

Ask HN: Anyone has experience with running YC clone *inside* a company? - c1sc0

Toying around with the idea of running a mini YC startup competition <i>inside</i> a larger company to encourage innovation?
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SABmore
We attempted something similar in my previous company. I can tell you it
failed, and why so as not to make the same mistakes we did. For starters, they
are an IT services company so it was difficult to implement from the get-go
when you are dependant on your employees being billable. We were hoping to
build software products, and we knew that we would need to provide support and
incentives b/c we were essentially asking those involved to work hours outside
of their normal schedule. We set up a fairly streamlined, gated process which
provided the teams the ability to receive mentorship throughout each gate.
They would formalize an idea/concept, then run it by the CEO and sales team to
ensure it had buy-in and would be marketable to our established customer base.
If at any point it wasn't viable they could either pivot or stop. The wheels
quickly fell off when the CEO (after signing off on it) decided it was too
heavy handed, then the sales team was too busy to meet with any of the teams,
and none of the teams could see the incentive to working on something that
lacked support and required them to work off-hours to build. Needless to say,
this is the opposite of how an YC clone should be inside of a company.

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btilly
If you want to encourage innovation inside of a larger company, go read
[http://www.amazon.com/Winning-New-Products-Accelerating-
Proc...](http://www.amazon.com/Winning-New-Products-Accelerating-
Process/dp/0738204633). You'll get a lot of ideas and some very practical
advice for addressing that problem.

Basically what it comes down to is, "Start with lots of ideas, and have a
rigorous process for making most of them fail fast with a minimal allocation
in resources."

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adrianscott
check out geoffrey moore's books if you haven't already

