What I Wish I Knew About Innovation Before I Became a Corporate Innovator

When I was 28, the investment research startup where I began my career, Innovest, was acquired by RiskMetrics, a publicly traded financial services firm. Overnight I had to transition from startup entrepreneur to corporate intrapreneur. Since then I’ve launched 33 new ventures at Bloomberg, Google, Uber, PWC, and across the Fortune 500. During that time I painfully learned that intrapreneurship is fundamentally different from entrepreneurship. 

Here’s what I would tell my younger self about life as an intrapreneur. 

Disruption Almost Never Happens

Netflix toppling Blockbuster, AirBnB disrupting hotels, the iPhone displacing Nokia, are irresistible ‘David v Goliath’ stories of a scrappy startup toppling a corporate giant. They also are extreme outliers, and statistical anomalies. Only .04%, or 23 of the 568 companies included in the Fortune 500 since 1997 were under 15 years old when they broke in. 48 of the 58 sectors which make up the Fortune 500 have never seen a new entrant. 

When someone like Marc Andreessen said “software is eating the world” or when Peter Diamandis said, "linear companies are getting destroyed by exponential technology" I would repeat it in pitches to C-suite executives only to be met with smirks and blank stares. It was a compelling Silicon Valley slogan, but it was completely divorced from the lived experience of executives outside of tech. Startups, as far as they were concerned, were great partners, acquisition targets, investment opportunities, and healthy competitors - but they weren’t credible corporate killers. I thought these executives were complacent, but the data (unfortunately) supports their skepticism. 

Never pitch an idea - only pitch an outcome

No one with power risks anything when they say no to an idea, which is why intrapreneurs should never pitch one. Build a prototype, test it with real people, and once you generate positive results then ask for the resources and investment to grow it.  Only then should you put together a deck explaining what your results might look like if you could grow it and make it bigger. You will never innovate anything by producing a McKinsey & Company -esque 79-slide deck with a hypothetical proposal for a hypothetical innovation. First, create the outcome, then pitch the idea.

FOLP (Fear of Losing Power) is stronger than FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

Do not underestimate how low executives and middle managers will go to sabotage innovation if they’re worried it will diminish their fiefdom. People with power are as insecure as everyone else. FOMO motivates startup founders. But FOLP (fear of losing power) is often the driving motivation of corporate managers and executives. It behooves you to understand every type of obstructionism and to develop a strategy for moving past it. 

Find Your ‘Norm Pearlstine’

When I was a director of innovation at Bloomberg, Norm Pearlstine was the #csuite executive who went to war for good innovators. He was visibly thrilled when someone he never met approached him with a new venture they wanted to build. The politics that killed so much great innovation was more easily navigated if Norm was in your corner. Every C-suite has a ‘Norm Pearlstine,’ an executive who is worried about stagnation and embraces change. They genuinely wish they had your job, and long for the time in their career when they were in the trenches building something big. (Norm would go undercover and write a story as a freelancer for Bloomberg Businessweek once a year). All big innovation breakthroughs I’ve ever created started by joining forces with a fierce executive champion. 

“That’s not what we’re seeing”

Informed, constructive dissent is a powerful tool. If you’ve discovered data about the market, your customers, or your products that diverges from the company’s consensus then you should say so. And make sure you have someone like Norm to back you up. Executives seriously appreciate and respect intrapreneurs who constructively challenge them. 

Thanks to @john Johansen, @elizabeth Gafford for their data science wizardry/