Why Corporate Accelerator Programs Fail

Are live. Welcome to those of you that are just joining the session. We're very excited to have you all join the session and it is why corporate accelerator programs fail. And we're joined by our very own Alex Osterwalde and Tendaya Vicky. Alex, of course, author of the Invincible Company most recently. And Tendai Vicky, the Pirates in the Navy. Great to have you both. How you both doing?

Really good. I'm just back from vacation.

I'm doing okay. I'm not back from vacation. Very jealous.

So motivating.

That salty 10 day, if you've never met him before, brilliant.

And you've got myself as well, part of it. And I haven't been on vacation either. Oh no, I did actually. I just came back from Moldova so that was good as well. Just throw that in there too. So what we're doing on today's session, well, there's four main parts. The first part is focusing on we're going to talk about business models, not products. Then we're going to talk about the criteria to measure progress. We'll move on to finding a home in the core business and then we'll go on to strategize the corporate incubator. Okay, so that's the plan for the session. If it sounds good, give me a thumbs up in the chat and we'll move on with it. If that's all right. We haven't had much interaction yet so feel free to share in the chat if you think that's a good plan so far. Excellent. I can see where people are coming from. That's good. Australia, Hamburg, Calgary. And Bastian says sounds good. And he's from Zurich, Switzerland as well. So this is great. Now before we get into it, we do want to mention strategizers corporate incubator that we're going to be launching from the 4th. It's going to be going on from the 14th of November to the 17th of February. And if you want to find out more, you can go to strategizergop.com corporate incubator registration page. I'm going to drop that link in the zoom because I think that's a bit of a mouthful. And you can also get in touch with salesrategizer.com if you're a corporate innovation team and you're interested in potentially being part of that. Okay, now I'm gonna hand over to Tendai.

Yeah. And I'd love a Spotlight. Put me in spotlight. Thank you, man. And really, it's really cool if you can join the the Strategizer Corporate incubator. I think it's going to be really powerful. And it's one of the reasons why we're running this session because as we started setting this up, the question was like, well, why are we doing this? And what lessons can we bring to other folks that are trying to actually run this? And so that's why we're having this conversation with you around. What is it that actually makes corporate incubators and corporate accelerators sometimes fail? And so we are going to present you with the three different themes and we're going to go like the positive thing to the negative thing just to show you how this works really well. So one of the first reasons that we think why cooperate programs fail is there's too much focus on products and technology and stuff from R and D. There's, there's such a focus on like making cool products, making cool technologies, that people forget that they should also be thinking about how those products and technologies deliver great value propositions and the right business models to take those things to scale with. The second reason we think why corporate performance fail is there's too much measurement of the wrong things. So they measure activity, number of experiments run, number of ideas submitted, number of, you know, all of those kinds of things. And it's not really the right things to be measuring. And what we should be measuring is impact. And Alex will talk to you about how do we make sure that we're measuring impact. And then finally, this is the. My personal pet peeve is the isolated incubator, the corporate innovators that hate MBAs and want to be as far away from the MBAs as possible. When actually the only way that innovation succeeds is if you actually build a bridge between your incubation program or accelerator program and the core business. Because that's the way you get the advantages when you're trying to scale. So let's start with the first one, then talk about business models and not products. And this is the strategy. It's a mantra. We believe that, and I say this a lot like the atomic unit of innovation is business models. And then there's always some smart alec in the room, was like, so what's the subatomic unit? But what we really mean is like, that's the smallest piece that you should be thinking about. We tend to think of the smallest piece of innovation is the idea, the product and the technology. But actually products, ideas and technologies is more the creative invention side. When you're talking about innovation, it's about whether those things become successful in the world. And One of the most. You'll see these T shirts a lot during this. During this. During this webinar. One of the most common Lean startup T shirts is make something people want. This is a very common mantra of like, make stuff people want. Make stuff people want. And it sounds really clever, but it's really strange because as Roger Martin likes to say, if the opposite of your core strategic choices look stupid, then every competitor will more or less be doing the same thing and have the exact same strategy as you. So the opposite of make stuff people want would be make stuff people don't want, which is kind of like a weird thing. So I don't know why we sort of focus on that a lot, because there's actually a more fundamental question that we need to be asking about, which is, is it still possible to make products that delight customers and fail? And that's something that I'd like to ask you on this call. Like, is it possible to make products that delight customers and still fail? So, Nick, if you can share with them the mentee so they can go on there and show us what they're thinking.

Yep, absolutely.

Yeah.

Now on screen.

Yeah. So please join the Mentee, and we're really curious to see, like, your thoughts on whether it's possible. Alex, what do you think? What's your. What are your thoughts around this? But maybe don't give them the answer yet, but just.

We'll wait. We'll wait a bit. Right?

Yeah.

So join the Mentee code on top. 336-08-4908490.

Excellent. There we go.

Yep.

Kind of a rhetorical question, right? I mean, what changed? So the thing that did change, what's interesting is, you know, for some time, if we can make a bad joke, you know, some entrepreneurs were seeing venture capital as a revenue stream, which it's not. Right. It's a subsidy to kind of keep you alive until you actually figured out, you know, how to create value for customers. Right. So. So there is there. This period is over, I think. Not entirely. I worked with a startup that was able to burn through 20 million in quite a rapid, you know, pace. And they only did a business model canvas a bit later, after one year. But. But in that time is like, it's. It's much harder. Right. Today, you. You have to actually show something, not just a product that people want, that subsidized through venture capital.

