APRIL 20219MANUFACTURINGTECHNOLOGYINSIGHTSthe nonprofit Intrapreneurial Initiative offers an excellent overview and pointed examples, including the invention of the Post-It Note in 1974 by a 3M employee, Art Fry. In 1968, he held on to the idea of an adhesive developed by fellow 3M employee and scientist Spencer Silver, who accidently created a lightweight sticky substance instead of the strong bonding agent necessary for aerospace technology. There are many more examples of intrapreneurial discoveries in large organizations, from Sony's PlayStation to Sun Microsystems' launch of Java programming language in 1995. However, given the challenges of size, rigid structures, hierarchies and processes today, innovation in large organizations, which is often obtained externally through acquisition of startups or emerging companies remains a relatively lower on the priority list. Creating an Intrapreneurial Environment and CultureSince Pinchot introduced intrapreneurship into the business vernacular, countless books have been written and keynotes delivered expressing why businesses should embrace intrapreneurship, and how it can be done. Pinchot himself developed his own guidelines, entitling them The Intrapreneur's Ten Commandments:1. Come to work each day willing to be fired.2. Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream.3. Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description.4. Find people to help you. 5. Follow your intuition about the people you choose and work only with the best.6. Work underground as long as you can--publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism. 7. Never bet on a race unless you are running in it.8. Remember it is easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.9. Be true to your goals, but realistic about the ways to achieve them.10. Honor your sponsors.As Chief Technology Officer responsible for innovation at Advanced Energy (AE), in order to support those who embodies these intrapreneurial spirits via the commandments, I would add the following to the leadership team's list:11. Democratize the ideation process.We often equate the word diversity to imply differences in gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. However, in the area of innovation, diversity of thought is equally important. One way to encourage and democratize ideation is not to assume that only people in leadership positions have the best ideas, and everyone else just follow orders to execute. Another way is to not assume that only the experts' solutions are the only options. Lastly, the most damaging statement that can be made to a young aspiring innovator is to tell him or her that they are wasting their time. After all, how do we know if we have succeeded if we never failed.12. Give everyone permission to be bold and risk failure without the fear of penalty.As a leadership team, one way to give permission to be bold is to make sure we "got their back" when our teams go out on a limp to try new ideas that have not been proven. Make the failures a learning experience as oppose to a finger pointing exercise. Often through the analysis of failure, new and better ideas emerge and teams become stronger. It is imperative that, we as leaders, not squelch the enthusiasm and boldness of those who dared to take the risks.13. Collaborate with others who share your interest and passion, and who can bring fresh perspective, including people and organizations outside your own company.The tried and true collaborations pre-commercial is with local academic institutions. Such collaboration is a breeding ground for new innovation bringing together the best combination of real world applications focus of the industry partner, deep theoretical and experimental practices of leading academics, and fresh new talents of the students. AE has established several of these partnerships in our state but also internationally too.14. Celebrate milestones and successes along the way. This bullet point should not warrant much explanation other than to say that everyone needs encouragement on the long road of intrapreneurial pursuits.Playing the Anticipation Game In the industries which we serve, such as semiconductor manufacturers and industrial coatings among other applications, innovation and customer experience have been the pull we see from customers in the U.S. and abroad. To that end, AE continues to bring highly engineered, precision power conversion, measurement and control solutions to help customers worldwide with their mission-critical applications and processes. Our new facility in Caesarea, Israel underscores that commitment. The new 6,500 square-foot facility includes business offices and a state-of-the-art R&D lab that advances AE's goal to provide customers in the semiconductor, medical, defense and industrial markets with the most reliable, smart technologies and resources. The inclusion of an on-site services and repair facility will also help to support AE's regional customers, who increasingly require access to high-quality local service for their power systems and controls.As AE accelerates our capabilities to power the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are entering uncharted territory with the introduction of our newest intelligent power solution: PowerInsight by Advanced Energy. Utilizing more than 30 years of know-how and knowledge of power delivery systems in combination with data analytics and machine learning, this solution enables our services customers to improve their total cost of ownership and improve yield in their factories. As we move forward, embedding self-diagnostic, self-calibration and self-learning real-time controls and digital twin into our products and solutions are no longer just R&D work. As we move into the next industrial revolution, it will be essential to anticipate potential customer problems and develop ways to solve them before they occur. More importantly, as history shows, every business must foster an intrapreneurial culture, or risk elimination in a high-stakes game where the rules are always changing.
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