DRIVING INNOVATION FROM WITHIN
DRIVING INNOVATION FROM WITHIN: A GUIDE FOR INTERNAL ENTREPRENEURS
Driving innovation from inside of an organization has become the central determinant of organizational success today. Employees are the number one source of innovative growth options and the only remaining source of sustainable competitive advantage. Arming them with the skills and tools necessary to innovate on a continual basis is of paramount importance to any organization with aspirations to remain relevant in the future.
Kaihan dispels the myth of the visionary startup company that disrupts the world as being the primary source of innovation. Kaihan shows how large, established organizations are the true innovators and how they can be a place where both incremental and revolutionary ideas and innovations come to life.
Creating the culture, structure, and organizational environment needed to enable continual employee-driven innovation is no easy task. Driving Innovation From Within assembles insights from over 150 interviews with internal entrepreneurs and experts into a practical guide for leaders and employees alike – proving the toolkit, frameworks, and know how they need to transform their organizations and drive growth by activating employee-driven innovation and entrepreneurship.
THE IN-OVATE FRAMEWORK
- Intent – Can you activate your employees to have the intent to innovate?
- Need – Do you understand what the market needs, what the organization needs, and your organization’s strategy?
- Options – Are you able to create lots of interesting options, ie, do you have the creative capacity to generate ideas for innovation?
- Value blockers –Are you able to overcome value blockers if the new idea conflicts with your current business model?
- Act – Can you take action and experiment or prototype your ideas?
- Team – Can you assemble a cross-functional team that has the right attributes needed to ramp up the innovation up quickly?
- Environment – Can you manage environmental factors (leadership, culture, structure, and talent)?
Praise for Driving Innovation From Within
“Amidst great global competition and rapid technology shifts, continuous innovation is what drives long-term impact and success. And the number one source of innovation for companies is their own employees. Kaihan shows how large organizations, not just startups, can be a place where entrepreneurs innovate, build, and adapt for the future.”
– Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Co-Author of Blitzscaling
“This smart and wide-ranging book will convince you that it’s often more promising to be an ‘intrapreneur’ — someone who innovates from within an established organization — than an entrepreneur. If you work for an organization and are itching to become more creative — to tap the resources of your company to create something amazing — DRIVING INNOVATION FROM WITHIN is an essential read.”
– Daniel H. Pink, Author of When, Drive, and To Sell Is Human
“Innovation is the lifeblood of every great company – the key is to identify it and then nurture it to success. Krippendorff’s book is a useful guide that any business, government, and organization should read to ignite innovation from the bottom up.”
– Parker Harris, Co-Founder of Salesforce
“Innovation and creativity can come anytime, from anywhere. Companies planning to succeed far into the future have to accept that the best ideas don’t come from working in siloes – and may even seem to go against the strategies that have driven past success. But game-changing, innovative ideas can be fostered within organizations by embracing collaboration, co-creation and diversity of thought. Kaihan provides practical, actionable steps for breaking down siloes, igniting the drive to collaborate and accepting the new opportunities that will soon come your way.”
– Ajay Banga, Former CEO of Mastercard
“Kaihan’s description of the six attributes of successful corporate intraprenuers and the seven barriers that they face make this book required reading for anyone who wants to innovate inside of a company.”
– Steve Blank, Innovation Guru, Creator of the Lean Startup Movement, Stanford Professor
“Driving innovation from within’ is a fresh new approach of how to succeed in our highly uncertain business climate.”
– Marshall Goldsmith, Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and two-time #1 Leadership Thinker in the World
“This book speaks a truth: most innovation isn’t the realm of entrepreneurs, it occurs as smart leaders unleash the creativity and intelligence of their teams, turning employees into world-class innovators. And, while many books offer tools that might work, this one offers tools that have been proven to work at the most innovative companies. How refreshing.”
– Liz Wiseman, NY Times Best-selling author of Muiltipliers, Rookie Smarts, and Impact Players
“Startups get the headlines, but established companies are often the real innovation heroes. Driving Innovation From Within is chock full of examples and tools to help internal innovators combine entrepreneurial energy with assets of scale to innovate with impact.”
– Scott Anthony, Senior Partner at Innosight, author of Dual Transformation and Eat, Sleep, Innovate
“In Driving Innovation From Within, Kaihan shares a toolset and process companies and employees can leverage to bring ideas, both incremental and transformative, to fruition, to change the world and create a better future.”
– Stuart Crainer, Co-founder of Thinkers50
“Kaihan Krippendorff has written a stunningly engaging book on innovation that is as smart as it is practical.”
– Amy Edmondson, Professor at Harvard Business School, Author of The Fearless Organization
“Transformation cannot happen through leadership alone. Kaihan’s work provides compelling evidence that inspiring and empowering people broadly throughout the organization is the only way to sustain change and achieve agile and innovative growth. It includes an interesting framework on how to merge the advantages of scale with the agility of a startup”
– Maeve Coburn, SVP of Learning for Transformation at L’Oréal
“Would-be innovators inside large organization often come to realize their organizations’ culture, mindset, and processes fight them at every turn. Kaihan offers a practical set of tools that can help internal entrepreneurs better their odds against the large corporations that seem to ask for innovation but seem to fight it at every turn. He blends critical innovation concepts, from hypothesis-based experimentation to shifting from an operational into an innovation mindset, into promising process anyone can follow.”
– Vijay Govindarajan, Coxe Distinguished Professor at Tuck at Dartmouth, NY Times Best-selling author of the Three Box Solution
“Kaihan’s book gives us two precious gifts. First, a much-needed new narrative – big organizations CAN BE and ARE innovative; the “hero innovator” story in fact happens more frequently and successfully within large organizations vs. startups! Second, it provides a practical path and tools for those unsung intrapreneurial heroes – and their leaders – to create innovation-enabled organizations.”
– Kalina Nikolova, VP Strategy and Operations, Yahoo!
“Using examples that range from McDonald’s McPizza to Microsoft’s X-box, Kaihan teases out core principles of why some large companies succeed at innovating well and others fail. A must-read for those inside established companies who wish to cultivate the seemingly crazy ideas that change our world. In other words — Loonshots for “intrapreneurs”.
– Safi Bahcall, Physicist, Entrepreneur, and author of WSJ best-seller Loonshots
