What Is “Top Talent” When It Comes To Innovation?

Photo and Artwork Credit: Stef Lewandowski, taken in our Venture Studio with Jaguar Landrover

I’ve recently changed tack with my own career. And it’s made me think long and hard about what I really believe when it comes to the differences between the Entreprenuer and the Intrepreneur.

Corporate Innovation

Until a month and a half ago, I was all about education. How do we take what works for successful startups and teach it to corporate employees? So they have a chance to try a new path, and the company gets new business lines, products or processes which make a trackable difference to the bottom line.

I loved the people side of my job. Yes, the teams did nickname me “Devil Cop” because “Bad Cop” was apparently too kind a description for my point blank, candor. But, they said it with a smile, and often with a slack message on the side as a thank you for trusting them to take the feedback on board and turn it into momentum. I loved hearing how everyone’s language changed. From talking about “ideas” to calling out “assumptions”. I was routinely teased for getting emotional on demo day. But I challenge you not to find it emotional when you have a room of people in front of you who have genuinely unlocked a different kind of potential; telling you they can’t go back to their day jobs and old ways of working.

I loved the ideas we created and incubated too — knowing we weren’t delivering fluffy ideas or pretty prototypes. That we could watch the pitches at demo day and really believe those businesses were worth the C-Suite investing in. And I’ve loved watching those businesses take on the task of scaling. Running at the things that are hard and still trying to learn on the job.

I believe, adamently and passionately that corporate careerists can become intepreneurs. Can pick up the lessons from startups and apply them to deliver real business impact straight away.

Now, not everyone is a natural here. Perhaps I’ve made it sound too easy. Sign up for some education, join an accelerator, and hey presto… 6 months later you emerge from your cocoon a beautiful innovator…

The truth is I’ve seen people fall flat on their face here too. People who leave a program because the idea of “being comfortably uncomfortable” is too paradoxical to swallow. I’ve seen people who should have left the programs because they couldn’t keep pace.

To be a corporate entrepreneur the following has to be true:

• You have to be ready to work in uncertainty and you have to find you can thrive in it. Not just survive it for a short burst.
• You have to really really really want to learn. And value your personal learning as highly as your business learnings, because if you don’t embrace new methodologies, skills, and principles as fast as they’re thrown at you, your business will be slower for it.
• You have to play politics. I hate to admit it, but sometimes you have to play the game or you will just get played. Working on innovation within a corporate means you have to use your connectivity within the organisation. Get great at saying no. Get even better at saying yes and then pivoting to another track when the data comes in. Learn how to involve stakeholders so they feel comfortable, without creating a consensus culture where you’re beholden to building everyone else’s idea. And learn to jump through hoops when you have to, or neatly sidestep them when you don’t
• Get really good at Lean Startup, Business Model Innovation, Customer Development and the whole startup toolkit, to the point where you can evangelise and instruct in them enough to bring your colleagues along with you, so they help instead of hinder your progress.
• Bring deep industry expertise to quickly understand how to evolve new offerings from current solutions. The challenge is countering this with an optimism and data-led approach that avoids the common pitfall of thinking: “well it didn’t work last time we tried” or “it’s never been done before so it can’t be done now”.

Venture Building

Now we’ve run down the memory lane of my last few years as Head of Training — let’s skip back just a handful of weeks.

A month ago I moved jobs in what may seem like a side step to some, but to me, felt massive.

I’m no longer spending my days teaching. I don’t design workshops. I don’t build education programs.

Perhaps the biggest change of all. I’m not trying to convince anyone to “give entrepreneurship a try”.

I’m not doing any of that, because my focus has changed.

From optimizing existing businesses and growing new business lines, to building new ventures. Ventures which have the potential to deliver big returns and to not just build a new business line for a corporate, but a new business entirely.

I’m now an Associate Principal at a a startup that is building startups — Rainmaking Venture Studio.

My day to day has fundamentally shifted. I’m now focussed on finding and examining new spaces to see if there’s enough fodder for business model innovation and ideas worth investing in.

I’m discovering the customer need and mapping the user journeys myself, rather than training someone else to do it. I’m unpicking business models, supply chains and will be shifting industries and companies regularly.

