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Failure & Intrapreneurship

Working in R&D I realized that effectively we are all intrapreneurs.   We’re constantly trying to develop new businesses for the corporation.

Intrapreneur is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as:  

“A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”

One thing that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs share is the goal of profitability.  We both are creating businesses, we are both looking for ways to create value and systematize the creation of that value.

The added complexity of contending with entrenched culture, entrenched bureaucracy and toxic organizations can make the intrepreneurs’ job more difficult.

On the other hand the added restraint of available funds make the entrepreneurs’ job more stressful and more risky.

One thing however that both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur must struggle with is …FAILURE.

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The failure rate of my projects in R&D over the past 17 years is much greater than 50%.  Projects fail for a variety of reasons sometimes due to technical challenges, other times due to external market conditions, other times due to poor leadership or employee performance.

Entrepreneurs have the luxury of controlling their culture around the topic of failure because the entrepreneur can just adopt a positive attitude about failure, the entrepeneur usually works alone or with a very small team of like-minded leaders.

“I never fail, I just learn how things don’t work.” – unknown

In other words an entrepreneur can make up his/her own mind that failure is just part of the process, it is just a mechanism of learning.

The intrapreneur must contend with organizational health, a large team of people many more powerful and influential than himself, he must deal with culture, if the culture in ones R&D organization does not handle failure this can spell trouble for the intrapreneur.

Failed projects can result in finger-pointing, in blame politics, which can spell real career trouble.  One thing that R&D organizations should do is to constantly frame the story, the attitudes of everyone around failure. 

I have been part of organizations that lambasted the members of a failed project, the courageous leader was “torn to shreds”  so to speak, blamed for the wasting of millions and it was a career altering delay.

This is not healthy, R&D leaders can learn from the attitudes of entrepreneurs and lead accordingly.  Blame and perfection are culture destroyers in the innovation organization.

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” ~ Sven Goram Erikson

A healthy perspective about failure is easiest way to rapidly improve R&D culture, at the highest levels corporations need to stop the blame game and permit failure, so we can relax and create system for capturing and spreading learnings and developing R&D professionals to develop business’ more effectively and more rapidly.

How does your organization handle failure?

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The Learning Industry

I work in research and development for a technology company. I’ve been in an R&D division since the mid 90’s. I work with some of the most intelligent and skilled people that one could imagine. These people are from the top universities and have created dozens of inventions making life better for countless millions of people.

There are many things that I will write on the topic of research, development and innovation in this blog, but in this post I want to bring out the concept of learning. We in R&D are professional learner’s, we are paid to learn for our company. We learn then invent on behalf of the company.

All of this learning has taught me several valuable insights, (besides all of the technology and science). Four of these insights are listed below.

  1. There must be a proper environment created for learning.
  2. There are private learning curves and corporate learning curves and they are very different.
  3. The faster the private learning’s become corporate learning’s the more efficient the R&D organization will be.
  4. An early stage organization may pay several times for the same learnings without good management.

Management of the learning, teaching and collaboration processes is critical in R&D. When I see attitudes in universities and industry where information is siloed with insecure scientists and engineers I know that is contrary to efficient innovation. It is wastefulness on display; it’s the opposite of what is needed for quality innovation. To have the attitude of the insecure scientist who conceals learning’s from the competition is contrary to what needs to happen in the learning industry of research and development.

An efficient research and development organization is one that both learns and teaches, that is our trade and those with attitudes or behavior contrary to that should consider changing fields.

Are you in the reseach industry?

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Social Media with Research and Development

Social media is not only a time waster for your 15 year old, it can also be a tool to enhance the effectiveness of your organization.  With the inspiration of Twitter, the microblog platform can offer most organizations a tool to collaborate, share accomplishments and reduce the time and money spent on R&D.  As a scientist, engineer, technician or manager tackles an innovation project they begin to learn.  They learn through studying publications, through studying textbooks, through experimentation, through convestations with others in the field, through making purchases and through brainstorming sessions with subject matter experts.  The learnings can be highly technical or simple market facts.  Regardless of what is learned, the learning itself is a necessary step for the organization to succefully innovate and penetrate their target market. The more people in the organization the greater the need to share learnings.  This is typically done through periodic reporting to the supervisor and sometimes through collaboration meetings

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I can see an opportunity for individuals in an organization to teach others via a twitter like microblog internal to each organization.  Perhaps call it a Learning Blog or a Teaching Blog, whatever it is named, the learning blog application holds the potential to reduce money spent on learning by much faster organization-wide teaching and learning.  Yammer is one such tool that can be used for this, microsoft recently purchased Yammer and pland to incoporate this concept into their operating platform.

The R&D learning blog (if used!) can reduce siloed learning that is so common in large organizations.  Incentives may be necessary to kick start participation.

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