Innovation & The Corporate Garage approach: Sharing Experience and Vision
Welcome. This site was built to thoroughly document the design of an intrapreneur initiative to change culture.
In most companies, innovation is concentrated in a dedicated branch, reserved to a few, from which a lot is expected. My name is Pierre Turkiewicz, and I worked in such a structure. Innovation was my job, and after a few years working in this field, I came to realize that one of the main difficulties of innovating in a company was not to come up with novel ideas, technologies or proof of concepts, but to ground them in the company’s business units, to hand them over to people that did not participate in their design.
Instead of trying to attract and retain more expert employees in the innovation branch of a company, what if all employees could contribute to innovation? How could they efficiently bring new ideas to life, scale them in the business units, collaborate along their lifecycle? Differently put: how to change the innovation culture of the company?
In 2014, a colleague and I joined forces to build a new innovation playground for Nokia with “Le Garage”, a Corporate Garage program initiated in Bell Labs, the company’s Innovation powerhouse.
From our initial proof of concept to a network of 8 innovation hubs at Nokia, our project gained momentum over the years and is now an innovation workspace where Nokia employees are free to bring their ideas, use the latest technology tools and software processes to bring their ideas to life, fostering a true spirit of entrepreneurship.
The embodiment of the cultural change powered by the corporate garage approach can be seen in the range of projects that came out, such as an augmented pedestrian, a solar connected bike, a blockchain-powered Data marketplace, a 5G cloud gaming demonstrator, or a smart city scale model demonstrating 5G use cases.
I invite you to take a guided tour and discover what a Corporate Garage is, the results it allowed my former company to achieve, and why you may want to replicate it in other locations and companies around the globe.
If you want to build your own Garage and empower your employees to build tomorrow’s innovations, this site can help you get started with the necessary tools, resources, and contacts.