Exactly. And so that's interesting. It seems like everybody agrees with us that it is possible to make a product that delights your customers and actually still fail. So, yeah, yes, it is possible to make stuff people want and still fail. So rather than making stuff people want, we should actually mix that people want with a defensible business model. That's a horrible T shirt. I don't know who would buy that T shirt. It was too hard to read. But that's actually, like, more reality. I like to buy that T shirt. Right. So we really need to think about how do we make stuff people want. I think that's really important because, again, even as we focus on, you know, making products and services, we need to make sure that we're creating the right value. But then we need to make sure that we're embedding that in terms of thinking about how do we create, deliver, and capture value within our business models. And this is really important because we're not saying this just out of the blue. Like, I've been in corporate accelerators, corporate incubators, even startup accelerators, where the focus is so much on the product roadmap and how well we're doing on delivering the product. And at the end of the process, people demo their products and not any progress they've made in validating the business model. And so that's really, really important that we make sure that we're really, really focusing on making sure we're creating the right business models for product. And then another thing that we want you to think about is some people think that they can work on their product first, lock that in, and then figure out the business model after. But actually, we think you should be thinking about the product and the business model from the start. And that matters because especially when you're designing digital products, the way that the product is designed and the service is delivered is often an expression of the business model. So when I open the Uber app or the Airbnb app, what I'm interacting with is not just the user interface, it's also how that business model then instantiates itself out in the. In the real world. So what you're learning about your business model will inform how you design the product. And that also actually applies to physical products as well. What you learn about your business model in terms of manufacturing costs, cost of delivery, packaging costs, will inform you to come and redesign what that looks like in terms of just its physical appearance. And so you really need to be thinking about the business model and the product from the beginning. And. Yeah, Alex, please go ahead.

Yeah, just very quickly, because Nick is going to hit me on the head because he's the timekeeper here. But it also Includes, you know, prototyping the numbers from the start. So while you don't need to be profitable for quite some time as long as you have funding, it does mean you have to understand the numbers and the potential business model and test those.

Right.

So from the start, you prototype business models and numbers just so you start to actually learn what you need to learn, which is not just to build a product. That's probably the easiest part. Exactly.

And that's exactly the problem that they had at Xerox Spark, which is they had all the great technologies and they couldn't figure out how to business model it. So they. So in case people don't know about this, but Xerox invented most of the technologies we use in computers right now. The mouse, the interfaces we use that we now call Windows, the graphic user interfaces. And they had no clue what to do with them. And so they ended up giving them all to Steve Jobs in exchange for a portion of Apple, I think 100,000 shares or something like that. And it's just like a really strange thing to happen because Xerox could have owned the computer age. But so you can really see that having a great technology, having a great offer is not, it's not going to help you become, become, become, become successful. And so, so, so thank you. We are going to hand you over to, to Alex, who's going to now take us to the criteria for measuring progress.

Okay, so second piece I think that we're seeing, you know, it's, it's going wrong quite often is that teams are and, and the company itself do focus on actually measuring the wrong thing, so measuring activity rather than measuring progress, right? So here's another T shirt, right? One experiment a week. Now this is not wrong. And it's something we like to say, you know, with David Bland, who you know, led the Testing Business Ideas book with us. This is not wrong, but it's not enough, right? And I'll tell you why. Because the experiment is not the goal. And while you are running one experiment a week, you have to keep your eyes on the price. And another T shirt slogan is way too long. But you need to focus. What do you actually want to learn? Based on the evidence and the insights, you're going to make decisions and you're going to make progress towards a viable business model. Or let me emphasize this, or to kill the idea, right? Because sometimes corporate incubators and accelerators need to be able to kill because otherwise then dynamite like that, you're condemned to succeed and then you won't innovate Right. But the key here is measure the right stuff. So way too often in corporations, because that's key to execution, people focus on measuring activity. How many experiments have we performed, you know, how hard are the teams working and all of that? It's not wrong, but it's not what we really need to keep our eye on, what you really want to keep your eye on. And this almost sounds trivial, but if you look at the metrics of what people actually measure in corporations, it's not this. Measuring progress in innovation means measuring the amount and strength of evidence that's showing progress towards a viable business. And it could be very little activity. Great, we got lucky. Or it could be a ton of activity that leads to zero progress. But what do you do? You need to be able to kill the idea, right? So what you really, really, really want to measure most doesn't mean you're not going to measure activity. But the only thing that really matters is are you making progress towards a viable business or not? And that's obviously in phases. First, you're going to learn about customers, and you're going to learn about products and solutions and value propositions. Then you're going to learn about acquisition. But what you do need to learn is progress. So let me just very, very quickly sketch this out so we stay on time. And some of you might have seen me make this drawing a lot, right? In innovation, entrepreneurship, whatever you get into your corporate accelerator, it's about going from idea to a viable business. Let's call this, you know, 100 million or $1 billion business, doesn't really matter. And when you start, risk and uncertainty is very high, right? Risk and uncertainty, very high. And you need to admit this. And it's not the activity that you really want to measure most, it's how much progress are you making towards this viable business. That's the only method that matters. Are we measuring the reduction of risk and uncertainty? So, yes, you're going to run experiments, you're going to talk to customers about their jobs, pains and gains. And when you learn what they actually care about or what they don't, you reduce risk and uncertainty. This is the thing that we need to measure because potentially you could run 50 experiments and not reduce risk and uncertainty. You might just reduce the risk that not to build something you know nobody wants, but you haven't made progress because you actually only made progress towards killing the idea. Ultimately, this is the progress we care about. So you will increase the spending only when you start to kind of learn what works and what doesn't. But what you need to measure most is not activity, not the experiments, not the money. You do need to measure that. But the only thing that matters is risk reduction. And one thing I briefly mentioned there was taking entire webinar is strength of evidence. So when you did interviews, people told you what they're interested in. But when you do a landing page with a call to action or you got people to prepay, well, guess what? That evidence is stronger. So you made more progress when you got stronger evidence. So with that, maybe we can go towards the question, Nick. And the question is which one of these are actually measures of activity and which ones are measures of progress? So I have a whole series here. Number of experiments run, number of assumptions tested, number of interviews, validated jobs, pains and gains, number of MVPs and prototypes, number of pre sales. So go back to Menti and give, give us your opinion. Where on this scale would you put each of these? More on the activity side or more on the progress side? If we measure the number of experiments run, is that measure of activity or is that a measure of progress or somewhere in between. So let's get, get some voting done here. Okay, let's see. Interesting. Interesting. Tender, any thoughts when you see this?

