on his idea! Besides, idea’s owner is in the best position to keep the initial innovation intent undamaged.

To help idea owner to structure its project, a coaching is often necessary: this training for intra-preneurship will traditionally unroll over several weeks, and tackle successively topics like:

• Value proposition, target, usage / persona, features, and customer experience;
• Business model innovation, and ecosystem development;
• Environment, and competition;
• Feasibility, from MVP to product roadmap;
• Innovation marketing, and social media;
• And of course, ‘The Art of Pitching your Project’!

A key question along the process will be to arbitrate whether the innovation will benefit most from integrating an existing business-unit, or should look for autonomy, in a start-up mode. This can give birth to:

• A complete spin-off or a brand new business unit;
• An half-cast unit (or ambidextrous framework: “The Ambidextrous Organization” by Charles A. O’Reilly) which borrows certain assets of the core co, (branding, distribution channels, purchase conditions, partnerships), while preserving its agility, akin the ‘rapid innovation’ platform.

Several companies have set-up successfully participative innovation process, with some specific focuses:

• At Ubisoft, an idea box collects creative concepts from the international network of studios, with a strong emphasis on social features: exposure of idea’s owner, comments, etc… Collective intelligence benefits from differentiated roles: contributors are not the same as activators, the latter sustaining ideas’ flow.
• Renault Creative People fosters ideation: it is dedicated to “internal creativity” mission explains Lomig Unger. We ask people – all over the company – to propose ideas related to a specific theme, going from Frugal innovation to Biomimicry; then ideas are sorted, and the “feasible ones” are linked to the expert inside the company, and concurrently, 2 or 3 workshop are dedicated to original ideas; another channel is the “incubator”: in The Creative People Lab, handled by Mickaël Desmoulins, you will have help, and a place to explore, try, draft, prototype;
• IBM Jam orchestrates insights of employees across all continents; IBM inner crowdfunding platform provides to pilot employees $100 to invest in colleagues proposals, and fosters cooperation across departments and the globe;
• Airbus Protospace stresses on rapid prototyping, tells Vincent Loubière, collocating design and prototyping skills, materializing quickly emerging concepts, and ‘Leading by Demonstration‘;
• BNP Paribas emphasizes achievements as well: Aude Albert pitches its network of innovators competing for the Innovation Awards, which values implemented innovations; the winners can be considered as pilots, that can be further rolled-out all over the company;
• Alcatel-Lucent organizes an Entrepreneurial Bootcamp contest open to all employees according to the following process that Olivier Leclerc explains: online call for ideas, team building & dating event, creation of business plan with training / coaching supported by French Business School, pitch at local and global final event, incubation, and internal or external ventures;

• Safran Snecma Fab Lab welcomes every employee’s ideas points out Fabrice Poussière: it proposes a complete approach to turn idea into business, from ideation, to prototyping, experimenting, and testing the concept in customer’s hands;
• Seb Lab offers several modules that Jean-Christophe Simon details: Prospection, Creativity, Materialization, and Test: one can pick-up the module he needs, and then dedicated sessions are handled in one place, in one or two days time, with all necessary skills;
• Adobe settled an original Innovation Box: the Kickbox Programme; anyone with an idea can request a Kickbox. This contains instructions on how to approach developing and refining an idea, and it also includes a pre-paid credit card with $1,000 on it; out of 1,000 individuals went through all 6 stages, which amounted to 23 sets of ideas reaching the next ‘blue box’ stage of investment;
• I-Lab is an agile and accurate structure which aims at creating new business revenues at significant level within 15 years, inventing a fifth business unit at Air Liquide, presents Gregory Olocco.

Additional examples of fostering an innovation culture and letting the start-up spirit enter a large company, diversifying product portfolio and creating new revenue streams, can be found in the Innovation Toolbox post, which is already 4 years old: a great deal has happened since then in term of unleashing innovation!

Stay tuned for the next episode: Crossing Participative Innovation with Open Innovation (2/2)

image credits: netzwerk-medien-trainer.de, Numa Paris, Alcatel Lucent

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

Sophie Cohendet is passionate about innovative environments and has a strong interest for management innovation.

She is partner of LearnAssembly, a start-up who help companies to develop their entrepreneurial and digital culture to evolve positively in tomorrow’s world. LearnAssembly implements new pedagogical approachs (MOOCs, SPOC, blending Learning) in large corporations as well as schools and start-ups on topics related to innovation, entrepreneurship and digital. In her job, she has the chance to assist the French private-label biscuit manufacturer Groupe Poult (Freedom Incorporated Company), and was already working with this company as a consultant in Open Innovation prior to LearnAssembly.

Innovation management : Are start-ups free Incorporated ?

Agility, trust, autonomy, resilience , freedom of speech … have you ever noticed how the lexical field of free inc. borrow these words to the world of start-ups ?

If the words seem to be the same, what parallels can we really do between a start-up and a free inc. ? Isn’t a start-up a free inc. in itself ?

It is worth taking some time to answer this question. The similarities between start-ups and free inc. are actually numerous. However is the new generation of start-ups’ leaders really innovative in the way they run companies?

A free inc. (or free incorporated) can be defined as an organization where a large part of the employees have both freedom and responsibility to take any action they estimate useful for the company (and not an action triggered by a supervisor’s decision). In such organizations, hierarchy is reduced, organization charts are flat, monitoring and reporting have largely disappeared.

In France, FAVI, Poult, Chronoflex, Lippi and others are some examples of free inc.

Autonomy and trust

Free inc. rely on the management by trust. These organizations empower the employees and foster their autonomy (employees decide what activities, when, where, with who and how to achieve them).

