Yesterday we held a breakfast event at the legendary City venue One Lombard Street, where self confessed technology veteran and digital entrepreneur Professor Paul Morrissey came to speak about innovation and how big organisations can best embrace it

And that’s always the conundrum isn’t it? How can large corporates, with all their bureaucracy and legacy issues, compete against small, agile start-ups, borne out of innovative thinking and an enterpreunerial spirit?

Intrapreneurialism…

As Paul said, it’s about rooting out the innovators, the thinkers in the organisation and giving them the space to develop their digital ideas. It’s called intrapreneurialism. Setting up these innovation hubs outside the main business is important – they need to be given the space to think freely and not bogged down with the same issues that stifle innovation in the mothership.

They need to feel ownership, that these digital ideas are their business. Better still, give them equity – with skin in the game, you can hang on to these people for maybe eight years rather than the average of four.

An alternative approach is acquisition, where companies snap up a start up and literally buy the innovation in. But again, the whole point of freedom of thought is crucial. You also have to know when to quit – the earlier these ventures fail, the better for everyone concerned. Then it’s on to the next idea.

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How do you make it work?

As one of our clients said to us following the talk this morning, "in the current market opportunity is the commodity and execution is the value" and I thought how right this is, particularly in financial services. It’s all very well in having the right innovative idea, but if it’s executed poorly, it will never work.

Making sure that innovation is carefully nurtured and if successful, integrated into the business is vital. The changes in processes, working practices and culture are key and organisations have to be guided through carefully – management needs to be airtight.

Innovation is the lifeblood of organisations. But it’s the right support, process and management that need to be put in place which will really spell the difference between success and failure.

Adam Ripley is chairman of the consultancy Certeco