Yeah, no, it's pretty cool. I think your message landed very well. Number of experiments run is the lowest scoring.

And I see some number of assumptions tested, number of assumption tested. There's some hesitation there.

And I think number of MVPs and prototypes is getting too high a score personally.

And number of interviews, same thing, right? Because you could, and here's what I want to emphasize, you could do a hundred interviews but not make any progress towards a viable business idea. You will make progress towards, oh, we're going to kill this idea. So yes, if we, if we look at progress in that sense, are we getting closer to the killing decision? For sure. But number of interviews doesn't matter. Number of experiments run doesn't matter per se. You could run one experiment and potentially get really far towards proving. But usually it takes in a whole.

Series and it's the same thing for number of prototypes like the prototypes do not like you could build prototypes forever and still make no progress towards finding a business model that works. But things like the number of pre sales, for sure. Validated jobs, pains and gains, for sure. Those things show you that you're on track.

Right? Okay, let's get to the solution. Let's get to the solution. And we would have something that looks a bit more like this. And I'll get out of the way in the meantime here. So on the left hand side I'd put those things that are really a measure of activity. How many interviews have you done? How many experiments did you run? Number of prototypes. So I'm not saying you shouldn't measure this and you don't need to do interviews and activities like that. But it doesn't give you any sense of progress because you could do 100 experiments and make no progress towards a viable business. We did actually learn that there's nothing there and you should kill. Now when we're talking about number of assumptions tested. Okay, if we went with the definition I just gave you right now, probably go a little bit more over here. If we had number of assumptions validated, it would be somewhere here, probably in the middle because we don't know is it the most important assumptions or is it a collection of assumptions that are actually not so important. Right. When we're talking about jobs, pains and gains. Well, we're now here invalidating what we would draw like this the customer. And now we're talking about validating revenue stream so it'd be more right hand side. So not an exact science. But we want to give you a feel of people actually measuring sometimes the wrong things. What we really believe in, we have these strategizer innovation metrics. We believe in measuring the amount and strength of evidence for each category of risk, desirability, feasibility, viability and adaptability. And I think somebody in the chat was already mentioning that they did some experiments around desirability and then actually had to kill a product that worked because they couldn't get more evidence on feasibility. So you get the point important to measure the right thing. And with that I'm going to throw it back to you Tendai on finding a home in the core business.

Oh, one thing, Alex, just before we hand it over, there was an interesting comment from Tendai which was what he would like is the T shirt which says condemned to succeed. Right. And this goes back to a point that you said that we, that we forgot. I'll let you jump in.

Yeah.

100. So super important to remember sometimes the evidence points towards you need to kill the projects. And too often corporate accelerators fail because when teams come in they're expected to succeed. Oh, we're giving you all this money and you know, but that's not the point actually the only thing that should happen in an incubator and accelerator is that they work on producing evidence and when it can be produced, it's okay to kill the project. Right. So I want That T shirt as well now, Tendai.