As an example, objectives are no more given by the management as the employees set their own goals, the budget is no longer the cornerstone of performance management, there is no more individual variable remuneration, there is a total transparency of the economical results, the strategy is shared, internal meetings are accessible to all employees…

As a way a comparison, a start-up cannot really perform without autonomy and total trust between its employees, especially in its early days. The start-up’s limited resources are likely to influence this behavior, I would not say that autonomy and trust are a desire but rather a necessity. Are all the start-ups casting doubt on the founding principles of modern management? Certainly not.

Agility

Agility is a term that comes up very often in free inc. These companies put the customer at the center of their operations and work with teams in direct contact with the field (Editor’s note: some Free Incorporated like Favi and Poult are structured by cluster dedicated to specific customers or customers segments: each cluster is composed of all the necessery skills to achieve the job to be done for the customer) . These multi-disciplinary teams are able to detect all the weak signals of their fast-changing environment to innovate quickly and efficiently. Decision chains are reduced thanks to the autonomy given to teams and less hierarchical levels.

Agility is also a major concern of start-ups , especially with the introduction of agile methods (lean startup , Scrum , Kanban … ) to develop their flexibility, adaptability and proactiveness . These methods and their success are closely related to the existence of autonomous teams. These teams are able to evolve in the start-up’s uncertain environment and make the company much more resilient.

Agility is undoubtedly shared by both start-ups that free inc. Nevertheless, agility is also synonymous of the ability to identify weak signals in a broad competitive environment. In a free inc., executives, free from their monitoring and reporting activities, can spend their time outside the company to identify areas of risks and opportunities in their field and build a powerful ecosystem.

Most start-ups are agile in the sense that decisions are made quickly, much faster than in most other companies including those known as free inc. It is always vital to be able to change strategy quickly and it is key to constantly have several possible strategic options. Very few companies, free inc. or not, start-up or not have this ability.

Purpose

The agile company (startup as well as free inc.) is obsessed with finding purpose in the work of each employee . The importance given to topics like the vision, the culture and values in such companies ​​reflects this obsession.

In free inc., including those of significant size, these components are the results of a collaborative approach. Actually, it is fundamental to have a common project, a “reason for being ” shared by everyone as well as values ​​that employees can daily experiment and embody.

In both cases, the start-up and the free inc. tend to drop pyramidal management models and adopt network configurations so that everyone can find purpose in its work… Easy- you will say – when you are only a handful of employees as is often the case in a start-up !

(Editor’s note: one might add that the main purpose of the start-up is to find its business model, and to scale: building a common vision might be seen more like an enabler than an end in itself).

Skills rather than titles

Beyond this flattening of the traditional managerial pyramid, the emphasis is put on the roles, skills and behaviors of each employee rather than on its title. Both the start-up and free inc. are looking for more interdisciplinarity and struggle to decompartmentalize the company. Being a small team does not appear to decrease the difficulties and obstacles !

Innovation is everyone job

In a free inc. as well as in a start-up , innovation is considered to be everyone job. Indeed, creativity, freedom of speech, test & learn approach, sharing of ideas are fostered and encouraged in both cases . This approach seems however more difficult in large companies. How to engage and thus give time to all employees including those allocated to production tools without disturbing the company ?

And yet…

It is clear that start-up and free inc. share a common ground … and yet all start-ups are far from adopting innovative managerial models! As the business is growing, old habits come back: the managerial pyramid reappears, processes combined with a command & control approach rise up fairly quickly.

Real trigger from the top management

An innovative management model is necessarily triggered and backed by the top management to be sustainable…and often that’s not the case in a start-up. The leaders and founders may face difficulties when it comes to share the strategic decisions of ” their baby ” and let the teams decide which actions to take without systematically controlling them.

Transparent and collaborative decisions

Start-ups’ decision cycles are very short. Strategic decisions can be made with very few collaboration and in a non-transparent way, on the ground that it is key to decide and react quickly to a change… and that collaboration is too time-consuming!

(Editor’s note: the start-up leader archetype is often at the forefront and perceived as decision taker, mirroring the company he has sometimes created, when the Free Inc leader is modest, exemplary, and supporting a collective venture.)

Creativity

Creativity is actually everywhere in a start-up , yet the ability to not kill ideas in the bud and explore multiple options remains quite rare due to the very limited resources of the startup .

Sharing the created value

Finally, I would remind the difficulty that start-ups face in sharing the value created collectively. Pay policies and equity models in a start-up are still not aligned with the models adopted in free inc.

(Editor’s note: in other words, stock-options should be made accessible more widely in a start-up)

As a conclusion, beyond the same words, start-ups and free inc. are far from being twins and few start-ups will become free inc. ! The current generation of managers and leaders running these start-ups is still relatively conservative, still relying on traditional management methods. The work to be done, particularly for this generation of leaders will be long and intense, and the temptation to adopt pyramidal models when it comes to ‘structure and implement process ” in startup is very strong. We have just begun this work at LearnAssembly and see how the road is still long and bumpy !

image credits: Freedom Inc, memberclicks, smokejumperstrategy.com, Uber

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

Creating Structured Innovation, or How can you lead a successful programme? I provided a few answers during an interview with the team setting-up the Service Innovation event in London. Here are a few lessons about creating an innovation culture, turning user-centric, agile, open, and global, and letting innovation finds its flow!!

image credit: bigstockphoto.com

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

Digital is ubiquitous: it’s like a colander, digital drops are falling down from everywhere! Companies are organizing in a hurry to take the lead on digital transformation, and are putting up a Chief Digital Officer to take responsibility, and guide the company to the digital realm.

Customer centricity, and digital state of mind

According to Lubomira Rochet, L’Oréal CDO, there are 6 recurrent domains that CDOs are tackling: innovation, reinventing brand with digital, expending to e-commerce, offerings customization, leveraging of digital data, and widespreading digital culture.

