⚡ The last 3 years I built two corporate startups in parallel. Both were killed. The surprising learning?
Short excursion: all innovators across all levels in corporates I talk to mention as the main challenge in innovation: culture.
Changing the culture of a huge company is not easy, sometimes maybe even impossible. And: if change occurs, it happens so slowly that it's barely noticeable when you're in thick of it.
It takes years and years: time many companies simply don't have. Sometimes the market conditions change faster than a company becomes "innovation-hungry" again.
That's just how it goes then, I guess. It's evolution: old things die to make room for new things.
But back to my learning: I built both ventures in parallel as a Co-Preneur. "Co-Preneur" is what we at Reruption call ourselves when acting as a kind of temporary co-founder for a corporate startup.
Both clients received a C-level leadership change, during which a "re-focus on the core-business" was executed, meaning all non-core innovation activities got killed, including my projects.
At first I was devastated. I put in 2-3 years of my personal time, I was emotionally invested into these topics, the business cases were promising. What a waste of time, right?
But the more I talked to people from within these companies who had seen how we work, how customer centricity is properly executed, how fast it's possible to get proper results, the more I understood that in fact I had an impact.
The real impact I had with venture building in these corporates was a mindset change for those I worked with.
And this mindset change carried over into their daily lives, into how they interface with other colleagues in the company.
So, I in fact contributed a small change to a bigger picture. And isn't that what it's all about?
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