Last Exit: Trust – How to Build New Companies in Eye-to-Eye Partnerships

When building a new company or startup, it is important that everyone involved in the partnership see eye-to-eye. No matter how you define the structure, partnership, or governance of your venture, the only thing that keeps things running when two or more parties are involved is trust. All of the parties must be able to trust each other. In…

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Psychological Safety for High-Performing Teams

The highest-performing teams have one thing in common: psychological safety, the belief that you won’t be punished when you make a mistake. Psychological safety allows for moderate risk-taking, speaking your mind, creativity, and sticking your neck out without fear of having it cut off — all of which are essential for innovation. Especially in…

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Selecting Your Corporate Startups for Post-Crisis Bounce-Back

How many new businesses has your company built up over the last 3-5 years? And if you did, what is their actual impact? Chances are, your corporation knows how to generate ideas. Most likely even more ideas that can ever be implemented. Yet innovation ultimately is not about ideas – it is about capturing value from new offerings in the form of…

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Testing Business Ideas: The Why, What and How

David J. Bland set out to help fix a problem that seven out of ten products face: their failure to deliver on expectations when they launch. David believes that systematically testing new business ideas will dramatically reduce the risks that products face when entering the market. As co-author of Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid…

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People (Also) Make The Difference in Innovation Management

The evidence is clear: it is the people who make the difference in innovation. In his talk recently during Innov8rs Connect - Talent & Teams, Peter Daels concentrates on two particular trends in innovation management: the ambidextrous approach to innovation and people-centric operations. He then goes on to explain why people are the greatest…

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Fruit, Tree and Soil: Innovating and Incubating in Large Organizations

Innovation is a tricky word to talk about. Any time you bring up innovation, everyone’s mind goes in different directions. For your business, innovation might involve ad-hoc, disruptive projects done by teams and leaders with strange titles and fantastical project names. But for others, innovation may be a more holistic, integrated disruption…

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It’s More Fun To Be A Pirate In The Navy

When Steve Jobs said that it was ‘more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy’, he was highlighting the fact that large companies are much slower to respond to change than startups. This is the speedboat versus oil tanker conundrum. The bureaucracy that runs many established companies is inadvertently designed to create inertia. This is not…

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Cultivating The Soil for Organizational Transformation

Despite massive investments of time and money, innovation remains a frustrating pursuit in many companies. Innovation and transformation initiatives frequently fail, and intrapreneurs have a hard time sustaining their efforts. Driving change in large organizations often feels like the loneliest job in the world: working 80h weeks, facing the…

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Corporate Venturing: How to Boost Speed While Reducing Costs

Since 2010, corporate venturing has been emerging at speed (with a 42% increase between 2010 and 2015) through many mechanisms, such as venture clients, venture builders, scouting missions, challenges prizes, and corporate accelerators. Now the corporate-startup honeymoon phase is over, innovation leaders look for data so they can make better…

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[Innov#8] Innovation Accounting: A New Scoreboard To Measure Innovation Performance

#1 Innovation Accounting: A New Scoreboard To Measure Innovation Performance Unlike conventional financial metrics and reports, a good innovation accounting system can identify a company’s disruption risk, outline the specific use of a company’s growth assets, abstract information, and improve the innovation ecosystem. Here's why it's time for a…

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Getting Fired & 6 Other Successful Intrapreneur Exits

An intrapreneur exit is not straightforward When a startup entrepreneur is successful their final destination rarely deviates from three endpoints: they get acquired, go public, or stay autonomous and grow organically. But for a corporate intrapraneur there is no clear definition of a successful exit. The normal big company accolades of a…

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Innovation Accounting: A New Scoreboard To Measure Innovation Performance

Financial reports have become unuseful for investors. Accounting is dead. Long live accounting? In his new book Innovation Accounting, Dan Toma, one of the keynote speakers at Innov8rs Barcelona, concludes conventional financial reports won't provide investors and leaders with the intelligence they need when measuring innovation performance. Most…

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