I started my professional career working for large companies. All of us who have ever worked in a multinational know what it means. Each process, however simple, involves a myriad of departments. When you work in a multinational, you can’t even update Windows on your computer without having to implement a complex decision-making system. There are many examples of these barriers.
This type of practice generates limited speed and reaction to change as well as little flexibility. However, in the current context of ultra-rapid technological change, how can a large company bring innovative products to market quickly enough?
An interesting strategic option lies in the creation of internal startups. There are interesting success stories in this regard as determined Google projects but also Xerox’s historic mistakes, because make no mistake, creating a startup within a corporation is not an easy process and, even from the The field of research is an area in continuous development.
From my point of view, in many cases you can make a fundamental mistake: falling into the temptation of launching an internal startup to “run a project”. The internal startup should have as its main mission to learn from its interaction in the market, iterate with real products in it and manage to design a meaningful value proposition. The startup must not develop projects but interact with the market and, most importantly, must be able to execute the build-measure-learn loop. measure-learn) with real products in real markets without the need for parent company approval or collaboration. In other words, the internal startup must control all the areas necessary for the full exploitation of the product in question. It is important to develop this cross-functional empathy of which This is David Aycan from IDEO., building multidisciplinary teams (technology, marketing, management) that work side by side and They have full autonomy to make decisions.
In most large companies there are great ideas in the drawer. Today, the problem of a large company is not usually the generation of ideas but the selection and prioritization of these. The mistake is to think that before launching an internal startup you have to choose which specific idea to put on the market. In this way, the greatest capacity of a startup is being underused: defining a specific product while learning in an iterative process with the market. In this sense, entrepreneurship methodologies help us not only to execute the project but also to define, design and launch it.
Entrepreneurship methodologies can be a powerful strategic tool for companies of all sizes. Methodological frameworks such as those that define the bases of the lean startup, the customer development or the agile development should be strongly integrated into innovation management carried out by more consolidated companies. These companies therefore have the challenge of building hybrid organizations, which combine the spontaneity and speed of startups and the rigor and efficiency of large corporations.