I would claim that they are. But incubating things … that doesn’t sound like the typical specialization of finance, accounting, sales, or information technology. In fact, have you ever seen a "department of incubating things" in a company? Wouldn’t someone who specialized in such an area get spread too thin?
Valid observation and concerns. To support my claim though, I would make the following anecdotal comments:
- I never focused much on incubating and running pilots until I cut my teeth at management consulting firm PRTM that had a niche in implementation and execution with high-tech firms (although I worked for a number of operating companies prior to management consulting). Incubation is akin to project management and risk management in an operational context.
- To orient oneself as incubating something, one needs to be prepared that things could be very rocky at first. Customers will be pissed. Workers will be pissed. Roles won’t be defined. People don’t know exactly what to do. There will be no technology support in many cases. Fraying, fringes, and bad things will be showing all over. To solve these problems, project management, discipline, and cross-functional skills are needed.
- Incubation tends to attract those with an appetite for variety as opposed to those unable to commit to a steady-state/harvesting-type business.
- Sometimes the role of incubating things can be found throughout corporate consulting groups, business development, or product management functions. Common best-in-class features in these functional areas include understanding the asset base of the company and figuring out how to create quantitative and qualitative value though combining things or breaking them down. This is in contrast to cost center-oriented functions.
- More often than not, people discount (or completely ignore) the role of piloting initiatives. Just jump right into deployment and rollout from the unit testing phase of a product. That has got to be the wrong answer at least some of the time.