Yeah, I really want it. I think people will think I'm vain, like, oh, he thinks he's gonna make it anyway, like, condemned to succeed. I don't think that ever connected to innovation, but yeah. Okay, so let's move on and have a different conversation. And Alex, there was a nice comment by Manuel as well, which is small number of interviews, of course, means that you're not really that confident. But then even if you get a large number of interviews, which is my response, it only increases your confidence that much because you're measuring only what people say rather than what they do. And so you don't want a small number of interview, but you don't want to overreact to the evidence from a large number of interviews either. And that's kind of a balance you always have to do when you're kind of doing this work. And so let's talk a little bit now about. So you can see where we're going with this, right? So a corporate accelerator can fail if people are just focused on products and they're not really thinking about the business model and how they go to and how they go to market. And then if they do start thinking about the business model, you know, the projects can still fail and the accelerator can still fail because the teams are not really tracking the progress they're making towards validating those business models. So you start off with like just products only, and then you, you can fail because of that. Then you start focusing on business models, but now you're not tracking progress, and then you can fail because of that. And then finally, if you do find a business model that works, you can fail because you won't find a home inside the core business. And that's something that accelerators really struggle with because part of the dance that you have to do is to see what you would like, where you'd like to be in relationship to the, to the core business. Because a lot of corporate innovators I've met really hate MBAs. I think this is a very popular T shirt. If we were to make it that I hate MBAs t shirt. And actually Steve Blank says something really cool, which is actually a good T shirt. Like, I think we should make this one, which is MBAs pay your salary and innovators pay the pension, which is that the core business is really important because that's what's funding all the innovation work that we're doing. And that's also what's going to help us scale. And then as we work on innovation, we're ensuring that the business lasts into the future, so innovators pay our pension. And so there's a balance there. It's not that we're antagonistic towards the core business, is that those two parts of the business have to work together and that's our job as corporate innovators. But before I go any further, there's a really interesting conversation that we would like to have with you. So as you go along these two dimensions of explore and exploit, as you go along these two dimensions, you get the three types of innovation, you get efficiency innovation, you get sustaining innovation, and then you, Sorry, I'm doing that the wrong way around. Alex is going to laugh at me. You start with, you get transformative innovations that are over this side, and then you get your sustaining innovations that are in the middle, and then you get your efficiency innovations that are over here on the export side. So the question we have is, if you're working on these three types of innovations, where should they sit? Should they be in the accelerator program or the incubator program? Away from the core business, or should they be within the core business? And so again, let's go to the mentee and see what people think there. I think, and Alex, this is, this is one that I would love for you to comment on because you got very well articulated, strong views on this. So if the data comes in, it's.

Coming in slowly now. We've got a couple people that have answered now. Five people have answered. So everyone's getting in there now.

Yeah.

Really interesting. Yeah.

So I, you know, my guess is also that we have a pretty informed and educated audience here.

Yes.

At the end of the day, you know, to a certain extent it's a false question. Right. Because you could have an accelerator that takes on ideas that are efficiency innovation, but are funded by the business unit. Right. So that where it sits is not necessarily a physical space or in an org chart alone. There's also the funding mechanisms and the mental mindset. Right. As long as we know the differences and what might prevent transformative innovation from taking off, it's about managing those risks, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely. But I think that if you were to give people, if you were to give us a rule of thumb, it's generally that efficiency innovations should sit in the core business and then sustaining innovations, depending on the number of risks that are underlining it and how, how much is disrupting the core business model, can also either sit in the core business or in the, in the, you know, off to the side, in the Accelerator program and then transformative innovations much more likely to succeed.

Right.

Especially in the early stages where they haven't been proven. If, if they're really sitting outside of.

The corporate, then I would be very, very dogmatic that it's extremely rare that transformative innovation can survive within a business unit, within an operating P and L in particular. It doesn't even have to be disruptive. Right. But it's just different. Right. Different margins, maybe even different goals, and they don't directly contribute to the typical kind of P L. So transformative innovation cannot, they cannot sit within a business unit that rarely, rarely works. I haven't seen it work.

Yeah. And so that's the interesting challenge, right. If we're saying that transformative innovation should sit inside the core business, then the question is, and I'm going to move over here so people can see who that is. That's Joe Gertner and he's got this really interesting quote which is that almost by definition, not a single person can ever create an innovation. The task is too variegated and involved. In the end, if you're going to launch successful innovation out into the world, you really need to work with the core business. So that's the paradox of what we're saying, right, Alex, which is even as we're saying that for transformative innovation, you should put that outside the core business. It doesn't mean that you are not working or collaborating with the core business. So you build and work on your idea in your incubator, but you build relationships with the core business in order to make sure that that actually works. And that's actually a double sided coin that every corporate incubator has to sort of deal with. Every corporate accelerator has to deal with. And what's interesting is that a lot of innovators are really happy and they celebrate when they get their accelerator away from the core business, like we're away from the MBAs, we've been saved. And then they work on their ideas without ever trying to build a bridge back to the core. And then they struggle when they try and then take those ideas, those ideas to scale. And one of my favorite stories, special shout out to Gina Mitchell, who's just, who's now part of our team. But when I was working with them at TD Ameritrade, I remember one of the teams saying, you know, Tendaya, we used to call our innovation lab the home for homeless ideas. And what we found out later on was if an idea is homeless when it comes to the lab, it will be homeless when it Leaves. And so part of the work, even though you're like a home for homeless ideas, part of the work is to make sure the idea succeeds at a business model level. That's half of the work. The other half of the work is that it finds a home in the core business. And not only that, but that you're able to leverage the advantages of doing innovation in a, in a large company. And Alex, this speaks to your principle of a startup in chains. Because the coolest thing about being a startup, right, the coolest thing about being a startup is that you can work on stuff you like. There's no restrictions. You can pivot your idea. You can, I mean you are accountable to investors if you have them, but it's not the same kind of restrictions that you have if you're working inside a large company. So if you're working inside a large company, you already have those restrictions, but now you don't even have the benefits. So like what's the what, so what's the point? Right? And you can explain that a little bit better. That whole concept of being a startup.

