TheThreePercent

Here is what I have been doing with Best Buy most of this year.  Some great things have come out of the Team upStart program so far, which combines aspects of IBM’s Extreme Blue and YCombinator.

upStart gives individuals inside large companies and universities a chance to prove new businesses while developing their entrepreneurial skills during an intensive ten week live/work experience.

Check out the video at:  http://videocenter.iambestbuy.com/Project_upStart.html

For more information about Team upStart, send me an email or contact me through LinkedIn.

This is the twelfth in the series on managing collaborative innovation. Click here for the Beginning of the Series

There are three seemingly unsolvable problems with collaborative business innovation.  The first problem involves needing to know in advance whether another party truly has the insights, resources and capabilities to fill the gaps in your intentions.  The second is needing to know before even sharing your identity whether the other party is likely to take the knowledge of your intentions and use it against you.  The third, and by far the most difficult, is understanding beforehand how the other party’s intentions will change given knowledge of your own.

Companies deal with these problems mainly through informal means.  As the case of Cirque Du Soleil illustrates, some industries handle informal methods of collaborative business innovation better than others.  Guy Laliberte was innovating in an entertainment industry that has a long tradition of free-agents cobbling themselves together in novel ways for finite projects.  He was able to select the different competencies he needed from the pool of free talent and quickly get them on the same team.  Informal conversations with industry friends to explore his emerging intentions could be conducted mainly with independent individuals with no sense of divided loyalty between their friendship and an employer.  The presence of free-agency in industries like entertainment is a key factor in sharing intentions across boundaries and forming innovative businesses quickly.

Affymetrix has effectively used its Board to forge relationships with companies far from its core business, such as Hewlett Packard.  These relationships over time have helped them overcome gaps in their strategic intention to become ‘the Intel of biochips.’  Others have effectively used consultants not only to identify new intentions but also execute them.

Because the Hong Kong Octopus team (see previous entry) had consultants with external insights, capabilities and resources already working on the smart-card project, they were able to identify, explore and execute their intentions without having to tip their hand to the other obvious source of know-how – competing Hong Kong banks.

The trouble with using consultants for the purpose of exploring emerging intentions between legally separate entities is that they are expensive to retain solely for this reason.  Also, the general practice of consulting firms is to avoid inadvertently passing knowledge between clients for fear of creating a conflict of interest.  It happens, but in many cases it is not supposed to happen.  There is no question that retained consultants, law firms, and merchant bankers are a major conduit for the private sharing of intent between organizations.  But it still relies heavily on serendipity, unspoken agreements, and personal trust relationships.  It would be unlikely to see the following line on a consulting firm’s brochure: “We provide you with access to the internal secrets of our other clients.”

Click here for the Previous Entry.

[Click here for entry #13.]