INTRAPRENEURSHIP PROGRAMS

UNLEASHING THE ENTREPRENEURS WITHIN

We custom-design formal Intrapreneurship / Corporate Entrepreneurship Programs for organizations.

Intrapreneurship – or Corporate Entrepreneurship as it is sometimes called – can be a powerful element of your organization's broader innovation agenda.   The aim of intrapreneuring is to provide your organization – particularly its community of more entrepreneurial individuals – with the venues needed to unleash their innovation drive in a manner that positively impacts your organization and its future trajectory.

Formal Intrapreneurship can be enabled through a variety of venues – ranging from engagement campaigns like innovation tournaments and business plan competitions, all the way up to formal corporate incubators and accelerators used to spin out new ventures.   Whichever venue is selected, it means giving these individuals and their teams the time, space, and resources to pursue an idea they're passionate about within the context of your own broader business strategy.   This becomes their ‘sandbox’, in which they will study the challenge they have chosen and experiment with different solution concepts in order to find its one best solution.

These venues thus become the incubators for what are quite often radical new product, service, and other business concepts that your organization may never have pursued otherwise.   Some of those concepts will turn out to be very lucrative.   Occasionally they spawn the next great idea that becomes the foundational basis for the future of your organization.

Intrapreneurship venues and activities are often built around the practices of Design Thinking, Blue Ocean Strategy, and Lean Startup.   As such, they challenge teams to experiment quickly and frugally… to fail fast and learn fast, so that they can discover their one best solution as quickly and as efficiently as possible.   Thus the investment on the part of the organization is typically not overly extensive – just enough to allow these teams to experiment, learn, and get to the point where they can confidently pitch their concept to become a real innovation project in the organization.   For concepts that are selected to become real projects, your organization would then invest accordingly in each endeavor on a case by case basis, and in keeping with your broader innovation strategy and pipeline goals.   As a formally funded endeavor, your organization would then develop and refine the concept to a level that meets the business' standard for going to market.

THE ENGAGEMENT

The Intrapreneurship Engagement typically follows these steps:

1. We begin by listening to you so as to understand your goals for leveraging intrapreneurship, and to understand who within your organization is behind the initiative driving it, as well as what their hopes and expectations for the effort are.
2. We then explain the many different approaches to intrapreneurship and the pros and cons of each.
3. Next we explore with you how each of these approaches may or may not fit with your organization, and help you select the most appropriate approach for your business at that point in time.   This would be the approach most likely to succeed in your situation, with ‘success’ entailing both bottom–up success and top–down success, as the metrics must run both ways if there is to be sustained viability of the effort.
4. Finally, we help you plan out and develop the chosen venues and their processes so as to have the maximum impact on your business.
5. As needed, we can also deliver custom training and workshops around intrapreneurship so as to build awareness and understanding of it within the business.   It is not uncommon for this to be a part of the implementation process.
6. If desired, we can remain engaged with you to help oversee the intrapreneurship effort, and to coach you along the way so as to ensure it remains on track and does not get derailed by unforeseen circumstances.
7. If desired, we are also available to serve as advisors to the intrapreneurial ventures inside your business.