3 :: Intrapreneurship

🚪TL;DR:

Everyone in an organization can become an innovation driver. No matter their function, team, or seniority level - all of them face business challenges directly and can identify growth opportunities in their job. Organizations just need to find the right mechanism to empower, collect, filter, and support their ideas inflow. And intrapreneurs just need to find the right mechanism to assess, plan, propose, and execute them. Intrapreneurial ventures can become a competitive advantage for both. The startup world sounds way more romantic at Web Summit than it is in reality, yet many of us still dream of building our own. As such, bridging the gap between the desire to start something and the opportunity to own impact-creation as an employee is probably the best chance for organizations to win the entrepreneurs at heart and channel their drive to everyone’s benefit. At least that’s what happened to me.

🧠 What is it?
Entrepreneurs solve problems, try to close market gaps and leverage business opportunities through new ventures (even social entrepreneurs, but that is a conversation for another day). Intrapreneurs act as entrepreneurs in their organizations. Usually, they still need to validate their idea, fundraise, and manage resources, and stakeholders, but their risks are lower and the trade-offs are often less painful. So, in short, intrapreneurship is essentially the practice of entrepreneurial behavior in the context of a company, association, or university, to either create a new project or initiative, solve an operational challenge, transform the existing business model, or even improve internal processes. Whatever the venture chosen, the unicorn potential is also there.

📦 Why is it relevant?
All CINOs are intrapreneurs. In fact, I would even say that most (if not all) of them are entrepreneurs, really. Creators, builders. They just found or built (and decided to cross) the bridge that connects their value-creation intention to the opportunities to do so within an organization. So, at the most basic level, intrapreneurship allows innovators to develop a muscle they usually feel the need to constantly work on. Then, as a bottom-up and highly scalable innovation mechanism, it expands the innovation efforts and their outputs. Finally, it is also a tool for a CINO to become a talent development driving force in the organization. Not only does it increase employee engagement, leading to talent retention, but it also powers high-value transversal skills for the organization, like autonomy, resourcefulness, problem-solving, and risk-taking.

🧶 Where to learn more about it:
A few years ago, Mark Randall, Chief Strategist and VP of Creativity at Adobe at the time, launched an innovation methodology called KickStart as he looked for a way to capture the energy from Silicon Valley-style hackathons into the company. Nowadays Mark leads the KickBox Foundation, which provides actual boxes with open-source material that thousands of organizations have used to empower their employees to become entrepreneurs - and so can you. If you’re also interested in learning more about entrepreneurship, you really can’t skip Lean Startup by Eric Ries or Steve Blank’s recent newsletter, as two of the most important references in the field.

See you next Tuesday! 👋