Startup of the week: your company?

Material handling industries will face an increasing demand for connectivity in the future. However, combining this somewhat conservative industry with its opposite, dynamic internet, is not an easy task. To survive within this pressure for change, companies need to increase their speed, and adopt a hint of startup mentality into their core strategy.

Traditionally, material handling industries have been hesitant when it comes to making changes. Errors are extremely costly in this industry, so every step needs to be considered carefully. With internet, it is completely different. This world is changing all the time, and its dynamics allow you to make mistakes freely and correct them, even in seconds. The question is how to combine these two completely different worlds? If material handling industries want to keep up with the automation development, the two worlds need to come together. Every material handling company must face the need for automation, internet and connectivity. There is no way out of this.
Traditional industries need to increase their speed and integrate a hint of startup mentality into their core operations. Startups have their weaknesses, but there are good practices we should preach, too.

1. Organization cultures need to change towards flat hierarchies, and be more playful and enthusiastic. In agile development, competency is the king and hierarchy is obsolete. Innovation is built when the people with the highest competency meet, share their knowledge and play around with ideas of what should be done. Management can support the developers only when management is amongst them and deeply understands the ongoing development. Having management many steps away from the development is simply too far. If the people making decision don’t understand the implications of these decisions, the decisions are made in vain.

2. Don’t give too big of a budget for your innovation management. If a company is given too much money for innovation development, the innovations will fail. That’s the cruel fact. Too much money kills creativity. Sometimes startups create more innovations because they have less money to use. Smaller budget forces to actually solve difficult problems and not just throw euros or dollars at them. Solving difficult problems is rewarding, but also very mentally taxing. For that reason, if you let people push the innovation dilemma to someone else, many feel tempted. This does not mean that scaling innovations needs no resources – it does – but only when there is clarity of the innovation and the scale needed.

The key is to figure out how to avoid this challenge in big companies. It can be done by creating an entrepreneurial culture. When the R&D department asks themselves the core question “If it would be my money, would I spend it like this?”, you are on the right track.

3. Companies should give enough independence to new projects. When there is a new initiative up and running, project managers should have the opportunity to freely try out what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, this is not always self-evident, because there are mentally large bets at stake. Most of us have a tendency to play safe rather than take risks; however, all larger innovations come from significant risk taking. Most companies hate failure, but in true innovation failure is a more likely outcome than success. Independence is the only way for a larger company to allow a culture of failure, which in the core business would be catastrophic.

4. Finally, I would like to emphasize curiosity. Not only the innovation departments, but all employees should have the curiosity and willingness to try out new things. Speed and innovations lie behind free, independent thinking. When I was studying at university, my professor posed me the most fundamental question about motivation: Which one is more likely to learn about computers, a person with motivation to learn about computers or a person who is genuinely interested in computers? The easy answer is the latter one. Only through internal curiosity we will learn and build competency that prevails over competition. Of course, common sense is needed: don’t experiment with things where risks are far beyond the returns or where the safety or wellbeing of others is put in danger. This said, the fun part is that curiosity also increases the job satisfaction. If we can have a fun, playful and curious environment, everyone benefits.

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