How to Find More Reasons to Launch Your Startup within Your Current Company Date:   Friday , October 07, 2016 David J. Neff helps people for a living. As an award winning author, speaker, teacher and consultant he has been driving innovation and digital strategy work with Fortune 500 clients and nonprofits for over 16 years. With immense experience in institutionalizing innovation development frameworks and creating consumer engagement solutions for companies, Randal C. Moss is an award winning marketer who focuses on engaging organizations and applying technology to drive growth. To be a competitive entity in global commerce an organization must be able to consistently have strong points of differentiation in its products or services. We exist in a global meritocracy where the best win and the rest go home to cry in their tea. The largest single challenge that executives should consider is how we create a culture and a structure that can consistently out develop, out design, out produce our competitors. Delivering MORE You can no longer compete on price alone. Cost still has a place in the sales cycle but many consumers have moved beyond price as the sole consideration point. Consumers, whether they are individuals or institutions, want value. And value comes from competitively priced solutions that offer more. Are you capable of giving more? More comes in so many forms, and everyone has a different opinion of what more is. What is most important is that you structurally designed to actively look for and develop more. One of the best ways to identify more is to look internally at your employees and create opportunities for them to bring forth their ideas about more and develop them. Being intentional and inclusive in your search for more will have a net positive impact on the product and service that you produce as well as the internal corporate culture of your organization. Believe it or not, your organization is better place for people to develop more than taking their ideas to an external incubator for funding and growth support. You just have to make the commitment to supporting them. Empowering Entrepreneurship When Sergey Brin speaks people tend to listen. It is not enough to just listen, you have to think about the underlying drivers of those words, and when you do you�ll hear the message loud and clear. His comments at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit effectively said that launching a start-up in Silicon Valley is a bad idea. So, if not there, then where? Odds are that you will be more successful starting something up where you are based rather than heading out to Silicon Valley, even if where you are is a big company. This could be a perfect incubator, if you just work at it. Incubate an Incubator When you think of what value an �incubator� or a �startup hub� or an �accelerator� offers perspective entrepreneurs you can boil it down to a few key services. 1. Access to Capital 2. Access to Talent 3. Developmental Coaching 4. Free coffee and donuts 5. Connectivity to your first introductions to potential clients through the member�s networks 6. A wicked atmosphere filled with other ambitious diverse entrepreneurs that help feed your aspirations for success and serve as sounding boards and competitors simultaneously. With this exercise in oversimplification complete, let�s rewind the tape and look at this from an internal corporate point of view. Is it possible that a corporation can offer the same things? Wonder no more, the answer is a resounding, but qualified, yes. Small, medium, and especially large organizations are primed to internally incubate ideas, grow innovations, and harvest the fruit of their investments. The challenge is that they are likely not structured for efficient innovation and they lack the internal culture to nurture entrepreneurs. However, if they take the leap and make the investments they can compete with the most famous incubators and accelerators for talent and ideas. Don�t believe me? Consider these: 1. Access to Capital � If you need cash you need not look further than large organizations. Cumulatively they are sitting on $1.68 trillion dollars. Stockpiles of cash are like potential energy, they only generate value when put into motion in a thoughtful way like funding internal innovation development. 2. Access to Talent � The bigger the organization the higher probability you will have a wide range of talent to partner with and learn from. Not just talent quality, but skill-sets and perspectives on product and project development. 3. Developmental Coaching � Typically an HR department will provide some coaching and training. We are not referencing the biannual interpersonal communication training. With a variety of easily accessible experts budding entrepreneurs can get coaching from financial, legal, and engineering experts, sometimes simultaneously! 4. Free coffee and donuts �Yes, but it is not good coffee and the donuts are only on birthdays. 5. Connectivity to your first introductions to potential clients through the member�s networks � If you develop an innovation within an organization you basically have your first customer built right in! Moreover, depending on your organizational structure, you can reach out to other departments and engage them to use and adopt the new application. 6. A wicked atmosphere filled with other ambitious diverse entrepreneurs that help feed your aspirations for success and serve as sounding boards and competitors simultaneously. Of all of the parallels, this one seems the most non-obvious. Like an incubator, it will take a fair amount of time and effort to develop an intrepreneurial community within your organization. Establishing a structure, attracting interested participants, and funding projects are just the starting points. Focusing On Markets Once you establish an internal innovation center you can begin to drive focused innovation efforts that can answer individual market needs. If you happen to be designing for a specific geography your organization can issue a focused innovation challenge. Pick a market needs, set parameters, and invite anyone interested to submit solutions. Unlike waiting for intrepreneurs to come forth with new ideas, you can coax them out with a challenge to overcome and incentives to encourage interaction. So, before you pack your bags for Silicon Plateau, or your local incubator, take a moment to look at where you are first. Explore how fertile the ground is, where you are and consider what you can cultivate.