Politics is a vital domain for businesspeople, intrapreneurs, and corporate innovators to concern themselves with especially as it relates to bringing new offers and ventures to market.
Laws, regulations, and the rules of engagement in the marketplace can mean the different between success and failure. Simply stated, if your new product is prohibited from being sold or has some restriction placed on it and you and your team are unaware of these prohibitions, this can expose your organization to unnecessary risk. Most organizations have a legal or market insights team that can provide guidelines for the introduction of new products that will eliminate or reduce this risk. Not only is it important to know the rules and regulations of marketing and selling a new offer, but knowing and even crafting these rules can open tremendous opportunities to exploit new or existing markets.
This is a simple example of why it's critical for corporate innovators to concern themselves with politics.
What is Politics for Corporate Innovators?
Politics is a major business concern for intrapreneurs and corporate innovators as it has a strong relationship to new offers being presented to the market.
Laws and regulations, developed and introduced in the domain of politics, determines what is prescribed, prohibited, and permitted. These rules and regulations are introduced and enforced through legislation using a 'who gets what, when, and how' philosophy. This fundamental framework is as old as time itself and as much as the tactics have changed the underlying mechanisms have been the same.
Laws that result from this process can affect all areas of the business including marketing, sales, technology, constitution, and finance. For instance, there are rules that govern what can and can be marketed, to whom, and where geographically. There are restrictions for where a product can be sold, which countries restrict or permit products and services to be sold. Selling any product or service in China is highly restricted and requires many levels of approval. For alcohol sales, there are age limit restrictions for who can be marketed these products. Tobacco companies are required to disclose the harmful effects of their products. Pharmaceutical manufacturers are required to disclose side effects of their products.
Politics has affected the use of certain technologies through specific prohibitions such as the unlawfulness of using stem cells in aborted fetuses. There are limitations and restrictions placed on certain computer applications and how they can be used, if or if free speech is permitted, how political advertisements can be presented, and age restrictions. for certain mobile applications.
Politics can allow or restrict the creation of a 'virtual' business or one that requires a physical location such as the case with DAO's (decentralized autonomous organizations). There are prohibitions on certain organizational and business structures that can be formed such as the forming of a ponzi-scheme.
The Relevance of Politics for Corporate Innovators
Knowledge of the law - what's required, prohibited, and allowed - is critical for corporate innovators to know when bringing new ideas, concepts, and business ventures to market.
Politicians play a critical role in the development and approval of new laws which is why it's important to understand their current situation especially as it relates to re-election cycles. Once in office their main objective is to be re-elected therefore if a new law is being developed or introduced this can have a bearing on their perspective of the law.
Corporate innovators have unique insights into the breakdowns within society and have the resources to address them. These include conflict, trends, and changes in technology that require new laws. These leaders have a unique opportunity to craft laws and regulations that could potentially favor their business or industry. Intrapreneurs and their teams have special insights into existing habits, traditions, and practices of their market and are uniquely positioned to design and craft new offers within a capitalistic market system. Laws and regulations open and close new opportunities that organizations can exploit.
There's an opportunity cost to adhering to various regulations that corporate innovators are well positioned to profit from if politics is an important enough of a concern to exploit.
Taking the time to understand politics as it related to new offers and innovation can open all sorts of new opportunities for organizations to profit from.
The Value of Politics for Corporate Innovators
The value of knowing about politics and the lawmaking process is that innovation leaders can employ political technologies to influence laws that specifically help their businesses in one or more domains of concern for their business.
Therefore, it's worth the time, energy, money, and lost opportunities to learn these political technologies and then put them to use in their own situation whether at the local, state, or federal level. Recently, there has been a spate of innovation labs that have been shutdown for various reasons. These innovation labs, in most cases, will no longer be able to produce new and compelling offers that will drive enterprise value.
Although the labs will no longer be able to produce new value for the organization, the one silver lining is they may be able to mitigate tax exposure due to the write-down (if there's a write-down available).
To know how politics will affect the concerns of an organization are critical for corporate innovators to know and be able to influence. This will open and close 'spaces of possibilities' for new ideas, concepts, and business ventures to be introduced and will directly affect their probabilities of success.