Branding, customization, e-commerce, data, digital transformation surely drives customer centricity: ‘digital tools far from mass marketing, must be handled as a way to cater to the customer’ claims author and consultant Steve Yastrow.

In term of culture, digital seems a wake-up call that things aren’t gonna be the same anymore. Orange CEO Stéphane Richard explains in his book ‘Numériques’: ‘Digital reality has destroyed pyramidal model in one fell swoop. Today, senior managers are accessible, and this applies to me more than anyone. Management today is about achieving buy-in, motivating people, and educating them. Giving our customers a say, in design decisions, but at a the right time.

‘Digital is mindset, not technology’ observes Jane McConnell, Digital Workplace Advisor and Researcher. And it might entice someone to ‘unlearn’ in order acquire the digital mindset.

Then training plans for employees are massively rolled-out: ‘Digital for all’ is a digital literacy journey targeting the 100 000 Danone employees. Digital culture is instilled with external recruitment: UK Gov is bringing on board 100 new digital staff, referred to as “digital natives”, for communication and information tasks.

Companies are progressively acting that ‘digital shifts the fundamental relationship between workers and business, with no return’ analyzes enterprise architect and transformation consultant Dion Hinchcliffe.

CDOs invent their job everyday, designing bespoke processes that fit their company. They bring agility, test & learn, fast iteration, collaborative framework, project management into the corporate engine. One thing remains constant: the way they break out silos, and promote transversality.

Let’s go through some examples of digital roadmap recently unveiled by CDOs.

Mobile app, open data, API, and startups, mobile workforce at SNCF

Yves Tyrode, Chief Digital and Communication Officer at SNCF national railways company, presented last February ‘#DigitalSNCF‘. It’s the workplan to accelerate SNCF digitalization with a m€ 450 budget over 3 years. Main items are: personalizable and multimodal mobile app, 4G coverage to enable WiFi in the trains, open data (sharing trains timetables in real time, travellers flow -FluxSNCF-) and APIs to speed-up innovative ecosystem (fostering e-ticketing distribution through partners), codevelopment and data monetization, and 800 000 tablets for maintenance workers. m€ 30 will be allocated over 3 years to start-ups through new fund ‘Digital SNCF venture’. Digital accelerators will be opened in France and San Francisco to incubate start-ups working on big data, open data, design, and connected objects.

Customer experience, mobile app, big data, BtoB, employees and partners at Accor

Vivek Badrinah is Deputy Director, heading Marketing, Digital, Distribution, and IT at Accor. For the anecdote, like Yves Tyrode, Vivek is a former brilliant employee of Orange Innovation: it tends to prove that Orange is a recognized school for training Chief Digital Officer!

Vivek presented in October the ‘Leading Digital Hospitality’ plan to engage Accor digital transformation, with a budget of m€ 225 over 5 years. The approach is global. 4 programs are focused on customer benefits: Mobile first (a unique app to handle before, during, and after stay, and covering all brands: Ibis, Mercure, Novotel, Pullman…), Customer centric (customization), Seamless journey (e-payment, one click e-reservation), and  Mice and BtoB (for corporates and BtoB services). 2 programs target employees and partners: Employee friendly (tablets at the welcome desk, corporate social network), and Owner & Franchise centric (dynamic pricing). 2 programs support IT modernization: Infrastructure transformation, and Business intelligence & Analytics (‘big data’ including 42 millions of customer data).

Accor also acquired the start-up Wipolo, which develops a compagnon app for travelling.

Vivek added: ‘Disruptive digital players think beyond product innovation: they design an experience. To explain what we’re aiming at is more inspiring than to provide a requirement specification document’.

Social proximity, mobile workforce, open innovation and startups, living lab & data at La Poste

At La Poste French Post Office, the CEO himself, Philippe Wahl is on stage at EBG Digital Summit November 2014, to present how La Poste handles digital: ‘La poste is developing an innovation ecosystem in a world at a critical and extraordinary phase. What comes with digital creates opportunities for La Poste which is centered on human. We are forging a new pledge on op of mail: we want to be the proximity human factor, everywhere, and for everyone.’

Thus, with Facteo program, La Poste rolls out 90 0000 smartphones for its postmen, enabling them to extend their services to residentials: digital signature, QR code reader, and Digishot, a certified picture with location and time code. Postmen facilitate digitalization within a familiar customer relationship. Because this program was based on employees commitment, Philippe Wahl speaks of ‘entrepreneurs postmen’.

3 open innovation tools are in place: XAngeVC fund, Startinpost accelerator (24 start-ups per year) and LabPostal. As well as participative innovation with employees, and with managers: 7500 managers were recently gathered to build together a strategic vision of the future.

Data is a cornerstone of digital transformation, to unify internal operations, and better cater to the needs of its customers. Living lab is another tool used to refine post office interior design.

Big data, start-ups, and mobile app at Axa

We’ve talked on how Axa is accelerating its digital transformation by mean of open innovation, and how it tests an original approach, by innovating like fish schools. Start-ups not only bring additional creativity and skills: they stimulate digital transformation.

Digital transformation governance

CDOs best peers shoud be CMO and CIO: ‘There’s a focus that the CMOs take, a focus that the CIOs take and the focus of the CDO that really makes for an extraordinarily strong partnership in a world that continues to get much more complex’ according to Tricia Blair, Chief Digital Officer at Lincoln Financial Group. She oversees Web, social media and mobile technology, a frequent ‘multichannel’ focus for CDOs. Earning company-wide commitment, designing a digital roadamp and corresponding KPIs, experimenting, mobilizing experts when needed, and speaking business language, are some keys to success.

Digital Transformation does not always rely on the shoulders of a CDO: digital governance is integrated in business lines at Société Générale where digital transformation stresses on cloud, big data, tablets for employees, and corportae social network. At UKTV, they don’t have a CTO because ‘everyone there is in charge of its own digital future’ says UKTV Chief Executive, Darren Childs.

