Can't Keep Well Enough Alone?
One simple way to identify potential founders-in-residence inside of an organization ("intrapraneurs") is to look for the people who can't leave well enough alone. Who are the folks who just won't let an idea die, who come in to tinker after hours, who are using the lab equipment on the weekends, etc. Those folks are a nice group to consider. Some are lunatics, but some of those lunatics are right.
That's the story of Gary Starkweather, who invented the laser printer, which was largely considered a waste of time by his superiors at Xerox. So much of a distraction, in fact, that Starkweather was threatened with a loss of his entire staff if he kept pursuing the idea. As a matter of history, when Xerox finally commercialized the product, earnings from that single product more than repaid the company's entire investment in the PARC research lab.
"With great anticipation he brought his knowledge (from a PhD focused on lasers) back to Xerox's Webster lab, where he had worked his way through school, only to be instructed to stop talking like a madman.
"For a company whose vast corporate fortune depended on the manipulation of light, Xerox remained resolutely behind the curve in exploiting (the technology). Everywhere Starkweather turned at Webster he saw projects coming to naught beacuse they employed light sources too feeble. Whenever he pointed out that the laser packed 10,000 times the brightness of a conventional light source he encountered sneers, especially when he suggested that the new devices might play a role in xerographic imaging...
"For the next few years Starkweather had no choice but to experiment on his own... Enlisting the help of a couple of lab assistants, he built a clumsy prototype, hitching a laser apparatus to an old seven-page-a-minute copier no one used anymore. Whenever he could steal an hour or two early in the morning or late at night he would run some equally clumsy tests by bombarding an unused xerographic drum with laser beams...
"'I did some test experiments in Rochester, which my immediate management felt was probably the most lunatic project they'd ever seen in their lives. That's when my section manager said, "Stop, or I'm going to take your people away."'"
(From the fantastic, "Dealers of Lightning")
He was right, of course. But the point is, he's the type of person I'd keep my eyes out for. He couldn't keep well enough alone, and he stuck with it through an incredible amount of opposition. It wasn't until he was so miserable that Xerox approved an internal transfer to send him across the country that the environment at PARC was able to accelerate and ultimately realize his convictions commercially.
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