Innovation is anything but business as usual. That’s why the processes we abide by should not be taken for granted but questioned, challenged, simplified, improved or invented whenever necessary.

Outside of the Corporate Garage, we might be required to adopt a tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned process to coordinate actions, execute and deliver on time.

Inside the Corporate Garage, creativity requires a more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic and more playful environment.

Simplicity

By placing employees at the center of the company’s Innovation journey, the Corporate Garage relies on specific behaviors and state of mind, putting forward simplicity, autonomy, daring and self-discipline.

The conditions necessary to create such an environment have been described in the Rules of the Garage, shared by HP CEO Carly Fiorina in 1999.

Continuous Learning

If Startups can learn from industry standards in development, quality assurance, planning, or business modelling, established companies also have a lot to learn from methods that were developped by Startups to face the uncertainties, limited resources, and fast growth inherent to their journey.

In the Corporate Garage, best practices from the Industry and from the Startup world are equally revelant.

Innovators can acquire and use whatever method best suits their needs, should it be Extreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, Lean Startup, Growth Hacking, Gamification, Design Thinking, Viral Marketing, Intelligent Fast Failure, Fast Prototyping… They can all be part of the common toolset.

Full-spectrum Innovation

The exploratory nature of the work being done in the Corporate Garage continuously challenges the tools, methods, and skills deployed by innovators.

By actively looking for means to test their ideas faster, with more insights and less friction, innovators can profoundly redefine the way they innovates.

There should be no limits to the range of materials they can choose to reshape to their needs – electronic components, programming languages, organizations, furnitures, space…

From their experiments and insights, new ways of working can emerge in the Corporate Garage and propagate their innovations and dynamics throughout the company.