Thread by @CBinsights

We just issued our Guide to Corporate Innovation

It contains 19 bulletproof strategies your corporation can use to look innovative

cbinsights.com/research/corpo…

If you prefer not reading, here are all 19 strategies in images

2/ Go to the Valley and tell the troops about how you want to bring innovation from the outside in. Talk about how we must disrupt ourselves and share stories of meeting with hoodie-clad founders.

3/ You know you’re going to be disrupted, so what says you’re taking this seriously?Paying a vendor to set up an accelerator for you and giving $50k to 10 early-stage startups that are pre-product and pre-traction.

4/ Put them all over the room and have a great conversation full of ideas around disruption and new business models. And then don’t follow through. Just let all those ideas sit on those Post-It Notes.

5/ Nothing shows your commitment to growth and innovation like taking someone the whole organization knows isn’t that great and putting them in charge of your very important innovation efforts.

6/ Focus your corporate venture fund on near-term needs and as a way to find M&A targets (“try before you buy”). Put really onerous terms on companies and invest in companies too early for your organization to actually do something with.

7/ Talk about bringing learnings into the org but have no systematic way to do this. Send lots of decks and emails around and hope people read them. And in a couple of years, have no real trail or institutional knowledge you can go back to.

8/ If you give these teams concrete goals, they might hit them. If you keep the goals open-ended, you can fire them when the economy turns because they didn’t hit the goals that were never defined.

9/ Have a venture, M&A, partnership, digital transformation, and innovation team that are all sort of doing the same thing, but to maximize confusion, have them reporting into different folks. Don’t have any sort of technology-driven system that keeps them all on the same page.

10/ Instead of just calling the VC up and asking the firm if it has a company in its portfolio that might help with a business need, invest in the VC to get mediocre returns and also get no real preferential access. Win-win.

11/ Talk non-stop about the long-term but measure every forward-looking, somewhat risky partnership, investment, or acquisition with as short of a time frame as possible.

12/ Hire a digital innovation sherpa or chief intrapreneur or head of ecosystem and give them no resources or budget. Ensure these folks have cool hair.

13/ You’re all about free idea flows, right? Cubicles are for those stuffy f’n suits. Add in a barista for extra credit. Fruit-infused water for serious innovation cred.

14/ Talk about failing fast, design thinking, and how you’ve adopted a lean startup mindset. Then have your legal team send a startup a 135-page confidentiality agreement ‘cuz that screams lean.

15/ To build an innovative culture, hire organizations with a business model that hasn’t changed in one hundred years. Yup — they’ve studied innovation and have lots of frameworks. They’ve just never done it.

16/ They will bring some of that Google magic to your organization. Of course, they won’t have budget or an organization. Instruct them to say “At Google, we…” to kick off every meeting.

17/ Great ideas are sometimes lost in the time it takes someone to walk up to a whiteboard. So get rid of that walk. Make the whole freakin’ room a whiteboard. Watch the ideas flow.

18/ Free food is what made Google a huge company, right? Get a chef and don’t worry about your business model. All will be fed. All will be fine.

19/ Set up a committee that will define a robust process that any executive can ultimately override if they so choose. Bonus points for a scoring methodology that is entirely subjective.

20/ Along with your open floor plan, go all in and allow people to dress casually. Everyone knows the best ideas come to people when they are in flip flops.

21/ Want to drive growth and innovation, come to TRANSFORM in NYC on Dec 4-5th

We'll dig into the data and show you:
- how not to F up an M&A integration
- why pilots fail (and how to avoid it)
- if a Chief Digital Officer is good or bad for your stock

events.cbinsights.com/transform/mewe…

22/ Plus, an absolutely killer lineup of 29 speakers sharing their secrets

events.cbinsights.com/transform/mewe…

23/ Here's the full guide to Corporate Innovation

cbinsights.com/research/corpo…