The Importance of Intrapreneurship

Innovation has never been as important as today.

There are a ton of challenges heading our way - climate change and global conflicts running the fastest towards us.

Right now we’re trying to get away from these challenges, but we are definitely not fast enough to outrun them with our current toolkit.

There are two possible reactions to this situation in the typical “the glass is half empty vs half full” kind of fashion. The “half empty”-camp sees everything going to sh*t and kind of accepts its fate. Meanwhile the “half-full”-camp is looking for a way to keep the cup from loosing more water. That’s the camp I see myself in.

I believe in innovation as one of the key vehicles to enable us to outrun them. Like a switching from running to riding a rocket!

We are doing quite ok and humanity prides itself in being innovative. But we’re not nearly fast enough for today’s challenges. Newton & friends did a great job back then, but we need to accelerate the speed innovation.

There’s already a big community accelerating innovation: Entrepreneurs. And they do a good job. Their innovations improve our situation big time.

It’s not enough.

Entrepreneurs do their best, but they don’t have the largest leverage on these challenges. You know who does? It’s the same group who has the highest impact on climate change: Big corporations. Kind of logical isn’t it?

Big corporations have a much larger leverage on solving society’s challenges through innovation than entrepreneurs do. I would even argue they also have a much larger obligation to do so.

Their main tool to solve the challenge is - you might have guessed it - innovation.

These companies understood this quite some time ago. Today, they acquire innovation externally by buying and merging external startups (often killing them in the process). What they didn't fully understand yet: External innovation isn’t the only type of innovation available to them. I would even argue that they are currently neglecting their biggest advantage: Their internal innovation potential. Their innovative employees. Their corporate entrepreneurs. Their intrapreneurs.

The difference between intrapreneurs & entrepreneurs

Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs focus on innovation and turn innovative ideas into products within an already-established business. These ideas and products often shape the business fundamentally. Other than entrepreneurs they just have access to their employer's resources. They develop open-ended ideas and turn them into real-world products and services - leveraging the existing ecosystem.

At the core of their mission they both aim to innovate. An entrepreneur works for himself and seeks external resources and support to develop an idea into a product. An intrapreneur innovates from within an organization and is able to use company resources in pursuit of their idea.

An intrapreneur is somebody who successfully adapts entrepreneurial attitudes and strategies within an existing organization and its ecosystem.

If you need some examples, here are the most prominent ones of intrapreneur-backed products:

• Paul Buchheit created Gmail, the first email platform with a search function and high storage capacity, when working for Google.

• Art Fry created Post-It notes when he revisited a previously abandoned adhesive project by scientist Spencer Silver.

• Ken Kutaragi created the Sony PlayStation when he wanted to improve his daughter’s Nintendo.

You can find dozens and dozens of these examples over all kinds of industries.

Three additional reasons why Intrapreneurship is key for success

Aside tackling climate change, there are three other reasons why intrapreneurship is key for success:

Intrapreneurs drive innovation, in a time in which innovation is necessary for companies to survive. To innovate, you need to break the rules. You need to think outside the box. You need to look beyond the existing ecosystem. You need to try something new and most importantly: You need to own your ideas. These are exactly the traits an intrapreneur brings to the table and companies so badly require in our fast-chaing markets.

Intrapreneurs support the continous transformation of the company's workforce. For their idea to work, intrapreneurs need to promote a culture of ownership, continous learning and display a growth mindset. They also need to get stakeholders from all kinds of departments on board, breaking silos and fostering cross-functional collaboration in the process. Intrapreneurs will have an influence on their environment (as every employee does) and foster these kind of traits in others too.

Intrapreneurs push collaboration and co-creation outside of their department and even outside of their company. Missing skills, perspectives or requirements are some of the main challenges for innovaters. Intrapreneurs solve these challenges by collaborating or co-creating with parties outside the ecosystem of the company. These parties could be anyone from universities to customers or even competitors. For intrapreneurs it's not the ecosystem and its boundaries that count, but the becoming of their idea.

Ok, bye 👋

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