Follow A Staged Commitment Model To Improve Internal Innovation Outcomes

I am often asked what is it that makes a Blitzscaling company successful? Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship. These kinds of companies always create a lot of the jobs and industries of the future.

If you want to blitzscale a new venture inside a large organization one of the most important challenges is how to convince or motivate your best people to jump on the opportunity to play a leadership role in creating these internal innovations. The answer is to make sure that if the venture fails, the impact of that failure on the risk-taking employee is cushioned.  And to ensure that there is upside for the employee, whether that's in the form of promotions or even financial upside, should it succeed.

The key to successfully blitzscaling an internal innovation is by making sure that you have the equivalent of a founder who is motivated, committed full-time, and who has control over the customer experience. To do so, make sure that you are using the right financial instruments to encourage a sense of urgency in the employees and allow them to pivot and find their way to success while making sure that that success dramatically accelerates the careers or delivers financial rewards to the people who take the risk to work on it.

So let's say you have this incredible internal innovation that you want to scale. You think it could be a breakthrough, even a Blitzscaling opportunity.  How are you going to tackle it? The answer is to look at successful Blitzscalers and learn the lessons of their success. So first of all, what is it that makes a Blitzscaling company successful?

There's generally a founder, someone who feels ownership over the product and over the company who is driving its growth.  If this is an internal innovation inside your organization, you need to determine who that founder is going to be? Do you have an executive who's full time focused on driving that innovation to success? And do they have control over the entire product experience so they can innovate and iterate and pivot as necessary to make it successful?

Now, one of the things that also happens in these Blitzscaling companies, there is financial discipline around how they're able to grow. With a startup, you're raising money from a venture capitalist, you get a certain amount of money and you are tightly focused to make sure you get to that next stage before you run out of money, so that you can raise that next round and keep growing.

In a larger organization one of the issues that sometimes arises is there are massive financial commitments that are made upfront. That's not what I advise, in fact, I think the better way to scale your internal innovations is to take that same venture capital model of putting a small amount of money in, at first, just enough to get to the next stage, while very clearly understanding what you're trying to prove.

At each stage you're trying to prove a hypothesis about the market, about the business. And as you unlock those hypotheses and prove them out, then you can put in more commitment and more capital. By doing this, you're able to reduce some of the risk of committing all your capital upfront, and you're able to provide that sense of urgency that's going to help the team really blitzscale that opportunity.

The final thing that's important for scaling your internal innovation is to make sure that there is sufficient reward for the people who are taking on these risks. Let's face it, doing something new is hard.  And oftentimes the result is failure. If every time an innovation is generated, it succeeded, the world would be a great place. That's just not the world we live in.

So if you look at what has made Blitzscaling successful, you can draw some key lessons on how to scale your internal innovation by making sure you have the equivalent of a founder who is motivated full time it has control over the customer experience by making sure that you are using the right financial instruments that are going to encourage that sense of urgency and allow you to pivot and find your way to success. And finally making sure that that success dramatically accelerates the careers or delivers financial rewards so that people who are taking the risks are rewarded.

And if you're able to tap into these principles, you'll be able to scale your internal innovations more effectively.