These trends might show that CDO is a position born to disappear! ‘The aim is to integrate digital technology into corporate DNA, so that it becomes second nature, and people no longer question its necessity’ decrypts Orange Céline Louis at Le Web. She quotes Michael Aidan, Danone CDO, describing its goal as to ‘break down silos, change mentalities, and make digital technology a part of everything’. Once its mission accomplished, CDO could well vanish into thin air.

Is it a transformation, or a revolution?

Digital is seen by some as a more fundamental change than a transformation, a new era of continuous cycle of changes affecting business model and relationships between corporate, customers and the overall ecosystem, and within the corporation, among employees:

• Orange speaks of a digital revolution underway, where new technologies apppear everyday;
• ‘To some degree, every company will have to become a math house’ predicts Ram Charam, veteran adviser to many Fortune 500 companies and co-author of the bestselling book, Execution. He emphasizes ‘the power of algorithms and data, and the way actual users are increasingly interacting directly with the company’;
• Business Model in digital era unfolds in multiple dimensions: value, interface, platform, organization, and revenue; ‘it’s not enough to adapt digital into your business: rather adapt your business to digitization!’  concludes Tom Wentworth, chief marketing officer at Acquia. It’s the rise of business moments, whose opportunity the company has to seize dynamically; even more, shall managers strike out a seemingly guaranteed highway on to a narrow path, and harm at first conservative outcome in order to reach later a possibly outrageous hit,
• Michel Volle explains that digital leads to a new economy, called ‘iconomy’, an economy based on skills, where command chain is transformed.

Pivot enterprise, and the crowd

What is at stake with digitalization is the new role of the corporation: company turns into a communication node in its ecosystem, and a pivot enterprise.

In this network of which the corporation is a part, one can imagine activate the intelligence of the many, with crowdsourcing. Why not tackle into the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to define the digital roadmap, giving digital spirit to the the digital transformation, as suggests Bluenove CEO, Martin Duval?

image credit: cio.com, Gov.UK, SNCF, Accor, Wipolo, La Poste, Orange, nonprofitkinect.org, Fortune, isbe.org.uk

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

Start-ups selected by SeedStarsWorld for the final competition in Geneva have pretty much energy to spare. It just jumped out at you during the two days of mentoring I had the chance to complete there, within a team of experienced entrepreneurs. First of all, I want to thank SeedsStarsWorld team for this wonderful opportunity, and congratulate them for the impressive organization achieved.

SeedStarsWorld is not so much about mindblowing innovations, ‘coming out of the blue’: start-ups screened from emerging markets address real problems for real people, from e-commerce, payroll management, money transfer, to recycling, travelling, education, jobs, and smart city daily services. They differentiate by a better execution compared to poorly handled existing services. They have their hearts and focus in the right place:

• ScandidApp is a good illustration: it is probaly not the first price comparison app in India, but it facilitates comparison with its handy barcode scanning, provides the best experience according to GooglePlay ratings, and its partnership with a major smartphone manufacturer to embed ScandidApp natively is an unrivaled asset: it’s all about execution!

• Feesheh from Jordan caters for the untapped market of musicians in the Midle-East with a one-stop-shop, presenting Arabic listings and oriental instruments; they stand out on best price, and short delivery;

• OkHi is born from its environment: just like mobile money soared from the lack of bank accounts in Africa, OkHi is working on the problem of unknown addresses that is widespread in his country, Kenya; it suggests a slick work-around by giving every smartphone a postal address. As in the Jugaad way, necessity is the mother of invention!

• Washbox24 switches the pain of coin-operated laundry to simplicity: you just drop off your clothes in the WB24 locker, notify, and pick it up  when it’s ready;
• In a time where price competition is fierce, Prisync helps every merchant to have an updated eye on online retail price, and makes its solution remarkably self-service for any user retailer thanks to API.

Mentors at SeedStarsWorld semifinals draw start-ups attention on customers, sales, marketing, competitive advantage, and scale. One thing that fuels the start-ups nominees is that they actually deal with customers, iterate their innovation based on their feedback, engaging in a continuous loop of improvement. Happy customers is not always enough, but unhappy customers will surely prevent you from succeeding.

Out of the 36 start-ups gathered in Lausanne for the coaching sessions, 10 were finally selected to pitch in Geneva at the Final Event hosted by Lift Conference.  Salarium end-to-end payroll system from the Philippines was designed as the Winner (and won an equity investment of up to USD 500K from Seedstars), OkHi gained the Public Vote, and  Green Energy from Nigeria was awarded for the most Innovative Startup, with its exploratory process converting solid waste to petroleum products and electrical energy.

Nevertheless, all participants would bring home a lot, from the sharing of experience across entrepreneurs -an exceptional time-, and from the meetings arranged between the thirty-six finalists and investors.

The 10 finalists were:

1. Singapore’s 6Degrees, a self updating phone book, connected with your social networks;
2. Peruvian travel platform Busportal, to find, compare and buy bus tickets in Latin America;
3. Crowdfunding concert organizer Krowdpop from Seoul;
4. Nairobi’s OkHi, a geolocalized address book linked to smartphones;
5. The Brazilian hardware light plug-in device Ploog, letting you access safely your desktop on the go;
6. India’s ScandidApp barcode scan app to compare prices;
7. Salarium, from the Philippines, automating payroll service, and offering a topnotch mobile version;
8. Yerevan mobile learning solution Sololearn, mastering programming while playing;
9. Casual gaming for mobile, studio The Other Guys from Argentina;
10. Bangkok’s Washbox24, an automatized laundry service on the go.

