Tennenhouse didn't want to upset these efforts; he wanted to enhance them and, especially in the case of the disruptive projects, make them part of a more formal long-term strategy.
On the down side, heat pumps cost from £9,000 to £17,000, plus burying the energy-collecting pipe in the back garden – if it's big enough – can be a massively disruptive project.
Before Intel, Want was at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, which supports many such disruptive projects.
In parallel with in-house efforts, Intel will step up its funding of disruptive projects in universities.
Tennenhouse, though, thinks the opportunity to work on disruptive projects will be a creative spark for current employees-and could even become a great recruiting and retention tool.
Consider: startups usually only get to make one bet, but Experian DataLabs has a dozen or more disruptive projects going on a regular basis.
The reason is not a lack of competencies or assets but, rather, that established firms face a high opportunity cost and will as a consequence not be able to allocate sufficient resources to disruptive projects.
Still, the great lesson of floods past on the Red River, and especially from the devastating flood of 1997 in Grand Forks, an hour north of Fargo, is that big federal money for permanent flood abatement, and the local political will to support such disruptive projects, flows only where disaster goes.
I have seen similar dynamics in other innovation units, such as in-house think tanks that focus on writing reports but don't check if their knowledge is applied, or ideation units that celebrate their ability to come up with disruptive projects, but don't really address the fact that those ideas tend not to be adopted by the business.
Financial metrics are ill-suited, however, for disruptive projects that charter unknown territory.
