Ask HN: Anyone has experience with running YC clone *inside* a company?

We attempted something similar in my previous company. I can tell you it failed, and why so as not to make the same mistakes we did. For starters, they are an IT services company so it was difficult to implement from the get-go when you are dependant on your employees being billable. We were hoping to build software products, and we knew that we would need to provide support and incentives b/c we were essentially asking those involved to work hours outside of their normal schedule. We set up a fairly streamlined, gated process which provided the teams the ability to receive mentorship throughout each gate. They would formalize an idea/concept, then run it by the CEO and sales team to ensure it had buy-in and would be marketable to our established customer base. If at any point it wasn't viable they could either pivot or stop. The wheels quickly fell off when the CEO (after signing off on it) decided it was too heavy handed, then the sales team was too busy to meet with any of the teams, and none of the teams could see the incentive to working on something that lacked support and required them to work off-hours to build. Needless to say, this is the opposite of how an YC clone should be inside of a company.

If you want to encourage innovation inside of a larger company, go read http://www.amazon.com/Winning-New-Products-Accelerating-Proc.... You'll get a lot of ideas and some very practical advice for addressing that problem.

Basically what it comes down to is, "Start with lots of ideas, and have a rigorous process for making most of them fail fast with a minimal allocation in resources."

check out geoffrey moore's books if you haven't already