I’m loving it. Geeking out on startups more than ever. Relishing the chance to get my own hands dirty again.

And all the while, I’m working to not get personally over-invested in any one startup idea.

Firstly, because this is an investment vehicle- so we need to have passionate ideas but loosely held and really examine whether they’re worth our funds.

Secondly, because for every venture we invest in, we build a team of serial entrepreneurs who run the idea as they would their own startup.

This is actually perfect for me. I get to play at the exciting fuzzy space stage, where there are plenty of unknowns and room for creativity. I love this early stage, where we are searching for an area with clear pains to solve, new customers to serve, and a real advantage to be gained from partnering with a corporate to unlock a key resource (whether this at a customer or infrastructure level).

Then once we’re convinced it’s investable, and our corporate partner is too, we give the founders their seed round, and any support or coaching they need.

But here’s where we see the first big difference when it comes to the kind of talent I’ll be working with. They don’t need to be taught. They are proven entrepreneurs who have done this before. They’ve had a startup. Raised investment. They’ve lived lean startup. They’ve had their own customers, modelled their own businesses. They have their own muscle memories of failures and successes. They know what works in practice and how fast they really need to go to compete with other startups.

Why does this matter so much? And is it hypocritical of me to laud the potential of the corporate careerist and then claiming there’s no room in these ventures for fresh meat?

It matters because, truthfully, you will always go faster if you’re only trying to do one thing at once.

I’ve talked (ok ranted) a lot previously about the need for focus in new ventures. The need to not have day to day responsibilities for corporate employees. To not get bogged down in reporting which doesn’t serve the business but only the stakeholders. The need to accelerate your team through the stages of forming, storming, norming and performing to get past the personal stress patterns and just get sh*t done.

Now, when you’re running corporate innovation efforts, you’re typically looking at either optimisation or growth plays: building on the existing services you offer and making them more efficient, expanding their reach or innovating the product lines. This is still new — it’s uncertain and has risk. But the degree of risk is substantially lower than later horizon innovations. Where the growth path is still not known. Where the business models which will win aren’t proven. Where you need to be exceptionally speedy at pivoting to find the right path before your runway runs out.

In Venture Building, we are targeting those later stage horizon 2 (growth) or early stage horizon three (disrupt) business models. The winners aren’t known. The startup space is still early. The models are still to be created. In this context, you don’t have time to learn on the job. You have to be able to run at the problem from day one, without someone else directing you or trying to upskill you along the way.

So what changes when we think about talent we’re hiring for the studio?

Top Talent for Venture Building:

• Been there got the T-Shirt. They know what they’re doing. They’re open to being challenged and inspired by others, but they want to set their own direction. They have proven in their past businesses that they know how to find the right business model in the muddy spaces where innovations are still emerging and scale what works. To gauge this, we look for our founders to have already raised a Series A previously.
• Changing life stage. Looking for more security— they are used to driving their own businesses — this kind of talent is just never going to sign on to become a corporate lifer
• Driven by equity. We don’t do consulting day rates. We give base salaries which are the kind a startup founder could give themselves if they’d just raised a seed round. We need them to have fully aligned incentives so that it’s in their best interests to kill ideas which aren’t working, rather than drag a project on for the day rate.
• Startup skills matter more than industry. We rely on our corporate partner to help us dive deep on any aspects on the industry we need an inside track on (for instance regulatory detail). They know this best. What our talent knows best is business model innovation, rapid experimentation and how to scale a business in the first 5 years of its life.
• Passionate ideas, loosely held. It’s always hard to kill an idea you created, but our model only works if we quickly kill ideas which aren’t getting traction in the market so we can reallocate our own investment and our corporates investment. There’s huge opportunity cost in chasing any idea after the data has disproved it. So we need our entrepreneurs to be able to balance being passionate enough to hustle for an idea, and data driven enough to quickly pivot or pass on the opportunity if the market disproves our initial assumptions.

This article is just an opener, a quick update on why I’ve changed my tune for the avoidance of confusion, and hopefully a conversation starter on how we need to think about different kinds of talent for different vehicles of corporate innovation.

As ever, I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. What are the limits of the intrepreneur? What are the challenges of hiring and keeping serial entrepreneurs? What are you trying to learn about talent in this space?