TheThreePercent

Today’s WSJ has a long article by three European professors (Drs. Bessant, Möslein, and von Stamm) about approaches to corporate innovation.  Most of it is a survey of the usual suspects:  do scenario-based brainstorming, use stuff like innocentive.com (I love innocentive, but if I see them referenced blithely in one more article I’m going to quit the innovation business and start a McDonalds franchise), and enlist ‘lead users’ (a nod to MIT’s Eric von Hippel).  And then, of course, there is the annoying call to “get everyone involved” in innovation.  And to that I say once again -

If you are interested in Improvement (even radical improvement), sure – get everyone doing it.  But if you are interested in Innovation (paradigm shift), empower your entrepreneurs.  And true entrepreneurs occur in any given population in very small numbers.

So at this point I was about to exit out of my iPhone copy of the WSJ when the article took a turn into promoting entrepreneurship.  They stick to the old stand-bys on this (20% “try your own ideas” time at 3M and Google), and they don’t mention some of the newer approaches for this – Y Combinator, TechStars, and UpStart, but they do talk about BMW’s “Uboat” approach to employee-created programs, which is less-often referenced.

In the past few years, the call for supporting corporate entrepreneurs has been notably absent from most of these kinds of innovation articles.  And while we need a lot more on this – after all, the entrepreneur is the one that takes an inert “idea” and makes it happen (often disrupting the status-quo) – it is nice to see the topic show up in a mainstream innovation article.