Lab to market workshop at MIT
The session was led by
Wim Sweldens, Vice President Alcatel-Lucent Ventures (ALV). He is also inventor of wavelet compression that led to JPEG2000. ALV is a corporate venture-capital fund for scientists within the Bell Labs. Sven told us the story behind Alcatel's
OmniAccess 3500 . It started when an inventor (Dimitrios Stiliadis) submitted the idea to ALV incubation project nicknamed
Evros within 2007. The initial idea was a laptop card with a VPN, single-sign-on and WLAN/3G capabilities. But the improvement came from an IT staff who understood how to make it a remote laptop control by adding : battery and OS, remote wipe/lock as well as remote application management. As another example of a "hobby" that turned into a "big" idea he quoted
Linus Torvalds posting Aug 25, 1991 usenet : comp.os.minix
“What would you like to see most in minix?“:
Hello everybody out there using minix — I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) ....
Responding to his questions, the audience suggested 10 key points for innovation :
- Culture (of innovation)
- Failures (entrepreneurship is about risk, failure is a temporary state)
- Prototyping (permanent beta : Linus Torwald turned to users to get feedback ),
- Customer relevance (unmet needs, as with Kindle launch with Sprint or the whole net neutrality debate : consumers want it)
- Scalability (cloud, fast market adoption),
- Collaboration (about teams Swelden quoted "who 1st, then what" from Jim Collins, co-author of Built To Last, a study of companies that exceed their industry [success factors include : persistence over many years, right people on board and the wrong people off board before strategy, CEOs from within their own ranks and not from the outside]he says that small teams of A-players is the secret of venture investment).
- Marketing (targeting, creating an ecosystem value-chain, no linear go to market process is possible in a Web 2.0 world, you need innovation at every single step including in marketing value chains)
- Ideas (protection with patents or better by fast execution),
- Strategy (technology + business innovation, Robert Reich in the Future of Success writes "the geek needs a shrink" to understand and opportunity),
- Governance and regulation (pay attention to government incentives, regulation particularly in health care or in P2P "over the top" content management)
Commenting this audience list Wim distilled it down to one single element :
People
People have the culture, include customers of innovation, define strategy, ensure collaboration. "If you focus on the people, you will innovate"
Video of Wim Sweldens at Emtech09.
"Innovation = Invention + Commercialization", MIT Entrepreneurship Center
The workshop was kept lively by
Kenneth (Ken) Morse, founder of MIT Entrepreneurship Center who made frequent
"cold calls" with the audience. Participants contributes the following keywords on innovation :
"the guts to try something new and tenacity to stay on ", "passion, relentless listening to customers", "cheaper and better ways to meet needs", "new ways of doing things...and that somebody will pay money for ".Ken had listed his own success factors for innovation and yes he agreed "
they sum up to People"
- Attitudes
- Passionate behavior
- Management talent
- Flexibility in small organizations
- Product quality and speed to market
- Patents and sustainable advantage
- Quality investors
- Location clusters of excellence
Here are some comments that were exchanged :
Attitude, passion, management (points 1-3)
- Regulation is enemy of innovation. He challenged financial controllers with Howard Stevenson's definition of innovation : pursuing an opportunity beyond the resources available today "we'll worry about the money later..."
- Be willing to be Unusual/Unconventional, "break the harmony"
- As key factor for attitude : parent(s) who are entrepreneurs - "Violate labours laws and get your 8-year old kids involved in your company" and practical, real world experience before, during and after university studies.
- You need an “A” Team –“3K” experience (know the market, know people, be known in the market) . But "be ready with equity to give, if they don't want equity, you don't want them".
- "Recruit, Support, and Celebrate “Weird” people who are results-oriented, relish change, and have very fast clock speeds".
Organizations (point 4)
- Closely held (family owned) businesses are outperforming public companies (that was also the case of IBM and HP as long as founder's families were involved).
- Corporate business units are outstanding at incremental improvement (HP laser printer and ink-jet businesses had 20% / year improvement for 20 years).
- "Open innovation" is important as described by Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley . But Ken"OI is not the only game in town".
About product, speed, patents (points 5-6 )
- Our world has the ability to adopt and deploy faster and faster. He showed the technology adoption curves.
- You have to decide if your product is going to compete on price (Wallmart )or on innovation (Apple, HP for many years, Goolge) or customer intimacy (IBM, Mc Kinsey,... hotels HP these days)
- If you are in a big company do not despair "big pockets but short arms". But you have to challenge your company policy : "Can it embrace high risk ventures?" 6 out of 10 startups projects are shut down ; 1-2 are tremendous successes". Be prepared to change adverse reactions, this is the reason people join big companies.
- Ken gave the example of HP who as a corporation invested 1B$ in laser printers and one month later another 1B$ into the competing inkjet. That started as a bet on radical innovation but from then on it was an incremental game. "Continue relentlessly recruit A-players and invest, you will continue to dominate".
Investment and location (points 7-8)
- How to get funding ? "The best source of funding is the customer. Don't ask VCs, rather go and meet them to tell them that you are cash positive and growing".
- This is also valid if you operate inside a corporation : " the best stage gate is a purchase order. - don't ask the committee, contaminate the process with the voice of the customer".
- Clusters of innovation and locations have been analyzed by the Monitor Group.
Overall, the workshop was a teaser for MIT's course on
corporate venturing and for the
entrepreneurship course Ken teaches in Europe at Delft University of Technology, in Europe. The Center acting Director, Bill Aulet Managing Director, participated in another panel session.
Popular debates at ITU events tend to be policies, regulation, economy. This year the event attracted 18,000 visitors, a modest number due in part to the economy but probably also competition with other telecom trade shows in Europe. Visitors flocked to the Swiss stand, which proved to be one of the show’s most popular, covering 700 m2 on two levels and promoting the region’s excellence by highlighting thirty innovative companies and organizations based there. I went instead to meet friends at start-ups such as :