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

Incubators and accelerators

‘Common law’ separates incubators from accelerators: well-known incubators are Paris Region Lab, accomodating 150 start-ups over Paris, or La Ruche, a coworking space for ‘social business’. Incubators offer coworking spaces, where several start-ups work concurrently, transforming idea into elegant design and slick customer experience, defining their value proposition, and embodying it into preliminary prototype, MVP or demonstrator.

Accelerators assume that you have a product, and initial customers base: the direction is clear, you are ready to embark to the second step, searching for the multiplication effect: boosting sales, distribution, marketing, and branding, in parallel with sharpening a knocking busines model.

Numa Paris

Numa is the unmissible location in Paris for digital start-ups. Like the different stages of a rocket, it covers the progressive steps of a project, from the free meeting space at the ground floor, coworking at the first floor, design thinking and open innovation with large corporation with Data Shaker at the second floor, to the third floor and the Camping, the well-known accelerator created in 2011. The last floor is the large Terrace dedicated to Demo days, and various events and meet-ups. It’s truely a vibrant building for networking and creativity. Numa has recently refined its coaching proposition, extending its support from idea to product shaping, even targeting start-ups having succeeded in their fundraising, and this across all industries.

Startinpost

Laurent Lipiner joined Startinpost in 2014. Startinpost is the corporate accelerator of La Poste, French mail service. It helps innovative start-ups with a proof of concept and revenue over 500 k€, and focuses on 3 thematics: e-commerce, local services and connected objects, and digital trust. With a 12 m€ budget (of which 8 m€ funding), it’s one of the largest corporate accelerator in Europe.

“Startinpost is both simple and complex” anlyszes Laurent: simple in its value proposition of coaching start-ups, leveraging all the strengths of La Poste (17 000 points of presence, 2 000 salesforces, 100 000 mobile workforce) to open channels and reach customers, with a 10 multiplication factor target, and complex as achieving business synergies, and finding a common interest between start-ups and La Poste takes time. Cooperating with start-ups is part of La Poste Digital Transformation plan over its 3 businesses: mail, delivery, and banking. The challenge for Startinpost is to be as agile as the start-ups, and to translate innovation’s attributes from the outside to the inside. Human factor is essential. Startinpost stands out with its ongoing coaching (at the opposite of cohorts mode), over one year, for almost no fee, with a direct access to market and customers.

A 3 months experimentation phase can be funded by Startinpost, while a business sponsor is actively looked for. If the result is positive, the acceleration phase works on embedding the offering, intense deployment, and marketing exposure. Its’ a win-win: sponsor promotes the benefits of the new offering, and every effort is made to demonstrate the value generated. The offering takes part into the sales speech. The end of the experimentation is favourable to an autoevaluation of the entrepreneur, which will result in bespoke coaching, with an appropriate range of mentors and consultants. At the end of the roll-out, La Poste has a call option on the fundraising : might it be exerciced, it will take place with a much better knowledge of the start-up.

5 start-ups are being accelerated since the last 6 months. Success stories allievate progressively internal resistance. Startinpost scouts the market in every direction, conferences as well as tech.eu, to feed the pipe, and on behalf of La Poste business units.

Orange Fab

Orange Fab is a network of corporate accelerators initiated by Telco company Orange. It covers various locations: San Francisco, Paris, Warsaw, Asia (Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei), Tel Aviv, and Abidjan. It 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.

Let’s hear the testimony of Pascal Latouche, head of Orange Fab France. Orange Fab France has accelerated 7 start-ups so far, and accomplished 3 partnerships with Orange business over 5 start ups. The objective is to reach a 100% success rate. Only startups that seem attractive for Orange business units are accepted:  the primary focus of the coaching is to put the start-up in a position to achieve a partnership with one of Orange line of business. Then, because Orange Fab France is part of an international network, a second step is to export the start up in different regions. “It is not acceleration, it is propulsion!” says Pascal. There is no acceleration fee. Every kind of French start ups are welcomed at Orange Fab France, since a business unit is ready to work with the start-up, detecting an opportunity or willing to initiate a pilot. Mentors bring technical skills (IT and Telco infrastructure), distribution channels, packaging of the start-up offering with telco services, relationship with media, and include investors.

Lisbon Challenge

As Inès Dartiguenave puts it: “in 2015, Lisbon was promoted « European capital for entrepreneurship » and it is totally deserved!” As a matter of fact, this booming city recently unveiled tremendous start-ups. Lisbon Challenge can proudly presents itself as «Europe’s most international acceleration program »: among the selected start-ups, more than 70% come from outside the country, and top mentors are also joining this vibrant ecosystem from all over the world. This accelerator is part of Beta-I, which can be compared to the NUMA in Paris, especially as this organization inaugurates a 9-floor building entirely dedicated to entrepreneurship and innovation. Keep an eye on this accelerator, acting at a European level.

MEST (Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology)

Here is how Fast Company sums-up perfectly MEST genuine proposition: “Described by tech blogger and Ushahidi cofounder Erik Hersman as a “finishing school for tech startups,” MEST trains future entrepreneurs from Ghana and Nigeria by putting them through a two-year program that blends an MBA-style education with training in software development. Founded by Norwegian software entrepreneur Jørn Lyseggen, the school also invests in the best business ideas and teams that emerge from the training program, providing developers with $50,000 to $250,000 in seed funding for their businesses. MEST selects around 40 top university graduates each year, representing less than 2% of the applications it receives. Since its inception in 2008, more than 200 entrepreneurs have graduated from its program, and it has invested more than $15 million in African startups. Two of its Ghanaian companies—Saya Mobile, which provides a WhatsApp-style messaging service for feature phones, and ClaimSync, which digitizes medical records—were acquired by foreign technology firms last year. In the future, MEST plans to develop a hub of incubators across the continent.”

iHUB

Another pioneer in entrepreneuship is the coworking space iHub of Kenya, one of the most advanced African country in digital innovation, the birthplace of mobile money m-pesa. Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community is an open space for the technologists, investors, tech companies and hackers in the area. This space is a tech community facility with a focus on young entrepreneurs, web and mobile phone programmers, designers and researchers. The traditional story tells that legendary Ushahidi and Brck ventures have their origin in this creative space.

