5 Barriers to Innovation and Intrapreneurship. And How you can Overcome Them
This article is based on discussion from OneLeap’s most recent breakfast conversation, ‘Recession + Reset: Why internal entrepreneurship matters now, and how you can cultivate it’. Event panelist, serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, Sahar Hashemi OBE shares the top 5 barriers to innovation and intrapreneurship she has witnessed in large corporations, and what we can all do to overcome them.
Focus on your customer, not on comfort admin
Too much bureaucracy distracts your focus from your customers and their needs. In large corporates there is a default position of constant busyness. There’s a certain comfort in having a full diary. We feel like an important part of the business. But this can sometimes lead to what Sahar Hashemi terms “comfort admin”, which takes away the free time we need for creative stimulus. This comfort admin can keep us too busy to look up and check that our activities are still creating value for the customer. This is particularly dangerous in the current climate when customer needs are constantly shifting. Some bureaucracy, particularly in large corporates, is of course essential - it’s about balancing necessary constraints with space to innovate.
How do we maintain this discipline whilst finding room and time for creativity?
Reclaim your power and time. Give feedback on meeting cadence and schedule empty slots in your calendar for creative thinking or digesting information
Promote small teams to maintain agility and speed. Jeff Bezos’ two pizza rule requires that each team can be fed by two pizzas only
Ask stupid questions. It’s a clever thing to do
Instead of being weighed down by expertise and tied to a particular direction, Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Cominbinator, suggests “admitting we have no idea what the right direction is and being super sensitive to the winds of change”. By cultivating an open mind, by being clueless, we avoid dogmatic thinking or status quo bias. This is requisite in any agile organisation. Yet a 2018 Harvard Business School survey of 3,000 employees found only 24% regularly felt curious in their jobs, and 70% felt they faced barriers to asking questions at work. These companies are failing to recognise that their employees’ curiosity is a powerful tool to generate boundary-pushing ideas.
How can you encourage curiosity and remove the stigma around asking questions?
Promote and embody vulnerability, not bravado. Creativity requires curiosity, and curiosity requires vulnerability
Replace “how should we?” with “how might we?” to remove the weight and seriousness of discussion. The approach was developed at Proctor & Gamble by Min Basadur, who found the language encouraged his team to become more playful, therefore braver
Bootstrap your ideas to stop them suffocating under a blanket of perfectionism
Almost anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Once ideas have been nurtured into something tangible, they must quickly interact with customers to gather the data needed to guide future iterations. It’s important to avoid the perfectionism that traps ideas within large corporates. When these ideas fail to get off the ground, we typically point the finger at insufficient resource or corporate traffic jams. In reality, the root problem is often a lack of bootstrapping, which prevents us from squeezing every ounce out of the resources we do have. Bootstrapping gives your ideas oxygen by quickly exposing them to the outside world, rather than suffocating under a blanket of perfectionism. But big businesses, unlike startups, have resource endowments that often render bootstrapping unnecessary.
How can you bootstrap in a corporate environment, when it may not be necessary?
In our “Make a Way” article, we explained how Carthaginian leader, Hannibal committed to an ambitious outcome despite the constraints he faced. This forced him to be creative, and he physically built a new path across the Alps using the remnants of previously failed crossings. In a corporate setting, this could mean reaching for ambitious targets while relying on less resources than your company can afford to give you - a smaller team, smaller budget, more limited timeframe. This will force you to be creative in order to truly maximise the resources you have to hand.
Initial rejection is inevitable. Don’t take it personally
Humans have an innate resistance to change. This can be demoralising to innovators who mistakenly believe that good ideas will always be welcomed with open arms, and only bad ideas will be rejected. As Sahar points out, in a startup it is easy to ignore the sceptics because you can walk away from them; if one bank manager rejects your loan application, you move onto another. But intrapreneurs in larger businesses are surrounded by the same stakeholders every day, creating a different risk profile. It is demoralising if the people around you consistently reject and undermine your ideas. “No” can feel like a failure, a sign that your career progression within the business is at risk. This is not true - often saying no is simply easier than saying yes. And entrepreneurs realise that you can’t innovate without hearing “no”. It’s a sign you are pushing boundaries. You should notch up these no’s and wear them as a badge of honour.
How can people in larger businesses notch up the no’s without losing their enthusiasm for fresh ideas?
Change how you think about rejection. Stop thinking of “no” as a failure, and realise that it is an essential part of innovation
Keep your ideas under the radar until you have enough traction and proof of concept to overcome the “corporate immune response”; the default scepticism
Ban eye rolling to remove the fear of judgement. Pixar’s “plussing” rule only allows you to criticise an idea if you add a constructive suggestion to strengthen the original concept
Recommended reading
You can learn more about how to boost innovation within your company by reading Sahar’s latest book, Start Up Forever: How to Build a Start Up Culture in a Big Company
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