James Mawson listed some years ago in globalcorporateventuring.com “the typical corporate antibodies that emerge to defeat innovation initiative.

• Joint Venture: our company will gain only half of the revenue. We won’t have full control
• Partnering: we are arming a potential competitor
• Corporate venturing: we have no control and losses will roll up to our balance sheet
• Sandbox of ideas: what is our liability?
• Incubator: this is a self-disrupting organization for which we foot the bill
• Open innovation: it will raise so many legal issues!
• University research: who hold the intellectual property?”

One could add to that list many more reactions that an innovation project manager has to face from his own colleagues when trying to involve them (or not) in the venture:

• Innovation is not in my job description,
• Business quarter target is more important,
• This innovation will put us out of business,
• Why are you wasting your time (and ours)? Why are you wasting the company money?
• Etc.

Not to mention the first negative reactions coming often from the direct management of an innovation project leader:

• Why do you work on this project, what do you expect from this?
• You should not let me down, I need you,
• Etc.

Sure, it would be easy to blame the corporates to react in such a negative way. But when you think about it, you could as well consider that all of the noted above behaviors are somehow “normal”.

Not so easy when you are working with a railway company to consider that car sharing is your future.

Not so easy when you are working with the R&D department to understand that your company is going to find innovation elsewhere. You may sure feel a little bit cuckcold.

Not so easy to be focused on the business as usual which pays the bills, and at the same time prepare the future.

…

Of course companies try to cure themselves. But one should be realistic, it will take time. In the meantime I would suggest that the more disruptive an innovation is, the more distance companies should put between the project and the “business as usual”. This is probably why we have seen so many excubators and startup studios flourishing recently. Companies try to do outside, and often with outsiders, what they realize they can’t do inside. Probably a good move, future will say. In doing that, companies should nevertheless be careful and keep in mind that they will have some day to reintegrate the new business (if the innovation project is successful). To avoid a Not Invented Here syndrome, companies should probably set up mixed team (external AND internal people) to lead their innovation projects. We could call that hybridization.