Category: Specials

DIYer n. A disrupt-it-yourselfer; a Jugaad 3.0 innovator; an employee who acts and behaves more like an entrepreneur in the context of an established organization

Dr. Simone Ahuja – consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, is the CEO of Blood Orange where her mission is to empower innovators in large organizations and mobilize them with entrepreneurial tools for a single purpose: to transform the corporate culture from the inside out using design and lean principles. In Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation, she shifts the focus from ‘entrepreneurs’ to ‘intrapreneurs’, the incredible ‘corporate hackers’ who tap into and around the bureaucratic machinery surrounding them to advance their projects. Or we could call them ‘constructive disrupters’,since today’s intrapreneurs often seriously challenge existing business from product offering to business model, yet they do it actively from the inside and, by doing this, help keep the enterprise viable.

Based on hundreds of interviews, as well as the author’s consulting work within companies, Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation identifies the competencies these corporate hackers possess. It also offers a spectrum of carefully crafted archetypes to help people see themselves in this trend and allow organizations identify the innovators in their midst.

Read on to learn more about eight inspirational intrapreneurs whose passion and innovation transformed organizations from within-

Balanda Atis —As a chemist formulating mascara at L’Oréal USA, she set her sights on formulating foundations that did not look ashy on darker skins.

“Although Atis and her colleagues were not freed from doing their day jobs, L’Oréal gave the trio access to a lab. Fuelled by passion and purpose, they produced and tested foundation samples on their own time. Lacking opportunities for data collection, they tagged along on trips to existing conferences and fairs across the country, collecting skin tone measurements from thousands of women of colour. The big breakthrough came when Atis discovered they could work with an existing colour compound. Ultramarine blue was seldom used in cosmetics and difficult to work with, but it allowed them to create richer, deeper shades without the muddy finish that was so common in existing darker foundations. Atis and her tiny team succeeded in satisfying a massive customer need that had existed for generations.”

Ravi Ramaswamy— He led the innovation team behind the Efficia ECG100 an easy to use ECG after realizing that resource-constrained settings needed medical systems should not only be easy to buy but also easy to use and did not require expensive specialized training.

“The prototype exceeded everyone’s expectations. What is now a diagnostic-quality electrocardiogram started with the team’s purchase of an off-the-shelf mobile device. Any Android phone or tablet could act as the user interface after the simple installation of an app. The team’s energies went into making an ECG acquisition box that was just as compact (the finalproduct weighed fewer than ten ounces) and intuitive to use. ‘We worked on it for about six to eight months,’ Ramaswamy recalled, before asking for a meeting with Philips Healthcare’s business unit leader. After hearing the idea and trying out the prototype, the executive said: ‘This is a fantastic product. It’s going to be the pathway to the future.’ Ramaswamy reported that ‘from then on, there was no looking back. We had the complete support of the business unit in terms of driving this model.’”

TOYOTA US TEAM—They worked on the margins of Toyota’s organization to redevelop the Toyota Avalon.

“Take the wholesale redevelopment of the 2013 Toyota Avalon. Led by designers and engineers working far from the company’s Japanese headquarters, the initiative was culture defying for Toyota. When the US-based team told their story to industry analyst Mark Phelan, they stressed that they ‘worked in the margins of Toyota’s playbook, following the old adage that it’s better to beg forgiveness than permission’”

Doug Dietz—After seeing the discomfort of young children getting CT scans, he developed the GE Adventure Series—which involves turning dark, scary CT scanning tunnels into inviting storybook hideaways for young patients.

“First, it was by visiting a customer’s facility—the paediatric oncology department of a major hospital—that industrial designer Doug Dietz recognized a customer problem crying out for a better solution. He tells the story of how he had just finished working on a CT design project and thought he’d done a wonderful job. He was very proud of himself, and in 2005 he went to one of the hospitals where the equipment was being installed for the first time. But it only took an hour of observation for him to realize how reductively he had pursued his mission. The first people he watched interacting with the new machinery were a family with a young child. The child was so terrified by the machine that she needed to be sedated. Dietz had to be there to get that the key to better outcomes—including better image capture, higher machine utilization and better patient experience—was decreasing the need for sedation. It wasn’t just about making machines more capable; it was about making children—and families—more comfortable.”

Lars Kolind—His spaghetti organization at Oticon allowed employees across the board to choose projects according to their skills or as an opportunity to develop new skills, and share equal responsibility for projects.