In chain and there's, there's actually, you know, the best way to kind of frame it is. Steve Blank calls this a two front war. We might just want to get away from the war analogy. But it's a two front fight. A two front battle, right? On the one hand side you're fighting to get your business model right, getting customers interested. On the other hand you're fighting for executive buy in, right? So that's a really important dance. Which actually means that the innovation leaders, their job is not to run an accelerator, their job is actually a political one, which is to get everybody on board. And that's sometimes what people get wrong in innovation. Their job, you know, is they, they should have a team that takes care of the, of the innovation projects, the accelerators and incubators, the actual work, because their job is a political one like with most kind of senior leaders to create the conditions for success that there is a home, when there isn't create the conditions that we can create a new pnl. So that is often underestimated that the innovation leaders should actually not. And I, you know, one of our friends, Henning Trill, said that he underestimated that for a very long time. He was really focused on getting the innovation kind of projects right. That he neglected that his job was really much more about connecting with other leaders. So. Interesting kind of insight.

Yeah, no, I mean, and that's, and that's a super fascinating insight in the sense that I've even heard some innovators going, we don't need to talk worrying about dealing with the core business. If our idea becomes successful, we'll just spin it out. And I was like, do you know how hard it is to spin something out of a corporation? Now you got like the corporate finance team involved, the legal team involved. What are the contracts? What is the nature of the structure of the spin out? You cannot just spin something out. You always have to do collaborative work with the core business. Which is why this is one of my favorite quote quotes by Hobie Darling. He's a former Nike executive. He used to work in Nike Labs where they invented the Nike band. And he. And he says, when you work for a large company, you need to spend a lot of time lining up the cannons, right? You need to line up the canon for marketing, the canon for legal and compliance. Some of the cannons I even pointed at you and your team. So you need to turn them around so they can point somewhere else. But if you're working in a large company and you're successful in lining up all the canons, the advantages you have means that when you fire them, it just goes off in a big bang. So that's something that people have failed to pay attention to when it comes to corporate innovation, which is you do need to work to maximize the advantages of being a corporate innovator. So that's a really, really interesting kind of, you know, kind of take on that. And so that's. Yeah, go ahead, Alex. I was starting to get passionate.

I think this is absolutely crucial because we tend to, I believe, to a certain extent, kind of over glamorize the startup world and say, oh, the disruptions are going to come from the startup world. While that's mainly correct today, I really believe that corporations have so many assets that, if I may say it in a provocative way, if they get their act together, they're going to be innovation machines that create enormous value for customers and society. So I think we shouldn't make fun of corporations, but actually really see them as we need to get this right in companies because there's so much value that we can unlock. And they're good examples out there. I mean, let's take one that we like. You know, China's not these days, but Ping an and Jessica Tan, who was just elected to one of the top women leaders of the planet. She led innovation at Ping an large company, but they were in the top 500. Now they're in the top 20 companies of the world. So once you unleash those cannons in the right direction, there is such a huge, huge, enormous potential for value creation. So I think we need to really, really kind of get that right and not make fun or be cynical, but actually do the work. So, so corporates can, can create that.

Yeah, actually, you know, Andreessen Horowitz, some of the partners there, I think his name is Alex Rempel, has got a really good piece of advice that they give their startups and they tell them that in the battle between a startup and an incumbent, the question is, can the startup find distribution before the incumbent finds innovation? Because if the incumbent beats you to innovation, they've already got distribution, they've got access to markets, access to customers, they've got scale. So the startup has to innovate and then find scale, whereas a large company can leverage what they have to scale. So if the incumbent finds innovation before the startup finds distribution, they can crush the startup. And so that's what Andreas and Horowitz are trying to encourage the team to go find distribution before the incumbent finds innovation. Right.

And I would expand that actually to what, in our world, in the invincible company, we call that business model shifts. So when you have a business model, you have probably quite a few strengths that you're not using today. And I think that the best example of an unbelievable business shift was with Amazon Web Services. So people might not know the story, but the reason Amazon could be so successful so quickly is because they were an E commerce, very low margin business. So their IT infrastructure was so much more efficient and effective than what you would find at Google and Microsoft that are high margin businesses that when they launched Amazon Web Services, their weakness, low margins immediately became their strength. So they made this shift and turned a weak part of their business model into an incredible competitive advantage. And I think today, and that's back to don't just think products, think business model. What do you have today that can allow you to build completely new business models, but where your existing business model can be a launchpad? And another example is Netflix. Right? Moving from DVD by mail to to, to, to streaming, that was their initial goal, but they were already thinking at the launch of the business, they were thinking business model transformation. So this is a completely underexplored topic. Sounds a bit scary, but I think when we get this into corporations, it's a huge wealth of opportunity for value creation.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, yeah, no, thank you for that, Alex. And unfortunately you're going to have to keep talking because you're going to introduce everyone to the to Our upcoming incubator. So over to you.

