Finding and Developing Islands of Innovation within a Large Company – Action Plan for a New CTO

How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and develop islands of innovation within a large company?

How do you not waste your first six months as a new CTO thinking you’re making progress when the status quo is working against you?

I just had coffee with Anthony, a friend who was recently hired as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a large company (30,000+ people). He previously co-founded several enterprise software startups, and his previous job was building a new innovation organization from scratch inside another large company. But this is his first time as the CTO of a company of this size.

Good and Bad News

>>>lass=”yoast-text-mark” />>Their good news was that their new company provided essential services and, no matter how much they stumbled, they would stay in business for a telegram number list time. But the bad news was that the company was not keeping up with new technologies and new competitors who were moving faster. And the fact that they were an essential services company made the internal cultural barriers to change and innovation much more difficult.

We both laughed as he shared that senior executives had told him that all the existing processes and policies were working just fine. It was clear that at least two of the four divisions really didn’t want him there. Some groups think he’s going to ruin their empires. Some are, as he put it. World-class people and organizations for a world that no longer exists.”

So the question we were thinking about was: How do you quickly infiltrate a large, complex company of that size? How do you incite boardroom wins and make a coalition work? Maybe by getting people to agree on common problems and strategies? And/or by finding existing organizational islands of innovation that were already delivering results and scaling them up?

The Journey Begins

his first week, the executive team had assigned him to the existing corporate incubator. Anthony had long ago come to the same conclusion I had. That highly visible corporate incubators do a good job of shaping culture and getting great press. But more often than not their biggest products are demos how to increase your website traffic  never get deployed in the field. Anthony concluded that the incubator at his new company was no exception. Successful organizations recognize that innovation is not a one-time activity (incubators, accelerators, hackathons. It is a strategically organized, end-to-end process, from idea to deployment.

What’s more, he was already discovering that nearly every division and function was building groups for innovation, incubation, and technology scouting. But no one had a single company-wide roadmap for who was doing what. More important, it wasn’t clear which, if any, of these groups were actually delivering products and services continuously at high speed. His first job was to build a map of all these activities.

Innovation Heroes Are Not Repeatable or Scalable

Over coffee, Anthony said that in a company this size, he knew he would find. Innovation heroes” —the individuals others in the company point to as australia database directory single-handedly fought. The system and delivered a new product, project. But if that were all his company had to offer, his job would be a lot harder than he thought. Since innovation heroes as the sole source of new feature deployments is a sign of a dysfunctional organization.

Get Out of the Office</strong></h3>

>>>, over another cup of coffee, the question we were trying to answer was: how does a newly hired CTO find the true islan

ds of innovation in a company of that size?

A first place to start was with the innovation heroes/rebels. They usually know where all the innovation bodies are. But Anthony’s insight was that he to get out of his 8th floor office and spend some time. Where his company’s products and services were being.

It was likely that the most innovative groups were not just talking about innovation. But were those that quickly delivered innovative solutions to customer needs.