Home Depot, IKEA, and Accenture all have corporate innovation labs

“It’s like being an entrepreneur, minus the risk.” An
Accenture innovation hub in Detroit is
pictured.
Accenture

• Home
  Depot, IKEA, and Accenture are examples of major companies
  with innovation labs.
• The labs are designed to attract the brightest minds in
  technology, giving them a place to channel their
  entrepreneurial spirit with the security of working for an
  established organization.
• Companies benefit too, because they’re less likely to
  lose their top talent to the startup world.
• Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has a famous
  innovation lab called X. 

“It’s like being an entrepreneur,” said Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic,
“minus the risk.”

Chamorro-Premuzic, a psychology professor at Columbia University
and the chief talent scientist at Manpower,
was referring to “intrapreneurship.” It’s a general term for
acting like a company founder, but within the confines of an
established organization — typically in what’s called a
corporate innovation lab. Think X,
Alphabet’s research and development team that’s also been
called a “moonshot factory.”

Across industries, intrapreneurial opportunities have grown
relatively common. And while few are as glamorous as traditional

entrepreneurship can seem — you are, after all, working for
The Man — there can be practical benefits for both individuals
and organizations.

Specifically, Chamorro-Premuzic mentioned money. As a startup
founder, you never know “if you’re going to be bankrupt in one or
two years,” he said, adding, “The likely outcomes for founders or
entrepreneurs are very bleak.” Working under the umbrella of a
major corporation provides financial and job security, since you
aren’t constantly hunting for funding.

The business case for intrapreneurship, according to
Chamorro-Premuzic, is simply that companies aren’t losing their
most driven and most talented people to the startup world.
Instead, companies dangle the prospect of relative freedom and
creativity and hope that aspiring entrepreneurs will snatch it
up.

To be sure, intrapreneurship has its detractors. In 2017, Anderee
Berngian listed
on VentureBeat all the companies that have closed their
innovation labs in the last few years, including Nordstrom,
Microsoft, and Coca-Cola. One potential reason Berngian floats:
“Google has millions to spare” on failed projects. “Most
companies don’t.”

Business Insider took a look at three corporate innovation labs,
the kinds of challenges they’re tackling, and the creatives
they’re hoping to attract.

IKEA’s innovation lab, Space10.
Space10

IKEA’s ‘global future living lab’ aims to head off impending
disasters like food insecurity

One of the corporate innovation labs that’s received the most
media attention is IKEA’s
Space10. A “global future living lab” launched in Copenhagen
in 2015, its creations include
hydroponic farms and IKEA
Place, an augmented-reality app that lets you see how
furniture would look in your home.

“IKEA’s overall mission is to create a better everyday life,”
said Simon Caspersen, cofounder of Space10. “We are basically set
up to see how they can live up to that mission in new ways, that
their current business is not delivering on.” That means tackling
current and coming challenges such as food insecurity and
loneliness in cities, Caspersen said.

Only 25 people have full-time jobs at Space10. The lab then hires
project specialists for temporary stints, or “residencies,” as it
calls them. Space10 also collaborates with different startups
whose interests align with theirs.

Caspersen made the case for working at Space10 this way: “You are
put together with some other incredible people that don’t
necessarily share your background or expertise,” adding that
“otherwise people often work in silos.” An engineer might be
working alongside a farmer, for example.

Plus, there’s the exposure that a fledgling startup wouldn’t
ordinarily receive. “We do a lot to really highlight and promote
the people that are part of the journey,” Caspersen said.

An associate learns to use the virtual pallet stacker
at OrangeWorks.
Home
Depot

Home Depot’s innovation lab is tapping into college students’
technological prowess

OrangeWorks is Home Depot’s
innovation lab, located on the campus of Georgia Tech
University in Atlanta. The goal is to evaluate emerging
technologies that could change either the customer experience or
corporate operations (the lab isn’t looking into products that
would wind up on shelves).

The lab was launched in 2015, and since then it’s produced things
like a virtual pallet stacker, which moves heavy items around the
warehouse. Anthony Gregorio, a senior manager at the Innovation
Center, described the technology that led to the pallet stacker
as a “3D Tetris for shipping containers that allows us to be as
efficient as we possibly can.”

Like Space10, OrangeWorks has a small core team: Just eight
people, with varying technical skill sets, work there full time.
About 60 Georgia Tech students also pitch in at OrangeWorks.
Recently, Gregorio said, the team has been working on ways to use
computer vision for inventory tracking and customer-service
opportunities.

As for why someone would want to join OrangeWorks instead of
starting something on their own, Gregorio said it’s all about the
“size, scale, and resources that an enterprise like our own can
provide.”

He used data as a prime example: “If somebody’s trying to do
something in the data analytics space, readily available data
that’ll help them build out their model isn’t always something
that’s possible. … Something our size, we’re able to provide
that.”

Accenture’s Detroit innovation hub.
Accenture

Accenture’s innovation hubs are helping their biggest clients
avoid ‘disruption’ by getting creative

At Accenture, employees know that their clients — which include
many Fortune 500 companies — are at constant risk of getting
“disrupted” by new technology. That’s a major reason why
Accenture is working on launching at least 10
innovation hubs in the US by 2020, putting some of the most
creative minds in digital technology to work serving their
clientele.

“One of the things our clients suffer from a little bit is
they’re part of large corporations with a lot of cultural
inertia,” said Bob Markham, managing director at Accenture
Digital. “They don’t always get exposed to a lot of diversity of
thought.”

Markham heads up the Chicago innovation hub, which was the first
to launch, in 2016. It now has 600 full-time employees and is
collaborating with four startups. But Markham said that it can be
hard to attract top tech talent in the midwest.

What’s more, Markham said, “our large enterprises sometimes have
a mentality that they have to do it themselves.” However,
“oftentimes there are startups that have been thinking about the
same problem.”

By collaborating with that startup, the organization can have a
minimum viable product in four to eight weeks, as opposed to a
year, and spend “hundreds of thousands of dollars less than if
they were to try to do it on their own,” Markham said.

One example is the Washington, DC innovation hub’s
work with Marriott, whose business has been disrupted by
online booking agencies like Kayak and Expedia. Accenture
invested in a venturing arm that could help Marriott find
startups that were thinking bout “travel experiences,” such as a
digital concierge.

In return, some startups receive mentoring, and all learn how to
scale their product or service in a corporate environment.

Intrapreneurship isn’t for everyone

While a job at a corporate innovation lab might seem thrilling,
Chamorro-Premuzic sounded a note of caution.

“Not everybody is well-suited for this. It’s really a minority of
people who will thrive and enjoy and be good at this kind of
job,” he said. “But I think there’s still an opportunity because
many young people who decide to launch their own businesses could
be employed by these largest corporations and basically do the
same thing.”