{"id":7072,"date":"2015-06-03T14:29:49","date_gmt":"2015-06-03T19:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watermarklearning.com\/blog\/?p=7072"},"modified":"2015-07-09T09:45:59","modified_gmt":"2015-07-09T14:45:59","slug":"how-business-analysis-helps-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.watermarklearning.com\/blog\/how-business-analysis-helps-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Entrepreneurial BA Practitioner Part 4: How Business Analysis Helps Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, you don’t think you are an entrepreneur? How business analysis helps innovation.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"Entrepreneur\"<\/a>You might think you are not going to start a company or build a business from the ground up. Maybe you don’t want to risk your livelihood or work crazy hours or wear multiple hats like an entrepreneur does. We suggest you think again. Business analysis practitioners can and should be entrepreneurial by being intrapreneurs, a prime way that helps drive innovation.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s business world is quickly changing. With all the emphasis on innovation, your organization needs business analysts and project managers to be entrepreneurial. You might never become an actual entrepreneur. But, your organization\u2019s success and your career will increasingly depend on how you can help your organization adapt and grow and compete. Competition has always been part of business, but it seems to be getting more intense and dynamic. To illustrate this point, the average lifespan of a company on the Standard & Poor\u2019s 500 list was 67 years back in the 1920s. Today the average length is only 15 years.1<\/em><\/p>\n

Perhaps the best way for most BAs to become entrepreneurial is by being an intrapreneur. We cited a definition of that term in an earlier article as someone who is:<\/p>\n

\u201cAn inside entrepreneur, or an entrepreneur within a large firm, who uses entrepreneurial skills without incurring the risks associated with those activities. Intrapreneurs are usually employees within a company who are assigned a special idea or project, and are instructed to develop the project like an entrepreneur would.\u201d2<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is one part of this definition we don\u2019t like: it is hard to be entrepreneurial if you don\u2019t incur risks. So we would add to this definition that intrapreneurs indirectly assume risks on behalf of the organization. There might be financial risk if the new products and services we create lose money. There are product risks if the changes we instigate have defects. Additionally, intrapreneurs take personal risks within the organization, which could materialize if the products or services we work on don\u2019t succeed. We will come back to that challenge later in the article.<\/p>\n

Intrapreneurial Example<\/strong>. Our first stints as intrapreneurs came at the bank that we both worked at early in our careers. Much of our work was similar to a business analyst, but that term had not been invented back in the 1970s yet.<\/p>\n

No matter what we were called, we were definitely change agents for the bank, reviewing department processes, procedures, \u201cEDP\u201d requirements, and organization structures. We recommended improvements and new services, both manual and automated. It was creative and a lot of fun.<\/p>\n

We were both happy there as employees, and yet looking back we were expected to be intrapreneurs in the sense that we helped the bank move to new possibilities. We \u201cdisrupted\u201d the status quo (to use the popular term in lean startup circles). That disruption sometimes came at some organization risk when we recommended streamlining procedures that were overly controlling. We also took on personal risk when we made recommendations, although we did not view it that way at the time.<\/p>\n

Bank management thought the organization risk was worth it because it helped the bank achieve better customer service, efficiency, and control. We took on the personal risk because we earnestly believed our recommendations were helping the company.<\/p>\n

Types of Innovations<\/h2>\n

Why are intrapreneurs important? When organizations introduce new products or enhance existing ones, our guess is today they would all say they want to \u201cinnovate.\u201d We feel that the intrapreneurial function is the most practical and repeatable way to implement many innovations. However, to think about \u201cinnovation\u201d as being a uniform process is overly simplistic. In the article \u201cThe Innovation Strategy Big Companies Should Pursue,\u201d3<\/em> Tony Davila lists four types of innovations, depending on whether they are top-down or bottom-up and the extent to which they are \u201cbreakthroughs\u201d or incremental:<\/p>\n