Gaining momentum

Innovation requires collaboration, using new tools and shared ideas among our vast and growing audience. Will you lend your voice to the conversation?

Apr 25, 2023

I am expanding my work and moving in new directions. I shared my plans here and report on progress in this edition. Most importantly, I am working to share more knowledge and encourage more conversations. I need your support and feedback, so please read on and offer comments.

A collaborative endeavor

I have shifted my writing in two ways that I hope are transformative. Using the new “Notes” feature on my publishing platform, Substack, I post reports on exciting innovations, studies, newsworthy events, and divergent ideas that challenge orthodox thinking about the future of distribution and the supply chain. These are inputs that shape my work and may be helpful for readers as well. And I am recasting my newsletter to share insights from innovators—people acting on ideas to make them happen. Combined, I hope to share actionable insights with a broader audience and help fuel your work as we push for progress together.

Essential knowledge and conversation starters

Substack designed the Notes feature as a way for ideas and information to travel through its network of writers and subscribers. As a writer, I can publish short-form content on Notes with links to related information. Readers can read my Notes, as well as Notes from every other writer, with comments from all subscribers. While the Notes format may feel similar to Twitter and other social networks, it is very different. There is no advertising, and the feeds on Notes are not created by filters or algorithms designed to addict you with outrageous or inflammatory content. Instead, the goal is to foster strong relationships between writers and readers and to build small and large communities among the more than 35 million subscribers on Substack.

As I start using Notes, I see it as a place to share essential knowledge for innovating distribution and the supply chain—and to start conversations. Many of the items I share will end up in a newsletter, but not all. All are important, so my Notes feed can serve as a catalog and ongoing journal of my research. If you read my Notes, I invite your comments. Please ask questions, share experiences, add links to your sources, and more. Over time, notes may become a place to share ideas and debate them, deepen the insights in my newsletters, and help you make progress in your innovations.

Notes are only available on the Substack app. If you have not tried the app, I encourage you to check it out. To download, click here if you are an iOS (Apple) user or here if you prefer Android (Google) devices. My weekly newsletter articles will continue to arrive by email in your inbox, the Substack app, or both—it's configurable and up to you. If you need help, please let me know.

To get started, click here to find my first Note. Once there, feel free to let me know what you think. Let me know if you have questions. Substack is continually improving, offering new features for readers and helpful tools for writers. If you leave feedback, I will pass it along.

Startup stories and support

In last week’s edition, New insights for innovating the supply chain, I shared startup perspectives from Milton Young, longtime supply chain professional and president of the Yale Science and Engineering Association (YSEA). Milton is an unrelenting force for change and executes his startups as an intrapreneur—driving innovations from the inside of established organizations.

Read this Harvard Business Review article if the term “intrapreneur” is unfamiliar. There, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, author of I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, explains that entrepreneurship is the process that turns “ideas into actual innovations” and that when that process occurs inside a corporation, it is referred to as “intrapreneurship.” Chamorro-Premuzic offers sage advice on redrafting your job to be more intrapreneurial—to gain more satisfaction from work and make more profound contributions.

I use “intrapreneur” to mean anyone innovating from inside an existing company, of any size, instead of a founder that launches a new business—and Young fits the bill. For my work, intrapreneurs are critical for launching a supply chain moonshot. We must attract outside innovators to found startups that can help move the supply chain forward. At the same time, we must find, nurture, and enable the innovators already among us working for established companies in distribution or across the supply chain ecosystem.

Leaders must embrace intrapreneurs—give them space for experiments, avoid penalties when they fail, and herald accomplishments when they succeed. Distribution and the supply chain’s intrapreneurs do not have a shared identity or place to gather. They need a community and connections in the online and real worlds to gain access to ideas, mentoring, and resources to make them successful. They can learn from founders launching change from the outside as they drive change from the inside.

Working independently and together, insiders and outsiders are the future of distribution and the supply chain, and both are essential.

Foresight and footsteps

The work of founders and intrapreneurs often comes from different directions. Founders are often tech-savvy entrepreneurs, fully skilled in digital technologies and looking to leverage data through generative AI, the Internet of Things, or big-data analytics. Intrapreneurs flourish when enabled by an innovation hypothesis that can help them see new business opportunities. Ultimately, the most profound innovations happen at the intersection of technology and business needs.

It may seem self-evident that innovation happens best at the intersection of technology and needs, but I find that technology is often wielded on the assumption that it will align with opportunities. This is a problem. Intrapreneurs working in distribution and the supply chain can help by mastering innovation hypotheses, starting with understanding what they are. This Q&A with Michael Schrage, MIT Research Fellow and author of The Innovator’s Hypothesis, offers many footsteps on what may be a long journey. Among them, this jewel immediately stands out:

Frontline people, particularly those who experience customer and client touch (such as staff working in the contact centre, technical support, or remote diagnostics), should be empowered to conduct business experiments. Those employees get to observe patterns in their businesses: things that go very well, or go very poorly. They should be empowered to not just put a suggestion in a suggestion box, but say: “This is the pattern I’m observing. It implies a certain hypothesis of: ‘If we do this, that may be the result. If we don’t do this, that may be the result.’”

My takeaway: Intrapreneurial innovation starts where business is done, working with customers, by the people who see what works and what doesn’t. It’s a big idea, for sure, and one that I will explore in many editions to come.

Mark Dancer on Innovating Communities

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