Intrapreneurship in Industry 4.0: What You Need to Succeed
Christopher Couch, SVP and CTO of Cooper Standard and founder/CEO of Liveline Technologies, explains how his team spun off an intrapreneurial project into a standalone company to solve real-time control problems in manufacturing. Couch details the use of a low-risk 'test pad' at Cooper Standard’s Livonia, Michigan technology center to iterate quickly, contrasting this with the consistency required in mass production. He highlights two major surprises: the technical complexity of the minimal stack required for real-time ML-based control, and the business model difficulty of quantifying economic value, which forced a shift to subscription pricing. Couch also discusses the cultural challenges of managing a spin-off within a large enterprise and the importance of hiring for passion and rapid skill acquisition.