“Going back even further to 1990, an executive named Lars Kolind arrived at the Danish company Oticon with a bold new structural idea he called ‘the spaghetti organization’. If you think about the clean boxes and lines on the traditional command and- control organization chart, and then you think about what happens to those lines in a Holacratic or Hollywood system, you see where he got his metaphor. To the great surprise of the engineers working on Oticon’s innovative hearing aids, asvwell as all its functional groups from finance to sales and from HR to PR, Kolind in one fell swoop did away with everyone’s job title and moved them all from their accustomed offices and desks too. Most important, he told them that it was up to them now to decide where their talents could be best applied. No one would be assigned to projects where they would receive topdown mandates from project bosses.”

Kishore Biyani—His innovative intra-organization recruitment to create more ‘Kishore Biyanis’ for leadership roles.

“In January 2016, he put the call out across his organization for applicants interested in those leadership roles. Already, this was unusual, since the recruiting did not look outside FCL’s walls: this was a campaign, called Ban Jao Biyani, run wholly within the organization. More interesting still, having received 450 applications from employees, he and his team then ‘shortlisted’ fifty applicants, and put them through a boot camp where they were ‘trained on management aspects and asked to present a business plan for the brand they had bid for’. This was, in effect, the kind of competition some organizations today host for proposed innovation projects—but in this case, it was not intrapreneurial ideas but the intrapreneurs themselves who were being chosen for further development and investment.”

SHARMILA SAHA AT Mindtree—Mindtree’s programme

‘5 X50’ chose five intrapreneurial projects, each of which was judged to have the potential to grow to $50 million in revenues. The five were carefully selected through a competitive process and the winning teams were given the full support of an incubator-style experience of mentoring and resource provision.

“A quick win from that programme was a new line of business: Mindtree’s Digital Surveillance unit, launched in 2013. The team behind it, led by Sharmila Saha, was driven by the new market demand for better public-space surveillance technology in the wake of high-impact terrorist attacks, seen on a global scale by the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States and the Mumbai attacks of 26 November 2008. It saw that potential clients like US Homeland Security were struggling with conventional CCTV feeds, which required hours of tedious monitoring, and thought it could come up with next-generation capabilities. Prior to the 5 X 50 initiative announcement, Saha and four colleagues had been working for half a year on the concept, which features audio-video analytics and real-time updates. Winning the competition meant that Mindtree invested about $1.5 million (about Rs 9 crore) to incubate it to the point where it was ready for its first client, the Bangalore City Traffic Police.”

Babak Forutanpour—He found himself the accidental founder of a movement Qualcomm. The group acquired a name—FLUX, for ‘forward-looking user experience’.

“This is what Babak Forutanpour was up against as a software engineer at Qualcomm circa 2004. Once he was onboarded and unpacked his laptop, he realized there was no suitable place to bring a new idea to have it vetted and considered for development. ‘No one was listening, and my boss didn’t even want to brainstorm,’ he recalled. Eventually he was so desperate for a sounding board that he pulled together a ‘little biweekly luncheon’ with like-minded people outside his usual circle. ‘If nothing else,’ he figured, they could all ‘eat a ham sandwich with someone interesting’. But that initial group quickly decided to go beyond the sandwich and try to accomplish something more substantial together. In short order they came up with a cool new technical solution for reducing ambient noise. After a thorough vetting of prototypes by subject-matter experts, a patent that eventually produced real value for Qualcomm was applied for and awarded.”

For more, get a copy of Jugaad 3.0!

Dr. Simone Ahuja – consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, is the CEO of Blood Orange where her mission is to empower innovators in large organizations and mobilize them with entrepreneurial tools for a single purpose: to transform the corporate culture from the inside out using design and lean principles. In Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation, she shifts the focus from ‘entrepreneurs’ to ‘intrapreneurs’, the incredible ‘corporate hackers’ who tap into and around the bureaucratic machinery surrounding them to advance their projects. Or we could call them ‘constructive disrupters’, since today’s intrapreneurs often seriously challenge existing business from product offering to business model, yet they do it actively from the inside and, by doing this, help keep the enterprise viable.

Based on hundreds of interviews, as well as the author’s consulting work within companies, Jugaad 3.0 Hacking the Corporation identifies the competencies these corporate hackers possess. It also offers a spectrum of carefully crafted archetypes to help people see themselves in this trend and allow organizations identify the innovators in their midst.

Read on to find out how to ‘hack’ your corporation from within itself with these eight essential principles

Keep It Frugal

Intrapreneurs actively solve problems and seek opportunities, relying on pre-existing elements and recombining resources for novel uses.

What organizations need now are the right tools and a ready mindset to innovate from within. The Jugaad 3.0 agenda items that follow directly support my main message: deep-six the deep pockets. Simple tools, small budgets and human ingenuity can deliver impressive results, including maximum agility with fewer ‘business as usual’ strings attached. Knowing that nothing innovative

is ever truly linear (or one size fits all), consider these to be á la carte strategies for keeping it frugal:

1. Remain Asset-Based
2. Keep It Simple
3. Encourage Frugal Experiments
4. Focus on Teams
5. Rethink Incentives

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Make It Permissionless

Lets leaders provide support without crushing the creativity and potential of upstart intrapreneurs. Companies need a culture of permissionless innovation a innovation isn’t something that you should be asking approval for.

