Page - 248 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

Like somany other units and companies,DB’s business units are facing digital transformation.DB Intrapreneurs believes in using and empowering the innovation potential of its employees to create the digital future of DB. Therefore, DB Intra- preneurs strives to achieve three important goals: 1. Inspire employees and business units to drive innovation by understanding digital transformation. 2. Equip employees with entrepreneurial competencies and skills to foster an innovative and entrepreneurial mindset among them. 3. Support employees as a business unit to validate and build corporate start-ups. The followingcasehasbeenprepared in cooperationwithDB.Wewould like to thank FlorianMessner-Schmitt, Head ofDB Intrapreneurs, and his team for their useful insights. Case study 2:Obtaining digital talent through acquisition Manycompanies, knowing that their current culture canmakehiringor developing digital talent that they need difficult, have switched their talent acquisition strategy to buying digitally competent companies, not so much for their operations but rather for their talent. When one of us was an angel capitalist, we made a disappointing investment wherein the entrepreneur we had invested in had a great engineering team and a good idea thatwas just toobig for the funds and the time thatwere allocated for it. This entrepreneur was destined to fail. When we invested, we imagined that we could get him to begin earning revenue with a lesser product that moved in the direction of the grand dream before his funds ran out. Unfortunately, the CEOwas unwilling towork on anything other than the full version of his original dreamwith all its features. Oncewe learned that hewould never change his plan,wewrote the investment off as a failure.However,we then received an offer to sell this company; this gave us a twofold return on our total investment in thefirm. The buyer had no interest in theCEO’s vision or theCEO himself: thepurchasingcompanywas justbuyinghisengineering team.Acquisition is oneway to get the talent you need, and considering the team and the company that bought out the firm, I suspect it worked out well for them. Nevertheless, simply acquiring the digital talent you need is not sufficient since youalsohave tokeep it. In another example, oneofuswas runninga small internet security companywith a strong intrapreneurial culture and superstar engineers. To giveanexampleofwhat it took tokeepsuch talent, consider the followingscenario. One of my engineers insisted on this arrangement: even though I was his boss, I could only talk to himwhen he arrived in the morning or left at night; under no circumstances was I allowed to interrupt his thinking between those two times. Anything Ihad to say tohimcouldwait until the endof theday.Hedidnotneedor want to bemanaged.Once he agreed to take on a project—whichwas amatter of persuasion rather than command—hewould take it from there. Digital Intrapreneurship: The Corporate Solution… 255