From the course: Become an Entrepreneur Inside a Company

Adobe (Kickbox)

From the course: Become an Entrepreneur Inside a Company

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Adobe (Kickbox)

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- Adobe's Kickbox program is among the most admired innovation programs for corporate intrapreneurs in the world, and for good reason. Adobe describes Kickbox like this: it's a flexible program that uses a self-contained kit to teach a proven innovation process. Anyone can use it to create and refine new ideas by working through six distinct levels with exercises, checklists, and scorecards. With a Kickbox, employees learn the process of innovation, generating ideas to solve problems they care about, turning the opportunity into a product or service, and then actually piloting the project with customers. Mark Randall, Adobe's VP of Creativity, first introduced Kickbox in 2012, calling it an angel investor for every employee, and it quickly caught fire. A key element of the program was a thousand dollar prepaid credit card in every box. The results have been impressive. Prior to introducing Kickbox, Adobe prototyped 12 to 24 products each year, but in the first year of Kickbox, Adobe tested nearly a thousand ideas and for less money than they used to spend on just a few ideas. Adobe has made Kickbox available to anyone, and many large organizations have adopted it, including Mastercard and Cisco. Each has made tweaks to fit their unique cultures but embraced the three underlying principles, access to all, a focus on employee-driven ideas, not ideas put forward by management, and real money at the very earliest stages to support new ideas. If you're at a company that seems generally supportive of your efforts but doesn't have much in the way of culture or infrastructure to encourage intrapreneurship, you want to suggest Kickbox. The content of Kickbox, minus the physical and financial resources, is all freely available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike attribution license. In other words, Adobe encourages other organizations to use and modify their program, but they require keeping the license with it and sharing changes with Adobe. Adobe has adopted a membership mindset around the Kickbox program and wants open communication among members of their broader innovation community. The idea is to share ideas and for everyone to get better at innovation, which I love. So download it and give it a try. It could help you to be more effective in your own initiatives, and you may wanna share it with colleagues or your organization's leadership as a blueprint toward building a culture of open innovation.

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