More on accelerators?

• Have a look at  ‘Accelerator Summit conferences videos: https://numaparis.ubicast.tv/channels/#european-accelerator-summit
• Also: 20 most active tech start-ups incubators in India: Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi.

Selection criteria

There are some good writing from Steve Spiesser on ‘how to due diligence an accelerator’, with comments from Netease Technology, and accurate check-list from Entrepreneur.

My viewpoint encompasses 4 angles:

• Networking: is the accelerator relevant to your industry, and can he provide contacts, open doors, facilitate business relationships? Do the Alumni, events attracting PR/Media, other companies in class, investors attending Demo Day, and further investing, match naturally your activity, or will you be more like ‘lost in translation’ in this accelerator surroundings? Is there an international roadshow or network? Review success stories and failures, and contact Alumni to get an accurate view;
• Mentoring: what is your opinion on coachs and mentors? Are you comfortable with the relationship you have with them? Do you anticipate ‘whiplash mode’ or coaching mode? Do staff and backers have experience in your industry and entrepreneurship, do some Angel Investors serve as mentors? Assess time spent with mentors, and corresponding value, and  compare to the time left to develop customers base, and improve product.
• Capital and funding: how much equity is worth the acceleration? Less than 6 to 8%? What is the funding success rate? Is it a win-win collaboration? David Cohen, founder and CEO of Techstars says: “The accelerator should invest and only win when the company wins, this is what defines a true accelerator.”
• Services: where is the location, is it aligned with your ecosystem? do the accelerator offer offices, space, IT, and maybe more importantly, follow-up after funding?

Future trends: international networking, open innovation, and ideation

Does the future of accelerators rely on vertical markets, linked to local ecosystem, and international networking? That’s some of the 10 evolutions foreseen by Bryan Bulte, a cofounder of Seed Sumo, a Texas-based start-up accelerator: “Start-up accelerators will collaborate to share resources, money, and know-how to help each other succeed. We are seeing this with:

• Global Accelerator Network: GAN is a network of 50 accelerators across six continents in 63 cities that Techstars launched as part of the White House Startup America Initiative. GAN is the ‘global champion of the seed-stage, mentorship-driven accelerator model and its goal is to support the top accelerators that grow top companies’;
• Another networking initiative is Atalanta, which proposes a transnational accelerator networks acceleration in Europe;
• Copass (sprout at La Mutinerie)  is a worldwide federation of coworking spaces;
• StartupBootcamp: industry focused (Fintech, Mobile, Smart Transportaion and Energy, E-&Mcommerce), it operates globally with 10 accelerators, and 9 locations.

Open innovation with corporations is another hot topic, and we see a soaring diversity of collaborations. Two recent quirky examples:

• Corporates set-up physical innovation spaces named ‘Colab’ where “start-ups can work effectively, and where corporate emissaries can understand startup needs first hand and work to provide value through connections, mentoring and resources” suggests Ricardo dos Santos. This looks very much like the Hub:raum, the incubator implemented by Deutsche Telekom in Berlin. The space can be shared “between startups and internal innovation teams of the same company – best to learn to innovate like startups by innovating with (or at least alongside) startups!”;
• BNP Paribas Yoann Jaffre just opened Innov&Connect, an accelerator associating 11 start-ups with ETI (companies between SME and large corporations) for co-experimentaion, and design of creative projects; teams can be hosted in dedicated spaces WAI (We Are Innovative) stimulating creativity. In the same trend, some major Finnish companies are coaching 7 start-ups in a Corporate Venture Program.

Finally, creativity gets also accelerated on ideation platform like Imagine with Orange, both a crowdsourcing platform for innovation, and a launchpad for entrepreneurs: share your ideas, Oraneg is helping you to give them life! And innovation & FabLab ‘learning by doing’ waves are entering into schools and universities with FacLab, CampusFab, Téléfab, PMCLab, and De Vinci Fablab(w)… Game is on!

Previous episode: Start-up, find your accelerator coach (1/2)

image credits: Numa, Startinpost, Lisbon Challenge, Orange fab, Mest, IHub

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

Master of Acceleration: the first finding

Whether you are a start-up or a large corporation, finding your way in the realm of incubators and accelerators has become always more complicated as the ecosytem keeps growing. Hereafter I would like to review not a comprehensive benchmark, but a sample of a few players I had the chance to listen to, and draw some criteria to help you make the choice that fits you. That’s actually the first finding: there is no absolute ‘master of acceleration’. Indeed there are various value propositions, and different team personalities supporting them.

Incubators and accelerators

‘Common law’ separates incubators from accelerators: well-known incubators are Paris Region Lab, accomodating 150 start-ups over Paris, or La Ruche, a coworking space for ‘social business’. Incubators offer coworking spaces, where several start-ups work concurrently, transforming idea into elegant design and slick customer experience, defining their value proposition, and embodying it into preliminary prototype, MVP or demonstrator.

Accelerators assume that you have a product, and initial customers base: the direction is clear, you are ready to embark to the second step, searching for the multiplication effect: boosting sales, distribution, marketing, and branding, in parallel with sharpening a knocking busines model.

The fisrt question to ask yourself  will then be: what is the status of my project, and do I need more of Design support or Business acceleration?

