Roberts The Entrepreneur Within

How to Forge Innovation-led Growth by Embracing the Inner Entrepreneur
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-917458-20-7
Verlag: Unicorn
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 216 Seiten

The Entrepreneur Within is an innovator's playbook to help ideas gain traction, scale quickly and keep an entrepreneurial mindset alive within any organisation. Large companies often lose the creative spark that brought them success and get weighed down by the complex systems built up within them. Start-up companies often get bloated with too many disparate ideas and get blocked by a lack of basic systems and infrastructure. The proprietary FORGE® Methodology shows how businesses of all stages and sizes can develop creative and viable innovation that makes a difference.

Mark Roberts has experience leading innovation from very diverse perspectives while being able to identify a common thread. He is an entrepreneur (Founder of Beer Hawk, exited to AB InBev), an intrapreneur (CEO of Perfect Draft), Chair for Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP), an Angel Investor and Board Adviser (NED). He mixes coaching the leadership teams of established businesses, with founding new ventures through his Red Line Foundry business. The FORGE® Methodology is the culmination of twenty-five years of building businesses and has helped create hundreds of millions of dollars of value.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Roberts, Mark

Leseproben

IS THIS BOOK FOR YOU?

Do you recognise any of these pain points?

FOCUS

» We can’t articulate a coherent strategy for growth or differentiation.

» We’re too reactive to market pressures and competition, not creating our own path.

» We’re falling in love with the solution, not the problem.

» Our new initiatives don’t fit in with our mission.

ORIGINALITY

» We struggle to have genuinely creative thoughts.

» The ideas we do have don’t cut through.

» We have too many naysayers who block progress.

» We don’t seem to prioritise the most promising ideas.

RESULTS

» We’re scared of failure.

» We don’t test things quickly enough, or don’t know when things are good enough

» Decisions are taken without the right data.

» We’re not quick enough to back projects that show traction.

GROWTH

» We struggle to get new initiatives beyond a certain size.

» Our decision making is starting to slow down.

» Some of the team are becoming disenfranchised.

» We can no longer see the forest for the trees.

ECOSYSTEM

» We’re too internally focused.

» We don’t have access to the very best talent.

» We’re on the back foot with the latest market developments.

» We take on all the innovation risk ourselves.

If you recognise any of these challenges, the FORGE playbook can offer a new perspective on how to move forwards and unlock growth.

Innovation is critical for business growth, and, ultimately, success. You innovate or die. But how do you foster a mindset of innovation within an organisation that might have lost it? Is the current approach not working? FORGE will also diagnose the reasons why. I’ll show you how to overcome the hurdles and create an environment where entrepreneurs within a large business or organisation can be empowered.

SO WHY LISTEN TO ME?

I’ve always worked in innovation, from my first job out of university to, well, right now. Innovation is at the heart of everything I do, pretty much every day of my working life. I’ve read everything I can find on the subject and put the theories to the test in large corporations and high-growth start-ups. I advise companies and organisations across the world on innovation, how to foster it and, crucially, how to maintain it. I’ve worked in innovation roles my entire career, in organisations of all sizes. I’m an industry advisor at the University of Oxford; I’ve chaired regional economic development panels, advised governments and embarked on trade missions, all with innovation at the core. I’ve been an entrepreneur, building my own business and selling it to a multinational. I’ve also worked within corporations leading disruptive technologies and ventures, for example, at Procter & Gamble, Lloyds Banking Group, AB InBev and Leeds City Region Local Enterprise Partnership. I’m now an angel investor, operational partner of a venture capital company, non-executive director and, yes, let’s say it, author. My career, crucially for this book, has straddled the entrepreneurial start-up, as well as working for a large corporation.

And that juxtaposition is the essence of FORGE. It is about fostering and maintaining an entrepreneurial mindset while navigating the restrictions of a large organisation. You have the big business resources (yay!), but also the big business red tape and complexity (boo).

I’ve first-hand experience of the very common challenges that innovators within a large organisation face. It can seem to intrapreneurs and innovators that they are seemingly stifled and stymied at every stage, regardless of the board’s understanding that innovation is required. I also saw how a lack of innovation gradually leads to a decline in the business. If a company of any size is not innovating quickly enough, you can guarantee the competition is.

As an entrepreneur, I co-founded Beer Hawk with a good friend. It was an e-commerce business that grew out of a shed and two laptops into a company with more than £90 million in revenue and a 200-strong team in less than a decade. Along the way, we sold our business to AB InBev and eventually helped integrate it into the mothership.

An innovation paradox became clear. New ventures within large organisations are increasingly constrained by processes and long-standing culture, red tape and stakeholder management. Large companies tend to be conservative, motivated by short-term profits. When an innovative business grows, it becomes more efficient, but this limits innovation. This is not the right environment for a venture requiring a start-up mindset.

On the other hand, a venture that needs to scale must implement the rigour and efficiency of large-scale business to be sustainable, all the time maintaining an innovation stream to ensure it stays ahead of the competition. These are traditionally opposed. Entrepreneurs are brilliant at innovation but often need help to scale; corporations scale effectively but struggle to innovate. It’s why so many startups fail and why so many innovations in organisations fail to gain traction.

Overcoming this paradox is what the FORGE methodology addresses. I call it ‘becoming ambidextrous’. It’s about mastering the skills of both innovation and efficiency.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

This book is split into two parts: firstly, Growing Pains, and then FORGE, my methodology for innovation success. The first part of this book offers the context for innovation. It analyses why innovation can be such a challenge, and why it is critical for a business to survive. It addresses why it matters to be innovative, why business ventures become less innovative over time and why large organisations usually kill innovation or suffocate the creative process. I talk about the challenges you, as the innovator-in-chief, face. I discuss why companies become like this.

In the second part, I explain how we rise to these challenges and turn them to our advantage to ensure innovation is present at every stage. And, ultimately, how to create a sustainable, scaling business with longevity, an environment where people are happy to work, and that does good for the world.

FORGE has five chapters: Focus, Originality, Results, Growth and Ecosystem. It is the order by which innovations should be developed. I say ‘should’ because we know that’s not always the case. Chances are you’ll be at a different stage of the venture, or different stages with different innovations. While I’d suggest reading the book in order, you can absolutely dip into the chapter that addresses your needs most clearly. However, I do suggest you read Ecosystem soon, it is an essential element of all the other stages.

Throughout, you’ll see a series of Tales, Traps and Tips. These are interviews with some of the world’s most interesting innovators. In these pages, they offer inspirational stories, as well as hard-earned advice, the successes they had, and failures you can avoid.

I’ve also included some well-known examples of business success and failure from some of the world’s biggest companies. Full transparency: I wasn’t there for those decisions, I have no idea exactly what was going on in the head of Steve Jobs, for example, but these cases do illustrate a point, a principle, and that is very worthwhile.

Most of all, The Entrepreneur Within is designed as a playbook to be well-thumbed, to have scribbled notes in the margin, and to sit open at your desk, ready to guide you towards the next step.

This book offers decades of learning from more than a dozen people – innovators who have made mistakes and discovered patterns of success. It can act as a shortcut to becoming The Entrepreneur Within.

THE TRUE REASON FOR THIS BOOK

I’m passionate about innovation. I love the buzz of being part of new ventures, I love hearing how they succeed. When businesses grow, when they scale efficiently, it improves the lives of people, it improves the economy, it benefits everyone. But here’s the real crux: innovations can change the world. I believe that if we solve the problems of innovation, we can solve at least some of the problems of the world. That’s why I wrote this book.

Mark Roberts, 2025
Harrogate,...