Louise Kyhl Triolo: Innovations From Which To Dream Big

Innovations From Which To Dream

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From the early days in her career working with L’Oreal in Paris, to landing a job with Airbus Helicopters in the south of France, to ultimately spearheading a

groundbreaking innovation project with Airbus A3, Louise Kyhl Triolo has always believed in the power of intrapreneurialism.

“Intrapreneurialism, for me, is not a trend; it is the most natural form of human expression - thinking, creating, federating, building, making…. Although not each and every one of us has the desire, nor the skills to do so, I believe nevertheless that it is our way forward,” she said.

“Intrapreneurship allows businesses and organisations to ‘drill holes in the walls’ – it creates airflow between in and out, thus more oxygen within. It revolutionises

ancient and outdated systems, processes and workflows that stifle initiative, autonomy and mastery.”

Louise was instrumental in creating Airbus’s crowdsourcing innovation initiative and cultural transformation project known as

Dream Big. People from within the organisation, of which there are over 135,000 across Airbus, are encouraged and supported to see innovative ideas come to light. Internal innovation labs and programs offer intrapreneurs space, coaching and capital to work on their ideas, taking them all the way through from concept, to acceleration phase and, in many cases, implementation.

The business is now cementing the intrapreneurial mindset within both its culture and processes by updating policy, redefining roles and responsibilities of management and HR, and defining the recognition system for those who step up and offer new light to the culture and inner workings of the business.

“Intrapreneurship is now becoming a priority for our various businesses as it’s seen as a way to accelerate new growth and change our ways of working,” Louise said.

Dream Big became a reality after Louise was asked by the management of Airbus Helicopters to lead the cultural transformation of the business. While the company was maintaining success, forward-thinking leaders of the time knew there was a better way forward. With a small team by her side, Louise invented New Ways.

With this system, performance management was overhauled, along with leadership programs and business objectives.

“What I learnt as a result of this experience and felt passionate about, was that people drive all innovation. The way we work, think, collaborate, learn and incubate ideas, is all dictated by the culture in which we do it in,” Louise recalls.

Two years later, Airbus was poised to establish an innovation centre and venture capital fund in the Silicon Valley, US. After her work with New Ways, Louise had some innovative ideas of her own when it came to such a project: “I thought, if we were to do that, we needed to focus on the technological and financial side of innovation, as well as the human side of change. We should learn about the culture in which all the disruptive ideas are born and implemented, to extract what could help us at Airbus,” she said.

“So I wrote a note of what, in my opinion, was needed for us to learn there and I landed myself a job four years ago in the Silicon Valley!”

From here, Louise was on what she describes as an “intrapreneurial 3-fold mission”: to set up the innovation centre

and venture fund, start-up the Airbus Leadership University in North America, and bring back the learnings and practices from the Valley to help change the culture within Airbus as a whole.

It was while working in Silicon Valley on this project that Louise developed the Dream Big concept.

“I learned that the talent, the ‘entrepreneurial’ drive, skills and passion, the big thinking, the transversal collaboration, the positive ‘yes, and’ culture were the keys that make the Silicon Valley the innovation hotspot of the world.

“So, I decided that the most important thing I could do to infuse that innovative spirit and mindset into Airbus was to inspire all employees to dream, to give our ‘hidden’ talent a voice in the transformation of our company and let them help shape our future, learn and make our dreams come true.”

Her role within the organisation shifted to become VP of Global Intrapreneurial Culture and officialise the part intrapreneurship plays within Airbus’s businesses. Not even one year into the Dream Bigjourney and incredible innovations are already emerging from the diverse talent that was waiting in the wings of Airbus. For example, by using incentive challenges, the business has been able to tap into a vast talent pool to come up with solutions to mindbending problems.

“Instead of us finding the needle in the haystack, the needle is finding us! We are thus engaging with the external ecosystem in a completely different way, ‘hidden’ talent is helping us create new designs, and we collectively save costs overall,” Louise said.

For a company such as Airbus, there is a delicate balance between control and creativity. Safety is of paramount concern, therefore there will always be an element of compliance necessary to any new way of working, but this does not need to be allconsuming.

“We are continuously navigating between these two notions within our culture - strong control necessary for optimum safety and compliance, and empowerment

necessary for innovation and growth. However, intrapreneurship enables our people and the organisation tangibly and methodologically to navigate this uncertainty, loosen some of the tension and constructively challenge the status quo to transform and build new futures,” Louise said.

Ironically, Louise sees the future of the initiative as one that is obsolete, where intrapreneurialism becomes so ingrained in the organisation’s culture, that there is no longer a need for formalised systems.

Intrapreneurialism will have a permanent seat at executive meetings and be uncompromisingly welcomed top-down. While there is still work to be done in reaching this intrapreneurial nirvana across the business world, Airbus is leading the way.

“Intrapreneurs drive change with purpose - there is a higher cause, they/we want to make a positive difference to humanity and our planet - the world can only be a better place once we allow that spirit to flourish in our organisations.”

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