In March 1848 San Francisco newspaperman Samuel Brannan announced that gold had been found in California. In the gold rush that followed, more than 300,000 people headed to the area to make their fortunes. Over 150 years later, there’s still a gold rush in California — now re-located to Silicon Valley. Even organizations that remain headquartered in other cities have set up innovation outposts there in the hope that high-tech silicon dust will rub off on them.
How Corporate HQ Can Get More from Innovation Outposts
Setting up innovation outposts in global technology clusters, such as Silicon Valley, Boston, and Tel Aviv, is highly popular among Fortune 500 corporations. The logic is that if you are present where new trends, ideas, talents and startups are generated you might be able to recognize and assimilate them into your firm’s innovation pipeline. But too many innovation outposts remain isolated from their firms. To get real value from them, companies need to do two things simultaneously. First, they need a “sense and capture” approach in the outpost itself, so that insights from the local area can be absorbed. Second, they must set up “integration and propagation” processes to make sure that all that value is transferred back and properly used by the wider firm.