Juan Hernandez is cofounder of ‘L’accélérateur‘: it was created at the end of 2011, to found, and coach pre-seed start-ups. Juan explains that incubation allows a product to emerge, while acceleration goes deeper into business, market entry, commercialization and competitive advantages. ‘L’accélérateur’ provides 4 months of intense coaching, and support in the long tem, linked to a stake in the start-up. ‘L’accélérateur’ is fine for an entrepreneur who has gone half-way, having realized the complexity of his venture, and who’s willing an helpful hand to go the other way. ‘L’accélérateur’ brings funding, from 25 k to 200 k€. It coaches on business and operations, roadmap, as well as daily issues such as hiring a financial controller. It works on entrepreneurial momentum, prompting to ask oneself the right questions, assessing the situation, understanding problems roots, unfolding opportunities: a lot of small details that make a difference. Networking is vivid, especially on digital, opening doors to meet partners, customers, and investors. ‘L’accélérateur’ has helped completing 40 fundraisings in 2,5 years, for an amount of 20 m€. Services are paid through equity, cash provided helps to adjust a 10 to 20% stake.

Jérôme Masurel is CEO and founder of 50 Partners, a French incubator funded by 50 successful IT entrepreneurs, which concentrates on coaching a selected handful of start-ups. 50 partners offering starts with coworking spaces at reasonable price, with a partnership with Paris Region Lab. Then, the accelerator team provides 4 to 6 months coaching, with or without stake participation. Mentoring can last up to 2,5 years! They set up a mentoring structure made of several entrepreneurs from 50 Partners. 3 corporate partners, of which Publicis, bring additional support. The 50 partners share their experience as entrepreneurs with proven track record: one of them is Frédéric Mazzella, founder of Blablacar. The kind of entrepreneur they feel comfortable with is the humble type, looking for a launchpad, someone with a willingness and ability to learn. “Alone, I go faster; together, we go further” explains Jérôme. 100% of the projects have been founded. 50 Partners also belongs to a network of incubators: one start-up can spend 2 months at another incubator place: thus sush.io left for an acceleration at Plug and Play.

Y Combinator

Gaetan Gachet is VP Business Development at Algolia, a French start-up for cloud search engine. Gaetan went through Y Combinator acceleration. He shares candidly his memories of this period: the team moved to the Silicon Valley to attend the 3,5 months session from January to March 2014. Primary focus was to define a metric: Algolia picked-up ‘sales’ and defined a 10% growth objective. Y Combinator invested k$ 80, and took a stake (7%).

Y Combinator does not provide office or coach: they let people organize themsleves. They provide access to a unrivaled network: one can meet Air B&B or Dropbox founders. There are around 800 Y Combinator Alumni: they know a wide range of problems that entrepreneurs frequently meet, and are willing to help. Every Tuesday a dinner bring together Alumni and start-ups. This 24/24 7/7 period builds the team, stimulates creativity and cooperation, with constant interactions, fosters solidarity, and leads them on how to work together seamlessly, and iterate. “We could feel the sense of urgency, as time to go back to France was approaching” remembers Gaetan.

At the end of the period, 60 start-ups present at Demo Day in front of 600 investors: all were successful in their fundraising. “We were technology oriented, we became a true service, facilitating access to content underexposed or misaddressed” observes Gaetan. Y Combinator is not so much about coaching large cohorts of around 80 start-ups, it’s about bringing you a label, which is not easy to catch (selection rate of 2%, 5 French start-ups among the cumulated 800 start-ups having attended Y Combinator), and fostering personal human development. Since 2005, Y Combinator has trained over 650 start-ups, 17 of which are valuated over m$ 100 each.

Techstars

Techstars has also a very specific approach: it’s a unicorne just like Y Combinator. They have a network of 10 units over the US, and one in London. Techstars provides $118,000 in seed funding, intensive mentorship over 4 months, and a network of mentors and alumni for 7-10% equity in your company. Techstars is opening incubation spaces for corporations on industrial vertical, like Sports with Nike or US mail.

Y combinator compared to 500 Startups

Milan Thakor has gone through both accelerators in 2014, and pictures a thorough comparison between both accelerators. “Go to 500 Startups for distribution and community, Y Combinator for focus and partners.” he says. “Y combinator addresses elite and growth, while 500 Startups is more scrappy and about building foundation’.

Stay tuned for our next episode: Start-up, find your accelerator coach 2/2

image credits: stockport.gov.uk, Wave BNP Paribas, L’accélérateur, 50 Partners, Y Comninator, 500 startups

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

Digital might be a cliff for AXA, or an opportunity to reinvent itself. Think of collaborative economy applied to insurance: what happens to AXA business model when insurance can be subscribed in peer to peer mode, like we have for loan and with crowdsourcing?

Therefore Axa has developed several initiatives to capture innovation from the outside and bring it to the inside, in order to spark its businesses of tomorrow: not the ‘one big day’ for innovation, rather a continuous approach, ‘innovating like fish schools’.

Guillaume Cabrere, AXA Lab Director, gently guides us through these initiatives, in addition to Raphael Krivine, Head of Digital Banking at AXA BANQUE, in charge of @SOON.

Developing digital culture means acculturation with start-up spirit, working with operational teams at AXA on the digital customer journey, enticing delegation and tackling business opportunities, challenging status quo, and seeking for growth relay, in a company historically quite driven by financial KPIs, and ROI oriented. Various Axa lines of business are involved (Property & Casualty Insurance, Life  & Savings, Health, Proection), crossed with multiple Distribution channels.

Some budget is available to support pilot projects, to remove bottlenecks in the entity which has to provide human resources in the pilot, and spark innovation fire. Pilot acts as a proof of concept, a market test, and a preparation to scale. 4 POC are targeted per year, including quick wins like reusing Facebook CRM tool, Custom Audience, or testing customized emailing based on social networks personal data with Hearsay Social platform.