Yeah, I was getting very passionate and excited over there. So yeah, let's round it off before we maybe have some time for humanic. I'll see you tell us if we do. I want to show just a little bit what we're doing right now with this Strategizer corporate incubator. So the idea here is we thought, well, how could we launch something to really take our best practices and make it accessible to corporations before they scale it internally. So it's this vehicle that we created so corporations can send a team, just one team, to shape, test and adapt an idea with growth potential. And by learning how it's really done based on the best practices that we discovered through trial and error, they can then bring this back in and, you know, either work with us or on their own to actually scale all this knowledge. So what do you get when you do this is you really learn how to design and test ideas, you develop those skills because innovation and entrepreneurship is a skill you can learn and we know how to teach them with these tools. And then the last one is, is not training, it's actually something that produces results. So that's why we get so excited about the Strategizer corporate incubator because you produce results and ultimately, you know, through a series of workshops, a series of kind of testing in the field and then some presentations at the end, and that accompanied with best in class coaching, you really get something out of this and you can start to copy that model and bring it into your own organization. Because that's ultimately the goal that we have, is to equip corporations around the world, starting with the big ones, hopefully moving towards SMEs over time, equipping them with the best in class innovation kind of experience that we have. If I dive just very quickly a little bit deeper so you can already learn how we do this. So if you're running an incubator, you know, feel free to copy. So we start off with a kickstart kind of period where it's really about getting into the fundamentals of innovation and building shared language. So learning the tools, learning what are we focusing on, the metrics that it's okay to fail, how to fail, what to measure and what the expectation is. What do we want to see at the end of a 12 week sprint? This is a 12 week sprint. Then after that kind of kickstart, which is a bit more around training, learning about the tools, immediately going into shaping each and iterating ideas, shaping in the sense that you know, designing value proposition, canvas, business model canvas, Understanding what's a good business model. Because as 10 dimension from the start we want people to understand business models, not just products. Right? Because at the end of the day it's about building a viable business. It's not about building a product. And then of course the big part here is getting out of the building to use Steve Blank's world words and test, test, test. And it's actually this should be yellow and red. It's an iteration between these two because you test, you learn and you need to redesign. So you reshape your ideas and the coaches help you make sense of the interpretation of the data, of the evidence that you're, that you're getting and turning that back into better value propositions and business models. And at the end after we already did iterate and make decisions every week, there is a point where you synthesize the knowledge from a sprint. You synthesize that evidence and as a team you make an evidence based presentation. So not the typical oh I'm going to show my product and how great it is. Absolutely not because nobody cares. You show the evidence that you were able to produce over the period of the sprint with a very, you know, sharp eight minute presentation at the end of the day so you can make a decision or so you can present to the leadership or to a growth board to make evidence based, fact based investments decisions. And here we really, really go deep into all of this. Our trade secrets give them away. Doing this on our platform so that teams who go through this experience get, get, you know, just the best of the best, best of what we've learned through trial and error so we can incorporate this into innovation in, in companies around the world. Anything you would want to add Tendai, because you've seen this stuff in action in the field, we've already did one of these as a, as a coach assessment center. But anything you would want to add to what I just said?

No, not a lot to add. Just. Yeah, I mean the whole focus on, I think the value that we bring is the ability to focus not just on the idea but to make sure that, you know, you're testing and validating the business model. I think also what I love about the incubator is this combination of learning skills and tools and how to do really great work while simultaneously creating value for your organization by actually working on an actual idea and running an innovation sprint on an actual idea. So I think it's a great opportunity for organizations to take advantage.

It's real world training. And somebody did ask Lee, as a solo entrepreneur, is it better to click the books? And I do think the price point of the corporate incubator and the coaching support you get is tailored to large company budgets. So as a solar entrepreneur, I don't think the accelerator that we're offering today is the right one. I would hope that maybe in two years or so we can make this product accessible through more technological support to solo entrepreneurs and individual teams. Today, we're not equipped for that yet. It's really also quite some good support through. Through coaches. With that, I do want to show.

So, Alex, there's a question, there's a question. Is there any geographical limitation they're asking? They're from Egypt.

Absolutely not. So when we did this the first time with startups, so we tested the whole thing already with startups and it's the approach we use inside corporations today, it's across the world. Right. So when we did this for startups, that was the public one that we can even share the videos, maybe Nick, online, that video where you see the pitch Sessions, we had 200 teams apply. We took 10. That was a free product that we offered to entrepreneurs. We picked 10 teams out of 200 and they came from across the world. Right? We had team from Africa, we had. Didn't we have a team from Asia? Nick? I can't remember. I can't remember.

Off the top of my head, I can't remember. But I'm just finding the link. So you'll be able to watch all the videos anyway.

Definitely from North America and North America and Europe and I think two teams from. From Latin America. So absolutely no geographical restriction, that's for sure. So with that, I think we have time for some Q and A and then do you want to rate the session first before we go to questions? Nick?

Yes, I'm going to share the poll now should be coming up. And the question that we'll be asking is if you hadn't participated in this webinar, you'd be one, very disappointed, two, somewhat disappointed, three, not disappointed, or four, I wouldn't have wasted my time. So if you could share that with us, it just helps us kind of understand how we're doing with our webinars, whether they're helping you. It's a useful bit of quantitative data for us. So while you're doing that, I'm going to hand the hot potato back over to you, Alex, I believe for the Q and A from anyone kind of asking any questions they've got at the.

