Thanks to our esteemed speakers Nina and Cynthia, and our moderator Indu, we learned that entrepreneurship is about lobbying, pitching your efforts, getting allies, leveraging resources, exuding empathy, etc.
Practicing entrepreneurship within your organization is a way to gain credibility and a track record – all the tools are at your fingertips, from colleagues to materials. Below are pictures from the event:
And thanks to Annie Chang, we have notes from the event! You can find them after the jump.


NINA BHATTI (HP Principal Scientist)
Entrepreneur
Internalizing mission of organization, absorbing customer’s problem, and driving creative solution.
1. Understand organizational landscape/politics.
2. You can make something great happen.
3. Make your key stakeholders look good (win-win for all, not just
about you, later looks obvious).

Creating your labor of love:
– Understand the organizational landscape.
– Make something great happen.
– Don’t assume anything.
– Make your key stakeholders look good.
– Don’t be intimidated.
– Bigger efforts require teams, but with bigger results.
– Be fearless, keep the faith.

CYNTHIA JOHANSEN (Yahoo! Product Manager)

Product: Yahoo! Kickstart (18-24 y/o demographic)
– Scrummed up mobile team, early-stage, very bureaucratic. Bradley Horowitz. Scott Gatz (Yahoo! mail, friends’ page)
– Enabling venues for innovation, scrum process helps create priorities.
– Hack days. “Schwag.”

***

Backed by business, you have access to colleagues, tech, tools, lab, and not having to worry about monetization schemes, not being locked down to a bottom-line.

Entrepreneurship is about lobbying, pitching your efforts, getting allies, leveraging resources, exuding empathy — “currency” by instantiating people.

Requires absolute passion, prompts risk-taking, to NOT have your success determined by another group’s vision. Internal forces will listen to external forces.

In-house incubator, whether you’re truly addressing a need. Flickr was a gaming company –> photo sharing. Is launching into the next innovation chapter.

SCRUM at Yahoo! – Agile development process. Old-school waterfall. PM working with designers/engineers/QA. Sprints. Much more dialogue. Features are built in iterative clumps.