Intrapreneurship: from selling cans to innovation at Thales

Discover the story that led me from selling cans in high school to exploring intrapreneurship, and my thoughts on innovation in this field.

First entrepreneurial experience

As far back as I can remember, my first entrepreneurial adventure was in the tenth grade.

‍

There was a vending machine for snacks and cans in my high school. Back then, a can cost 10 francs. Yes, I'm a boomer, and yes, it was cheap. I'd noticed that at the local grocery store, they were sold in packs of 6 cans for 5 francs each.

‍

So I decided to buy packs at the grocery store every lunchtime and sell them for 7 francs at my high school. It wasn't a revolution, just a small-scale import-export business. Even so, I felt something stirring inside me, and it wasn't the money, because that business soon came to an end. It was the idea of creating value.

‍

Career paths and feelings of incompleteness

During the rest of my studies, there was a great lack of information on this subject. I followed a pre-established path that reassured my parents.

‍

So I worked as a software development engineer and joined a major French group, THALES, for 12 years. I held various positions including developer, project manager, program director and department manager.

‍

At 29, I was the youngest department head to manage a 50-person project and a department of 12 engineers. However, I felt an emptiness inside me.

From Thales to entrepreneurship

After 10 years, I felt the need to create again, to feel that exhilarating sensation. So I entered an internal competition and in 2014, I launched a project on the "soldier of the future" with AI and Deep Learning, well before its time. Unfortunately, I failed miserably. I later understood why.

‍

Then, with 3 colleagues, we created TED Talks THALES, followed by Thales' first internal Startup Studio. Several seasons, over 300 participants, and game-changing projects inside and outside Thales.

‍

The four of us left Thales and set up CREATEROCKS, where we have supported almost 1,000 intrapreneurial apprentices.

Understanding innovation

We were able to do this because we finally understood what innovation meant.

‍

I'll be honest with you: I hated the word "innovation". I even hated it. How many of you have ever seen ads with "innovation" written all over them, even on products as simple as my deodorant or toothpaste? They taunted me with this prominent inscription. And yet, until proven otherwise, I still brush my teeth the same way. Obviously, not with the deodorant.

Innovation vs. Invention

Here's the first problem: believing that innovation equals invention. That's why you can't talk about innovation without mentioning AI, blockchain, Industry 4.0, Big Data, LLM, etc.

‍

It's becoming unbearable and leads us to believe that :

1. Innovation is all about technology
2. and is reserved for a small group who know all the rules.

Counter-intuitive principles of innovation

In 2013, I visited the Foire de Paris, you may have heard of it? It's a huge show where you can buy all sorts of things in Paris. I went to buy a sofa. The fair also hosted a famous competition: the Concours Lépine.

‍

‍

I must admit that I hate this contest. But don't worry, I like other things too! The reason for my anger towards this competition is that it celebrates ideas and inventions without even considering their usefulness! It was then that I realized several counter-intuitive truths about innovation. I'll share some of them with you here.

‍

Your idea is worthless!

‍

The famous winner of the 2013 Lépine competition was a classic barbecue spit, but with a roulette wheel at each end. This way, you could grab your merguez on one side and flip it over without moving the spit.

‍

Beautiful, isn't it? Or at least practical? How many do you think they sold? I can't tell you myself, because two years later, they stopped production. Do you know why? Because nobody needed the brooch!

‍

A conventional fork or spit does the job very well: this spit didn't solve any real problems. But that's where innovation begins: for a specific target population, how does your life improve thanks to you?

‍

When we got the future Thales intrapreneurs to understand this during the first workshops we held with them, by moving them away from their technocentric approach, we found much better projects!

‍

To create is to copy

‍

Ever heard Picasso's famous phrase? "Good artists copy, great artists steal".

‍

For a long time, I was led to believe that innovation consisted in creating something out of nothing, emerging from nowhere one fine morning, and that everything changed! I was terrified! It meant that it wasn't accessible to everyone, that you had to be a genius to innovate. Press images of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Zuckerberg didn't help either.

‍

_{And then I realized that innovation means observing, drawing inspiration, adapting, mixing and adding your own personal touch!}

‍

Zuckerberg didn't invent social networking, Elon Musk didn't invent rockets or electric cars (by the way, he bought Tesla, not created it) and Jeff Bezos certainly didn't invent e-commerce.

‍

They sublimated them. Incidentally, Picasso's famous phrase was stolen from a playwright of the previous century, who had stolen it from a poet of the late Renaissance!

‍

Most of the time, it doesn't work!

‍

It was one of the hardest truths to admit: only 1% of innovations actually succeed and work.

‍

I love the story of Angry Birds: you all know that game where you throw birds at green pigs on a smartphone, don't you? A huge success! Who hasn't thought: "Incredible, yesterday this game didn't exist, and now it's number 1 in downloads! I wish I'd invented it! How many games did they have to create before finding this one? ... 51... 51 games that failed.

‍

The founding team found themselves so broke that they were no longer able to publish a game, so they drew on paper the models that would become Angry Birds, showing them to friends and family. Could they have found the secret recipe for Angry Birds without those first 51 games? Never. My message is not to become relentless, but to understand how much you learn from mistakes, even when it comes to innovation.