Making intrapreneurship sustainable requires creating a permission-lite environment for intrapreneurs. It’s autonomy with guardrails. The goal is to establish a network of support rather than a system of tight control by leaders. This ‘support, don’t control’ mantra reinforces frugal funding and has two additional benefits. First, it is an easy fit for intrapreneurs, who want a safe space to pursue new ideas and side projects. Second, it doesn’t oblige large companies and their leaders to bend over backward to manage and measure early-stage projects. Here are the plays that put permissionless to work:

1. Support, Don’t Control
2. Say ‘Yes’ More Often
3. Add Light Structure

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Let Customers Lead

Even though being ‘customer-led’ might sound obvious, it isn’t put into practice by many would-be innovators. Rather than sitting in an ivory tower and thinking about what the customer needs, ask the customer what they want. Look at how the customer is using your product.

Organizations that allow intrapreneurs to take their cues from customers create an instant advantageand avoid many of the barriers that derail internal innovation. These are the plays that I have seen work best in industries and environments across the board:

1. Create Leading-Edge Customer Focus
2. Hack Better Access to Customers
3. Turn Customers into Innovation Partners
4. Make Intrapreneurship a Sales Priority

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Keep It Fluid

Since fluid team formation does not happen naturally in most organizations, companies need light structures to enable new levels of information sharing, networking and mobility across their talent pools.

Fluidity delivers more control and autonomy to individual intrapreneurs and small groups, and less to the management layers above them. This tricky little paradigm switch packs a positive punch that promises to increase innovation if managed properly. The trouble is that the type of organizational structure that enables fluidity is less rigid than we are accustomed to today. Just as everything digital tears down existing walls, we need to eliminate artificial, outdated boundaries and allow intrapreneurs some latitude to selfdirect, self-manage and self-organize. Here’s a look at how

to make it work:

1. Create a Team of Teams
2. Make Management Fluid
3. Support Agility Through Structure

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Maximize Return on Intelligence

‘Return on intelligence’ is a reformulation of ROI that puts the short term emphasis on intellectual rather than financial gains.

Intrapreneurs rely on constant learning in an open, agile environment where the culture can balance structure with autonomy and metrics with flexibility as part of these J3.0 principles:

1. When in Doubt, Test It Out
2. Make Learning a Priority
3. Measure Return on Intelligence
4. Make Failure Feasible

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Create the Commons

The corporation should create ‘the commons’, or a space where information is openly shared, for the whole development community,  involving many more types of people and thinking.

The idea that intrapreneurship should be open and inclusive should not surprise anyone. Still, we are left with the question of how to achieve that goal. My approach throughout this book has been to hold up principles to help you create your own J3.0 playbook. That approach reflects the realities that (a) best practices are forever changing, and (b) the ‘best’ answers will, in any case, never come down to cookie-cutter solutions but will be customized to particular settings. With that in mind, start your playbook with these field-tested, flexible ideas for inclusive intrapreneurship:

1. Plan for Full Inclusion
2. Make It Safe to Innovate
3. Use Technology in Appropriate Measure
4. Train Future Intrapreneurs
5. Create Porous Networks

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Engage Passion and Purpose

Passion is what motivates intrapreneurs to keep going when the work seems thankless or when seemingly insurmountable challenges arise.

Recognizing the passion and purpose parts of intrapreneurship allows companies to think more broadly about how to match their people with the problems they care most about. For employees, having the opportunity to work on passion projects creates greater engagement. For companies, it makes the most of creativity and ingenuity. Here’s how to put this win-win dynamic to work in a Jugaad 3.0 way:

1. Make Purpose Programmatic
2. Leverage Passion That Bubbles Up
3. Push Passion Viral

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Add Discipline to Disruption

There should be a full spectrum of innovation options for intrapreneurs in any organization, from eye-popping, potentially disruptive innovations to clever little hacks on existing solutions. They are all valid, and companies can create disciplined systems by thinking through three streams of innovation.

 The J3.0 approach requires structure and discipline in the right measure in order to extract the most value from each stream of innovation and install metrics that guide and measure success

without losing the learning or limiting the idea. The prescriptive plays look like this:

1. Develop Multiple Streams of Innovation
2. Create a Culture That Enables Hybridity
3. Manage Disruption with Discipline

Jugaad 3.0: Hacking the Corporation will prove that every organization’s best chance, to survive and become better than ever, lies within itself.