Moment, I'll let it to 10. I think you were following the chat, right, because that was.

There we go. So Sebastian is asking, you mentioned startups. I have a question. You know, make versus buy. Some executives would argue that acquiring a disruptive setup is enough, perhaps less risky. When and how would you advise them to go for opting for in house innovation instead of buying?

So it's a very good question and I had this conversation, I can't remember just yesterday, but I can't remember who it was actually. But so you always should go for in house experimentation and testing because you will make better acquisitions. So you don't need to grow the project internally, but you should go at least for two consecutive sprints. Right? So do one 12 week sprint and then potentially, you know, a 24 week sprint afterwards because the experiments get a little bit more deeper and longer. And then based on that, you can make acquisition or investment decisions. What I would not advise is to think hard and then make, make acquisitions or investments. The in house learning is crucial and you can always at any point decide do we know enough to make an acquisition or an investment or do we know enough to actually decide to grow this internally because of whatever competitive advantage. So you need to use the whole toolbox. But I wouldn't undervalue kind of the, the, the insight. Now I remember it was with Sean from Carnegie, Carnegie Mellon, Sean Amarati, and we were talking about the lack of integration today between corporate venture capital in house innovation and other kind of strategic innovation activities. So these are not coordinated enough and we're leaving a lot of energy on the table and a lot of waste happens there because they're happening in different parts of the organization and they're not aligned. And we've seen this again and again and again. The corporate venture team is over there, the innovation team is over here and then there's another group that does other innovation activities over there. So I would not go immediately for investment or acquisitions. I would always, I mean, let me not say always, but it always consider doing the experimentation first before you do the acquisitions and the investments.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And then Matthias, absolutely. Like Nick said, this will be available at the video right afterwards. So you can share with your bunch of colleagues. Maybe your colleagues are running a corporate Florida and a lot to learn from this. But then David also asked this question, right? Is there value in having a team member or two that are just tasked primarily with building the bridge to the core, like just working on that, on the programmatic, you know, components to facilitate that work to grow innovation acumen Within. Within the core business. And yeah, absolutely, I would say that. Right. I mean, I mean, Alex, when Alex first designed the structure of what he thinks should be the way that a corporate innovation function works, he put in a role there that he called the chief ambassador, somebody who just builds a bridge between the work that's being done in the core business and work that's being done in the incubator or accelerator. Because actually it's important for the incubator to know what's happening strategically in the core business and what leaders care about. And also then for the core business to know exactly what the accelerator is working on so that they can sort of, you know, work collaboratively. So absolutely, that role of ambassador is really, really important. And if in lieu of having an ambassador, then the whoever is the head of incubator, that's your job, that's more your job than actually working on ideas.

Manuel, Manuel had a good question. Within this 12 week sprint, how far should we get regarding EG and MVP development? 12 weeks is rather short and that's a very good point. So in other webinars we insisted on not starting with building. You don't need to build something to test. So there's this complete misconception. And I do think it comes from, you know, Eric Greece framing, which I don't think he really meant literally build, measure, learn. You should never build as the first activity. That's the worst thing you could do. First activity already is kind of sketch out your ideas and come up with your hypothesis. But generally test the customer first. Don't build anything if you don't have a deep, deep understanding of customer jobs, pains and gains. So within the first 12 weeks we want to see really good evidence, strong evidence, call to action evidence on the existence of jobs, pains and gains, potentially some conversations around willingness to pay. And we do not expect an MVP could be, and it depends a bit how you define an mvp. So we would have something that we call value scenes. You can Google that. Value scenes where we show a solution, but it's a sketch that's technically not an mvp. Right. There's a bit of a religious war around what an MVP is. Minimal viable product. As a product that does something that you don't need in 12 in a 12 week sprint, it's the last thing you want to do. So generally people start to build too early without a deep understanding of jobspace gains. Why is it so important? Because if customers now don't want this mvp, you don't know if they don't want it because Your solution doesn't perform the way they should. Or if they actually have those jobs, pains and gains. So why aren't you first testing jobs, pains and gains? Because once you know they have those jobs, pains and gains, now when you test your MVP and they don't care, you know it's because your MVP is broken, not because they don't have the jobs, pains and gains. So within 12 weeks, we understand strong evidence around the customer. We do not need strong evidence around the solution yet because that would be over expecting. Again, depends a bit on the context.

All right, cool.

I think we should address one last question, right, Nick, I think we've got enough time for just one last question. Yeah, so that's an interesting one. Now, it's about personality, behavioral, psychological differences between those people that are successful in the core business and those that are successful in it, you know, in accelerators and doing innovation. How do you, how do you even manage for those differences, Alex? Like, what are your thoughts around that?

