Punch line: There’s a quiet revolution happening in corporate America.
Big companies are applying startup strategies and tools to jump-start innovation and renovation.
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Excerpted from Fast Company’s, “4 Innovation Strategies From Big Companies That Act Like Startups”
Big companies that behave like small startups focus on two things. First, they accelerate the speed of innovation, just like a Silicon Valley incubator. Second, they give internal businesses and teams an outside-in perspective.
Here are four strategies that anyone can use to start-up … innovation:
- Follow customers home: Intuit’s innovation success is tied to a value for finding and savoring … unexpected insights about customer needs, problems, and desired experiences. That’s why the company does customer “follow-me-homes,” … [to] immerse themselves in the customer’s natural environment.
- Tap outside collaborators: Kimberly-Clark knows that insular thinking is the death knell of teams and organizations. That’s why they … recruit a small group of “thought leaders” to … deliver strategic and practical insight that would otherwise take months to gather.
- Stay small: Big innovations don’t necessarily have to begin by taking big risks. Intuit, for example, … [doesn’t wait] around for senior leadership to sponsor and fund the next big idea but rather rapidly tests ideas to identify the things teams can do to have the biggest impact.
- Use the best, invent the rest: Speed and agility come from realizing we don’t have to invent everything ourselves. The strategy is to use the best … and then adapt it or combine it with other approaches that work within the specific company context.
These big-company strategies aren’t about ivory-tower innovation departments … they’re focused on pushing entrepreneurial thinking and practices into the places they’re needed the most–inside established businesses.
Edit by JDC
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