The smartest people in innovation and intrapreneurship from companies like Phillip Morris, Gap, HP, Salesforce, Nike, Cisco Univision, and dozens of other companies assembled to talk about what real innovation at scale looks like. This ebook contains a few of our takeaways. For more information, contact us at innovation@gapingvoid.com

1. Outtakes from
Intrapreneurship Conference Silicon Valley,
November 2016
The Culture Design Group

2. We all think that Intrapreneurs have the most exciting and
challenging roles of any organization, one of those roles where
some days you have to feel like you are just making it up as you
go along. That is for a very good reason: there is no handbook,
and the entire business function is new.
The best and only way to figure it out, is to get out there and
talk to other innovators, connect about what’s working and
what isn’t. Talk about real things that are happening in other
companies, and connect.
That is exactly what happened at the SV2016 Intrapreneurship
Conference. Three days of sharing, learning and connecting.
A crucible of ideas and thoughtfulness about all aspects. From
innovation models, to stakeholder strategies. From funding to
recruitment. Scores of topics that downloaded more information
than you could have possible absorbed in a year’s worth of
books, podcasts and articles.
The following pages share some highlights and insights from the
conference.

3. Only in Silicon Valley: The Changing Face of
Intrapreneurship

4. Taking place in the heart of disruptive
innovation, a big takeaway from the
conference was how Silicon Valley is
changing from an innovation dealer to an
innovation rival. Mark Zawacki illustrated
how silicon valley used to simply enable
companies. Now the tech is being used to
compete with them, forcing everyone into
the innovation game.
The conclusion is the necessity of investing
in change and embracing a culture of
disruption. In this new world, all companies
have to be creators, not just brokers.

5. The conference included a series of field
trips to local companies. Attendees got
the opportunity to see both the rapid
innovation of young startups, and methods
of preserving an innovative spirt at more
established companies.
Among these was a trip to Rocketspace, an
incubator matching startups with corporate
partners. These Strategic partnerships can
operate much the same way that simply
purchasing tech used to.

6. Making Intrapreneurship Work at a People Level
Buy-in, stakeholders, story telling.
The hardest part of what we do is often
The people part.
Without the ’soft’ skills, it is virtually
impossible to get the hard work done.
The ideas die on the vine, the best projects
Don’t get funded, and the people who
should be your biggest advocates, hide
In the recesses.

7. Ricardo Dos Santos discussed
the direction of intrapreneurship.
A key point was a requirement to
democratize innovation.
Even in the forward thinking creative
fields, elitism can be a plague on
innovation. Good ideas can come
from anywhere within your company,
and opening up channels for those
ideas is your fastest route to finding the
right plan to develop.

8. One recurring theme was the ecstasy
and the agony of our fast changing
world. New advances in technology
mean we not only have to question
where we’re going in business, but
where we’re going as a planet and a
species.
Carin Watson of Singularity University
sees the change as hopeful at both
a corporate and global level. As
technology reduces scarcity, it
becomes easier to synthesize a social
mission with defense of the bottom
line. And with millennials gaining
increased purchasing power, that
social mission will become a powerful
business tool.

9. Mark Randall of Adobe figured out a
counterintuitive way to promote innovative
ideas: fund them before the idea is even had.
Each of their Kickbox innovation kits comes
with $1000 to explore an idea and help
prepare a pitch. Working on the philosophy
that no business task comes without a
timetable, budget, or structure, each Kickbox
provides those as a way of promoting
creativity.
Cisco also leveraged different strategies in
funding to fix an innovation problem. In order
to stop nepotism and disengagement in an
internal innovation contest, they introduced a
token economy to let employees crowdfund
ideas. By giving ownership and providing a
return on investment in good ideas, smart
ideas rose quickly.

10. Managing Expectations: one of the things that they forgot
to mention when you took on the role.

11. Of course, not every company
understands the need for innovation on
a cultural level. Sometimes the most
important ideas are rejected because
they violate a comfortable inertia. Colin
Johnson of Aerion Corp. characterized
this phenomenon as an organizational
immune response.
Corporate leaders often react to
innovation much the same way as a
body responds to an organ transplant:
get rid of the unnatural object, even
if necessary to survival. Johnson
explored the ways to get around this
resistance and push through necessary
change.

12. Particularly in this new age of rock
star innovation, when companies like
Google and Apple use disruption as
a marketing technique, the urge can
overwhelming to innovate for it’s own
sake. Madhavan Ramanujam, partner
at Simon-Kucher & Partners, and
author of Monetizing Innovation spoke
eloquently about the fundamentals of
building new businesses, and resisting
that temptation.
He explained a series of simple rules
to guide new projects to meet revenue
goals and position products to meet their
potential. In the end, it comes down to
understanding your products value, and
understanding your consumers needs at
a fundamental level.

13. Finding Real Meaning, Not Just Fluff.

14. No matter who you talked to at
SV2016, there was an agreement that
innovation needed to me moved to
the heart of the corporate structure.
In the old model, the lab was a safety,
built to support and streamline a
set production. But that world has
changed and flipped.
With customers valuing innovation
above all else, and change coming
quicker than ever, production must
follow innovation, plain and simple.
Research and development, not honing
and refinement, is the new model for
growth.

15. It’s worth remembering, though, the
importance of having multiple sources
for bright ideas. That’s not to say they
should be separate though. Ideas
grow and develop when they mash
together with other ideas.
tThe author Matt Ridley calls this “Ideas
Having Sex”. By enabling transparent
communication between all levels
and departments, ideas have the
opportunity to meet one another and
make something great.

16. Traditional business structures make
it hard to innovate. The ground is
moving fast enough that what we think
of as stability is fragility.
By removing barriers to change, and
embracing a new culture of disruption,
rapid change isn’t a storm to be
weathered: it’s wind in your sails.

17. Of course, a key benefit to any
conference is finding people with
shared values. The intrapraneur tribe
believes there are no endings; only
opportunities to reinvent themselves
and their companies. We believe
that pursuing change is the only
way to maintain relevance in an ever
accelerating world
Of course this doesn’t happen by
chance. We need to come together
to create these new beginnings.
Collaboration is going to be both how,
and why we survive.

18. About
Gapingvoid
Gapingvoid is a Miami-based consultancy that helps companies increase employee
engagement and connect people more deeply to mission, values and purpose. Since
2007, gapingvoid has designed, articulated and speeded the adoption of organizational
culture for many of the most forward-thinking companies, worldwide. The concept is
simple: inspiring alignment and engagement in employees will improve creativity, agility,
productivity and innovative outcomes, which impact bottom line results. Our world is full
of change projects that no one pays attention to. Gapingvoid uses a unique combination
of language and visuals that connect people emotionally to your organization’s most
important outcomes.
www.gapingvoid.com
@gapingvoid
culture@gapingvoid.com
305-763-8503