Tendayi Viki is an award winning author and corporate innovation expert. As Associate Partner at Strategyzer, he helps companies innovate for the future while managing their core business. Tendayi is a speaker, workshop facilitator and advisor on innovation to leaders across the globe. He has written three books and his latest book is Pirates In The Navy: How Innovators Drive Transformation
Faced with the choice of starting a company or joining a large corporation, Steve Jobs believed that it was ‘more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy’. But for innovators inside established companies, making a distinction between being a pirate and joining the navy is a fallacy. We have to figure out a way to become pirates in the navy! There is nothing harder in business than trying to innovate within large corporations. Innovators in big companies often face internal opposition as well as their external competitors. It is the management of the core business that tends to get in the way of innovation. Most intrapreneurs recognise that innovation can’t be carried out as a series of one-off projects that always have to jump through political hurdles. They realise that there is a need for innovation to happen as a repeatable process. But how can they achieve this? This is a step-by-step guide to getting continuous innovation done in companies and reshaping them in the process. It is for anyone involved in corporate innovation and driving company change.
There are a number of inspiring success stories when it comes to corporate innovation. A few examples include Frito Lay’s Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Google’s GMail, 3M’s Post-It Notes and McDonald’s Happy Meal. Despite these successes, being a corporate innovator or intrapreneur is not easy. It can be frustrating...