While AXA Lab covers San Francisco area and various digital trends, Data Innovation Lab is focused on Big Data, and based near Paris, within the cradle of AXA online activities (Axa Global Direct). AXA Direct is a business familiar with low margins, which can benefit significantly from Big Data advances. Data Innovation Lab and AXA Direct interact closely on risk analysis, fraud detection, and a small R&D team has been allocated to online activities.

AXA  Global Direct and Paris Region Lab, Paris network of incubators, have also recently launched an incubator dedicated to ‘Smart Data for Customer Intelligence’, for start-ups to experiment creative concepts with the support of AXA Global Direct teams, and develop partnerships.

AXA Seed Factory

AXA Seed Factory leads AXA seed funding activities. It manages a €10M fund in France. AXA Seed Factory just closed their first deal with a US-incorporated airfare prediction and optimization technology company: FlyR, originally sourced by AXA Lab.

AXA Participative Innovation Program

AXA Participative Innovation Program is an internal call for ideas on specific business challenges. Best ideas get funding, they are turned into prototypes at Paris Lab, with a view to reach a Minimum Viable Product within 4 months. Ideas come from the corporate as well from the business lines. 2 campaigns are handled each year, and 4 ideas were selected at the first campaign.

It’s bringing fresh air for creativity, and the opportunity to leverage AXA resources to extend entrepreneurial visibility.

Soon AXA Banque

Soon AXA Banque is a mobile banking service specifically designed for tech-savvy youth, to help them monitor their expenses, geolocalizing their payments (turning them into nice memories!), managing its investments, enabling money transfer with Paypal, expressing both fun and confidence through a slick interface (smileys on expenses!).

Outlook

Digital is an opportunity for AXA to enter a new era, and for that purpose, rather than the Big Bang of innovation, it’s a multiple initiatives approach that has been adopted: innovating like fish schools!

image redits: Axa, artefactgroup.com, redorbit.com

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

Aude Albert is Innovation Project Manager at BNP Paribas (Prospective & Transformations Department within Corporate Communication). Her mission is to develop the BNP Paribas Innovation Community: sharing best practices and business watch, facilitating connections, leading transversal projects, in cooperation with business lines’ Heads of Innovation. She explains for us the various initiatives developed to foster a culture of innovation, heading to a Group Innovation Ecosystem.

Innovation Awards

Learning Expeditions bring the innovation laureats in innovation trip: latest journey was about crowdfunding, and gathered 30 participants. An additional approach on participative innovation and ideation has been developed with Jump platform.

Innovation mapping

Innovation does not rely on a central entity: each unit has developed its patch according to its needs and context. Thus, multiple approaches have been tested, and many ‘best practices’ can be shared. The first tool one can bring to the community is a map of the ecosystem, sharing the various initiatives. It started with a mapping of the innovation initiatives in retail banking, and has been completed at a group scale with the Corporate & Institutional Banking and Investment Solutions inputs.

This digital tool is like a compass for innovation, made of innovation bubbles which can be incubation structures, tech and creativity labs, partners like Partech Shaker accelerator, innovation frameworks. One click on a bubble provides useful contacts, and projects list.

In a nutshell, think, act, and mix internal initiatives with external world, over 4 axes: awareness, ideation, proof of concept & test, recognition.

‘Heads of Innovation’ network

Each unit has named a representative for innovation. At BNP Paribas Cardif, it’s a team of 3 people and a lab. The network amounts to 30 innovation leaders, and people involved in innovation is much more. Managing the network is about finding quick wins, with a consensus-building and bottom up approach: for instance, a creativity workshop was tested in 2014, and has become a training offering. Meetings with the network are focused on operational opportunities, concrete topics, information circulation, mentoring and sharing best practices…, as the Innovation Barcamp planned on Quarter 1 2015.

The new collaborative platform crossing cooperation with social networking could be a future tool, where one could expose his skills and interests in innovation.

One hot discussion is on open innovation and co creation with start-ups. The Innov & Connect program is an initiative to enrich service for ETI customers: topics selection, call for projects involving start-ups, and completing proof of concepts is a first big step to enlarge our start-ups network and accelerate collaboration.

Setting-up and managing a network of innovators

In line with Aude’s experience, I had the chance to participate to an Innovation Barcamp last July, and to a discussion about innovators’ network.

“What are the new modes for developing and supporting innovators in the field?” was the question raised.

• Define context and objectives of innovation endeavour: degree of urgency, innovation cycle (short/long), is innovation in the core activity or is an evolution, mission statement, engagement letter, and roadmap;
• Identify skills and profiles wanted: leadership (to create a movement, to communicate toward C-level), innovation profile (can be a facilitator who provides a framework, or a serial innovator, leaning forward creativity), professional pathway within the company (what will I become after this innovation project is completed?), and a breeding ground of innovators;
• Specify the innovator’s role in his business unit: act as a relay for the central innovation division or innovation amabassor, detect and share local innovations, let thrive innovation culture & overview projects locally, connect with the ecosystem locally, particpate to training and meetings held centrally;
• Think of motivation levers: time allocation, protecting sponsor (encouraging risk culture, tolerance for failure), resources, recognition and reward, training, enticement to innovation, playful spirit, project stop (‘celebrate failure’);
• Set-up innovation framework: nursery / incubator / accelerator / corporate venture for intra-preneurship, dedicated innovation cell or office for innovation (like a tourism office), facilitation dynamics (challenge for ideas, business plan competition, innovation tournament, employee crowdfunding), process to reintegrate proof of concept into the core business lines (upstream involvement of BUs in the innovation project, modular innovation design), innovation portfolio (incremental innovation, transversal projects across business units, new domains to investigate, permission for disruptive innovation), resources staffing, tools (innovation passport / tutorial, coaching, serious game).

image credits: BNP Paribas, Service Design Research, Fotolia, Seattle-business

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