Benefits Beyond Revenue
Building a new business from the ground up is hard, and you need to effectively use everything you have at your disposal to make your incubations successful. However, just because most of your new incubations will not be successful does not mean that your
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6 Benefits Beyond Revenue An Incubation Program Can Improve Your Entire Business “The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” —John Maynard Keynes Building a new business from the ground up is hard, and you need to effectively use everything you have at your disposal to make your incubations successful. However, just because most of your new incubations will not be successful does not mean that your incubation program is a failure. If fact, even if every incubation were to end in a failed business, there are many benefits to the larger company that go well beyond these new businesses and the additional revenue they may or may not ultimately bring. You might not realize it at first, but while trying to build these new business, you are simultaneously changing your company from within. You are improving your company’s processes, people, and image. You are making the company faster, leaner, and more innovative. You are building not only new businesses,
© CA 2019 G. Watt and H. Abrams, Lean Entrepreneurship, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3942-1_6
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Chapter 6 | Benefits Beyond Revenue but also the true business leaders your company needs for the future. You are showing your employees as well as your customers what an innovative company looks and acts like. Beyond revenue, what could be more valuable?
The Hardest Job They Will Ever Have Your intrapreneurs have a tough job. It may not be a stretch to say they have the toughest job in your entire company. While they may only be responsible for a single product, and they may not have as large of a budget as the other senior leaders in your company, the breadth of the required skillset they need is enormous. Engineering, user experience, operations, finance, support, sales, product management, project management, product marketing, event marketing, business development… the list goes on and on. Finding someone deeply proficient in each and every one of those domains to lead an incubation team is hard. Finding 20 people to lead 20 of your incubation teams will be nearly impossible. An often-repeated piece of wisdom about venture capital is that you should invest in a team, not an idea. The theory being that even if the original idea turns out wrong, a good team can pivot to a business idea that works. A corollary is that ideas are cheap, the point being that a good idea is nothing without good execution—therefore, again, you need a good team. If a team is the key piece to a good incubation, and finding good leaders, and by extension good teams, for each of your incubations within your company is nearly impossible, then how can you possibly succeed? Simple—you need to systematically build both great leaders and great teams.
Minimal Viable Teams Building a great business comes down to the people who build it. Although any given incubation team will be small, and everyone on the team must contribute in multiple ways, the leader does not need to be the most proficient at absolutely everything. They need to be just proficient
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