What is Intra-preneurship?
 Intrapreneurship is when employees of an existing company act as though they are entrepreneur, in terms of pursuing ideas to create new value for their company. |
Intrapreneurship is a process where employees are allowed and encouraged to pursue ideas that are typically outside of their regular work. It is a way to utilise your teams’ creativity to create profit-making innovations, whilst encouraging your teams to think differently and approach problems in more effective ways.
This typically involves a new idea which is nurtured and developed into a new value-adding product or service. Employees need space to develop these ideas, without the interruption of their typical work. This allows for faster go-to-market cycles, as the focus is purely on development and not on day-to-day activities.
If successful, this could also lead to a new department, new subsidiary, or a complete spin-off into a new company.
Is it different from Entrepreneurship?
Yes and no. Intrapreneurship asks employees to adopt entrepreneurial thinking, but to apply it in the existing business environment. Both are about transforming a vision into a successful (and profitable) business venture. Both are about discovering and exploiting new opportunities to generate value. Both can benefit from the executors having entrepreneurial characteristics such as:
- Taking initiative to resolve an issue or exploit an opportunity
- Being creative in obtaining and combining resources
- Being future-orientated and forward-thinking
- Having a tolerance for risk, and a willingness to accept potential failure
However, intrapreneurship has a unique set of challenges because it operates within an existing organisation. The first challenge is securing and maintaining leadership support. This focuses on aligning to corporate goals and appealing to a variety of internal stakeholders and management. The second challenge is risk aversion. Corporate managers and leaders are inherently risk-averse, and tend to demand intense testing of ideas to create buy-in. This degree of certainty can sometimes hinder and slow the process. The third challenge is integration. Intrapreneurship faces additional challenges of politics, integration, and utilisation of existing systems rather than building new systems that fit the exact demands of the innovation leaders.
Why do we need intrapreneurship?
Intrapreneurship development is an important infrastructure for the sustainability of your organisation. It is a system that allows your employees to contribute towards your company’s longevity. Having this system in place can lead to:
- Growth: Intrapreneurs generate new business and new revenue streams
- Innovation: Supports an innovation system that leads to sustainable competitive advantage
- Speed & Agility: Reduced time-to-market for new products & services, better change management
- Talent: Attract, develop and retain leadership talent through empowerment and enablement
- Engagement: Develop, stretch and engage employees with challenging, meaningful and rewarding work
Remember that your business is made of 2 parts. The main part is to effectively manage and control your existing products & services, as these are proven to be valuable at this moment. This is effective in the short term, but eventually your offerings will become obsolete or irrelevant (try to think of a product that has remain unchanged in 25 years). Thus, the second part is to grow and expand what you offer. This is where intrapreneurship is most valuable, as it supports your ability to constantly match your customers’ needs.
What can you do about intrapreneurship?
Developing a system for intrapreneurs can help you achieve competitive advantage for your business. The system is a set of tools to help you set up your business environment to enable and empower your teams to pursue innovation. This in turn helps your organisation to start competitive in an industry with rapidly-shifting customer demands.
At Innovation Brewery, we are specialists at developing intrapreneurial environments in businesses. Our goal is to help you capitalise on your people’s great ideas and to create great value for your customers and your business. Let us come to you for an assessment to determine whether intrapreneurship is right for you
