The 3 teams a corporate needs to innovate like a startup (3 min video)

There's a lot of leaders and CEOs at the moment who are looking for faster change. One of the things they're doing is they're asking their organisation to come up with more innovation. It reminds me of a situation that I used to see all the time in food companies. When a food company wants to innovate, they start off in a kitchen, a chef kind of environment and they come up with ideas that fit current trends externally, and what people are wanting, and health and things like that. These chefs come up with all these creative ideas. After they've come up with a few, there's some form of prioritisation and decision around which one is going to the factory to get scaled up. When it goes to the factory to get scaled up, the chefs aren't the right team to get that happening. The right team are food technologists. Those food technologists use their skills and abilities to fiddle with the formulas and the ingredients and the pace of the production line and they need to oversee and monitor, and essentially take it from something small into something a lot bigger. They interact between the chefs and they interact between the production team.

Now this is a very similar situation to many businesses, where you leaders and CEOs are standing in front of everyone and saying, "Hey, we need more innovation. We want you to change stuff. We want you to take more risks." I don't think that's the right approach because we need your small team of entrepreneurial people called intrapreneurs to be the chefs that come up with the creative ideas, and then they need to go through some sort of prioritisation and resourcing. Then there's another group that needs to scale them up into your core business. The core business doesn't want to change stuff all the time. Those people are experienced and skilled. They don't have this change orientation that these intrapreneurs have. The scalers take it from here and get it into your core. It's not the right way to go about it, to stand up in front of everyone and say, "Hey we want you all to change, all to be more innovative, all to take more risk," when it applies to different sets of people different ways.

You've got three groups of people. You've got your intrapreneurs, they want to change everything even when it's not broken. They want to change things all the time. You need them right now because you need to change your organisation. Then you’ve got people who can take those ideas and work with them, and work them into your core business. Then you've got the core teams that need to get stuff to customers all the time, the day to day stuff can't just stop. It's the bulk of where all your revenue and profit comes from right now. But this is where your stuffs going to come from tomorrow.

Think of your organisation in three teams. Find these guys, the Intrapreneurs, resource them so they find your future.