So sometimes, and I'll kind of answer with it with a deviation to hear what you think, Tenda. But sometimes people say, how do we pick the right people? Right? The right innovators. Well, I don't think you picked them. You actually created an environment in which anybody can try and then they have to prove. Right. Then it's just. It's like in the startup world, you get some funding to start, you can't pull it off, can't get any evidence. Well, to tough luck, your project gets killed and that should be okay, right? So you have to prove yourself. That's how you manage it. What you do need to make sure of is that people can come back and do this several times to a point where you will have some that do that. They become professional innovators. Right? And they get really good at this. But don't try to pick them because some might look better at this. Oh, these are idea people. Idea people are generally those who are not good entrepreneurs. Because entrepreneurship is not about, you know, ideas. It's actually about turning an idea into a viable business. So create the ecosystem so the winning ideas and the winning teams can emerge. And maybe the last thing you know, I remember it was in this, I was running a dinner for senior executive team and the CEO said, oh, I get it, Alex, we need to infect everybody with the innovation virus. I said, no, no, actually, quite the contrary. You already have people with the innovation virus. What you need to do is, is create a transparent system where innovators know where to go and what to do. And they will come. You don't need to infect anybody with anything because as long as you just create this ecosystem, they will come and they will succeed. So super important, right? And for me that was like, wow, I've never heard anybody say it that way. And it for me got clear that that's exactly the wrong thing. You don't need to create a lot of innovators. They're already there. Give them the vehicles so they can innovate.

Yeah, absolutely. And then of course there will be folks that are uninterested in innovation, especially in the early stages, but do have a role in helping innovation become successful towards the end. So it's really interesting, like Steve Blank is really a nice place to go and read some of these dichotomies in the startup world because he will advise startups on how they're not like established companies and how they need to use iterative methods to find the right business model to scale. And then later on he'll write a piece about why founders get fired. Because once this company is ready to scale, they sometimes the wrong personalities for that. And so that balance between being entrepreneurial and being then later able to execute and drive things to scale is how the core business and innovators collaborate. So you don't need to change people's personalities, just give people opportunities. Those that are interested in innovation can pick it up. And then once those things are ready for scale, they should know that they need to collaborate with those more MBA type personalities in the core business to drive that towards success.

Then I do have one more for you. So our friend Tyler Andersen is asking, have you ever run into a situation where the corporate strategy team thinks they own innovation and if so, how did they solve for that? So my immediate quick reaction was, is actually a good place for innovation to sit. Right. But it depends of course you know how the corporate, the corporate strategy team understands innovation or not. But I know you've been very specifically confronted with that situation, so maybe you can share your experience.

10 yeah, I mean, so that all depends on like how the corporate strategy function, thinks innovation works. Because sometimes actually corporate strategy is a really great place for innovation to sit because they have access to resources and they're allowed to explore the future because they can say that they're actually working on, on, on, on, on strategic things. So I think for us, and this is a really like, I hate giving these sorts of answers because they're not, they're so non specific. Like it's not really where innovation sits as such, it's in Terms of is it strategy, is it this, is it that? It's more like is there a function that's responsible for driving innovation? Is this sitting at the highest level in the org chart and are they putting in place the right practices for innovation to, to, to, to, to. To actually thrive? Because the chief strategy and growth officer that we work with at a specific organization is really driving the right innovation practices and building the right processes for products to become successful. And another organization in Ping an is the chief entrepreneur who is a co CEO. Another organization it is the chief innovation officer who reports directly to the CEO. So the question is not whether or not the strategy office owns innovation, but how they're owning that innovation. Are they owning it by saying no, we don't do anything else, we just do corporate venture capital, rest of the stuff, you know, we'll just write strategy documents about the future. Or are they owning it in such a way that allows innovators to thrive?

And what I'd add to that Tenda, is exactly that. The general answers, you know, where does it sit, who owns it? Probably not as important as it's slightly different framing of a general answer. As long as innovation has power, right? And that can be if the corporate strategy function has power, that's okay. If it doesn't, it shouldn't sit there. Right. So I think it's more important to look at the indicators than actually where physically kind of in the org chart it sits. If innovation has no power, it can sit anywhere. It's not going to work. Right?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, no, thank you everyone, thank you for the questions and really enjoyable session. Over to you Nick, to take us to the close.

Yeah, we're going to have to end it there but if you want to hear more from Tendai, Alex and even myself actually you can go to our YouTube channel if you go to YouTube.com of course, search for Strategizer. There's loads of videos that we've posted there. There's some really good ones that I posted just recently of Tendai that goes into a little bit more about your last answer I think there Tendai as well, which I think are really interesting. So definitely check that out. One thing that I'll do just to remind you if you wanted to, but you haven't, haven't had the chance yet and you want to get in touch about the corporate incubator, you can send an email to Our sales team gunjan.guptastrategizer.com it's probably the most direct email to send to find out more or you could just scan the QR code to be able to put a calendar invite straight in there via calendly with him. So that's that. We've done the feedback. I just also want to mention one last thing. Sorry, Tendai's eager to go but one last thing. From Innovation Theater to Growth engine, download the Playbook as well. If you haven't already, you can go to strategizer.com playbook to be able to download that. And if you want some help with implementing that as well, gisellestrategizer.com is what you can do. So thank you everybody. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks again to Alex. Thanks to Tenday once again and we look forward to seeing next time. Keep an eye out on strategizers.comwebinars if you want to register to hear when our next webinar will be and until then have a fantastic rest of your morning, day, afternoon, night and see you later everybody.

Thanks everybody.

Thanks very much. Thanks David.

Thanks both. Thank you. Thank you everybody.