My definition of innovation

I still have a dozen counter-intuitive principles, but we'll talk about them another time, okay?

‍

What I finally understood with all this is summed up in a definition that I find very clear on innovation: "innovation is the social implementation of an invention": most of the time we start from something technical or technological, yes, but all the intelligence lies in the adoption of the project, its target and its market. It's a question of method and mindset.

The role of middle managers in corporate innovation

This last point, the famous right to fail, brings us to the most complex aspect of corporate innovation: middle managers. Often caught between a rock and a hard place, executive committees (COMEX/CODIR) clearly need to innovate. Likewise, employees in the field are aware of the many problems to be solved.

‍

Then there's the middle manager, who has to keep everyone happy while respecting costs, deadlines and quality on his or her classic projects. I know this role well, having played it myself. However, it's impossible to innovate in a company without the commitment of its managers.

The complexity of managerial roles in innovation

Here are a few management principles I've collected over the years, which have enabled me to identify those who make the most of their employees' potential, while at the same time valuing themselves.

‍

The exemplary manager

‍

This is the famous manager who makes a personal commitment to innovation, learning the counter-intuitive methods and principles I was talking about, and always devotes a moment at team meetings to discussing them. At Thales, we accompanied a department head who gave a talk on how he managed his teams to stimulate their creativity. Needless to say, everyone wanted to join his team after that!

‍

The manager leader

‍

He's the one who puts his team first, who creates a community of "makers" within his group, who encourages action and then values his collaborators. This was exactly the profile of my manager when I launched my first intrapreneurial projects. After several failures, he was rewarded when one of my projects generated 7 million.

‍

The sponsoring manager

‍

It's the manager who doesn't hesitate to find funds to co-finance a project, or who finds human resources to help. He also opens doors on a scale that the intrapreneur in the field can't access, and puts the intrapreneur's project forward. For me and my friends at THALES, it was André, the marketing director of one of Thales' business units, who took advantage of his visits to the COMEX and CODIR to talk about our activities, which enabled us to gain visibility and take action.

In a nutshell

The manager plays a key role in structuring and disseminating internal innovation. There are many roles that managers can take on without having a negative impact on their bottom line. However, the first link in the chain is the intrapreneur.

The path and value of intrapreneurship

I'm often asked: "But why become an intrapreneur? It's risky, it requires a major investment, and in the end the project only has a 10% chance of succeeding and a 1% chance of becoming huge."

‍

So, let's be honest: yes, it's hard. The best intrapreneurs I've known are those who don't wait for a budget or time to get started. It's always better to show what you've achieved with little money, to show where you can go with a budget, than to talk about what you'd like to do if you had the money.

‍

But that's not all! There are important positive impacts to becoming an intrapreneur.

The experience

As Morpheus says in The Matrix, "There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path". It's the same in intrapreneurship. The experience of starting, failing, starting again, redoing, undoing, demobilizing, finding solutions and transforming risks into opportunities is like an accelerated MBA.

‍

This experience helps to understand challenges much more quickly. Julie, an intrapreneur I coached, didn't succeed in her project, but thanks to her experience, she moved to the innovation department and helped launch several successful projects.

Learning

In this experience, your learning curve increases tenfold, as reality quickly catches up with you. I'm a fan of "The Snow Queen 2", which I love watching with my daughter. We often think of Elsa as the heroine, but in reality it's Anna, her sister. She's the one who solves problems, learns to drive a sleigh, hunt stone giants and escape from a cave.

‍

‍

Maurice, whom I coached, benefited from this approach: his project didn't work out, but he applied everything he'd learned in his job. Before, he had trouble selling a product. Thanks to our exchanges, he sold it three times in three weeks.

The value

Are you familiar with the Japanese art of Kintsugi, which consists of repairing broken objects with gold? This art restores enormous value to an object marked by scars. Intrapreneurs, with their scars from successful and unsuccessful projects, are invaluable to the company.

‍

I crossed paths with Zulfukar: his project was working very well with its co-founder, so much so that the project came out of the group with an investment. Zulfukar preferred to stay with the group while looking for another position.

‍

Being backed by a powerful sponsor, he sent an e-mail to one of his company's COMEX members, who knew of Zulfukar's accumulated value. The next day, he received five calls from the group's human resources managers to discuss mobility.

Conclusion: learning from failure

Finally, I haven't yet told you all about my first business as a can vendor in high school. The project lasted a week. Why did it take a week? Because at the grocery store, the cans weren't refrigerated, so nobody wanted my hot cans. My high school friends still talk about it all the time: "Hey, remember Raph and his hot cans in high school? They laugh, I feel ashamed, and then I end up laughing too!

‍

But what I learned that day was far more valuable than my two francs in profit: I learned to appreciate the taste of error, to savor the erasures, because that's where innovation lies. That's where the intrapreneur is. And, my dear medium-sized and large companies, in today's world and the world to come, this is clearly the type of profile you need: those who launch new, out-of-the-box projects, and those who help them succeed.