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Getting Your Money's Worth from R&D
Motivating
Intrapreneurial Teams
"We are spending a billion dollars a year on R&D. Why aren't we are
not getting more exciting new products, technologies and processes for our money?"
Pinchot & Company frequently gets questions about increasing R&D effectiveness.
The highest leverage answers range from repairing serious disconnects between R&D
and marketing to cultivating the intrapreneurial energy that converts academic discoveries
into business success.
Pinchot & Company helps you:
- Identify what you are doing right so you can strengthen effective systems
- Identify and fix the disconnects in your innovation process
- Discover the barriers to innovation and find ways to reduce or eliminate them
- Build the institutions that support faster, more effective innovation
- Increase the bandwidth of technology transfer
- Improve collaboration with other functions
- Release the entrepreneurial spirit needed to turn technology into profit
What people say:
"We had developed the technology to be great. You helped us to develop the
intrapreneurs, to get that technology to market."
What we say:
If you want better return on your R&D investments, Pinchot & Company can
help you identify andeliminate whatever is getting in the way of turning research
discoveries and designs into profitable realities.
Strategic Implementation
Objective: To focus your organization's innovative
potential on your strategic objectives.
Communicating the strategy: How do you package your strategic message in such a way
that yourorganization's creative energy is directed toward solving the challenges
raised by the strategy? How can you communicate your strategy in ways that inspire
employees with strategically appropriate ideas to act on them?
Strategic implementation:
- Align your strategic communications with employees' deeply held values.
- Create low resistance pathways for people with strategically aligned ideas to
take the first step toward investigation and implementation. Consider innovation
fairs and targeted seed money funds.
- Use training both as a reward for the courage to pursue a new idea
- and as a method of giving the intrapreneurs the tools to screen their own ideas.
The result for the intrapreneurs:
- Fewer "no's" from management
- Knowing what's wanted and how to screen the business value of your own ideas.
- More success in turning ideas into realities
The result for senior leaders:
- A good supply of ideas well aligned with the strategy.
- Ideas are matched with intrapreneurial teams that are passionate about implementing
them. This combination greatly increases the probability of success.
- The ideas are better tested. The Strategic Intrapreneuring Workshop often quickly
eliminates or fixes bad ideas.
- Saying "yes" more often.
- Strategies are realized faster and with less risk.
- In the process of supporting intrapreneurial teams, managers learn to be more
effective sponsors of innovation.
Objective: To create intrapreneurial rewards that accelerate innovation without
upsetting people elsewhere in the organization.
What people ask: "We discovered that we cannot expect entrepreneurial behavior
if we don't provide entrepreneurial rewards. However, if we give one team intrapreneurial
rewards, won't the other employees be jealous, angry, and demoralized? Our culture
won't tolerate huge rewards. What can we do?"
Pinchot & Company has pioneered ways to reward innovation without demotivating
other employees. For example, not all rewards are financial -- earning the freedom
to make mistakes is an equally important
motivator. Pinchot & Company has designed and implemented many successful systems
of reward that motivate innovation and protect the intrapreneurial team, without
upsetting those taking care of the mature businesses.
Encouraging facts:
- Motivating intrapreneurial behavior doesn't take huge payouts.
- Freedom is as rewarding to intrapreneurs as cash, and much easier to grant without
arousing jealousy.
- Balancing rewards with up front risk calms the immune system.
- While rewarding individual intrapreneurs can be counterproductive,
- rewarding intrapreneurial teams helps to build teamwork.
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