Colt’s “intrapreneurship” journey

Last Tuesday night, the Colt Innovation & Prototyping team, which I lead, attended the Market Gravity and Wired UK Corporate Entrepreneur Awards. The awards recognize and celebrate the achievements of teams who are working hard within large companies to deliver game changing innovation and growth. Colt’s team was shortlisted for “Best example of building an entrepreneurial culture”.

Beside the rebranding and reorganisation, Colt’s transition from a Telco to an information delivery platform has involved a change of culture around innovation. The very word “innovation” was in the past associated with risk, something to avoid at all costs. Incremental developments, with certain return on investment, were prioritised, and disruptive ideas didn’t find the time to be analysed and were culturally avoided. At the end of 2010 it was clear that the move from Telco to the broader ICT market, required innovation to be brought back into the core of the business. Part of the task was assigned to a new team: Innovation & Prototyping.

Formed in 2011 assembling talents that combine technical understanding and business acumen, the Colt Innovation & Prototyping team focuses on high risk / high potential ideas for new services. The team assesses such ideas, building prototypes to qualify market and implementation risks and to bring the “art of the possible” into the 18-36 months roadmap. We have been given a license to fail fast and fail cheap: at any time in the de-risking process, we discard unpromising ideas, while promising ones are brought to the attention of the product team, typically focused on maximising short-term revenues.

The team has been instrumental to the creation of a systematic, organisation-wide approach to scan external trends for opportunities and challenges. All ideas are mapped against an Innovation Radar, which is shared regularly, and external contributors, such as Venture Capitals, Vendors and Technology partners, are now being brought into the process. The team uses pervasive guerrilla and viral marketing techniques to embed a culture of intrapreneurship across the organisation, and to onboard Colt employees and customers on prototypes. Innovation is no longer taboo, instead it’s now on everyone’s radar.

After less than 2 years of existence, the team has already delivered great results. For example, we have opened a new market with Femto-as-a-Service, a proposition for mobile operators built in partnership with NEC. We have been instrumental to the due diligence of the recent ThinkGrid acquisition, and we have built a highly collaborative relationship with the product management teams.

Having been short listed for this prize makes me immensely proud of this team. These are exceptional individuals, that with a structured methodology, laser focus attention, permeating communication and a lot of courage, have brought Colt to compete with far larger organisations and R&D budgets. Congratulations to Telefonica Wayra, the award winner, and…watch out, cause we don’t give up.

Questions and comments are welcome, and you can follow me on Twitter: @alebyday