5 Reasons Why Corporate Entrepreneurship Is Not Thriving in Your Company and How to Fix It {100% human-written article}

TLDR;

? Target 99% of Employees: Create the best possible conditions for all employees, not just innovation champions, to develop new ideas.

? Don’t Oppose Corporate Comfort to Entrepreneurial Behavior: Allow employees to remain in their corporate comfort zone while they develop their corporate startup ideas for as long as necessary.

? Provide Transparent Access: Offer managers insight into what ideas employees are working on before the formal packaging and presentation stage, enabling earlier engagement.

? Implement a Feedback Mechanism: Establish a feedback loop based on alignment with corporate strategy to help employees adjust or improve their ideas, increasing their value to the company.

? Eliminate Corporate Isolation: Learn to identify similar ideas and gaps in competencies to form successful internal teams within the company.

? Ensure Full Transparency: Establish early feedback mechanisms and alignment with company priorities, preventing employees from wasting time and energy on projects that don’t match the company’s needs.

The solution.

Hi there, I’m Dima, founder of PitchBob. My background as a founder is 10 years in corporate innovation. I’ve worked with Visa, Raiffeisen Bank, Retail, Oil & Gas, and many other companies. I’ve noticed that big companies have substantial unrealized innovation potential, which can be revealed by developing internal entrepreneurship. It now looks like a graveyard of corporate innovation ideas when you’ve gathered ideas and don’t know what to do with them.

Currently, one of the most important directions for PitchBob is its use for developing internal entrepreneurship.

I am confident that every large company possesses unrealized innovation potential hidden within its employees. Despite all the efforts made by corporations, many fail to achieve the results they could. Unfortunately, internal innovation development programs are limited to corporate accelerators, incubators, R&D labs, and idea contests. In the best case, they result in solid corporate products, and in the worst case, they become corporate graveyards for employees’ ideas.

Most books and essays on the subject cover fairly obvious aspects and provide well-known (but not always effective) recommendations. I want to show you the root causes that we can help fix using our methodology, product, and my experience.

You are targeting 1% of your employees instead of targeting 99%.?

Yes, most companies seek so-called innovation champions — people with predominant entrepreneurial thinking, behavior, and the desire to create new things and change the old. This makes sense, but these are low-hanging fruits that quickly run out. All accelerators, incubators, and corporate idea competitions motivate your employees to step out of their comfort zone, where they consciously placed themselves when they took a job with your company.?

They are motivated to engage in behavior that is not natural for them, exposing themselves to reputational, career, and other risks, often with weak value propositions — without real equity motivation, but with the possibility of realizing their idea, which, if they really wanted to realize it, they could have done outside your company. Yes, many ideas are difficult to implement without your company’s resources, distribution channels, technologies, and the comfortable salary they receive. Therefore, your task is to align these incompatible motivations.?

Returning to the 1% of employees you are targeting — this is a great driver, but its potential is limited, while the potential of the remaining 99% slips out of your attention because these employees do not exhibit proactive behavior, do not participate in idea contests, are not ready to pitch ideas to stakeholders, and are generally subject to introversion, fear, and other concerns that keep them off your innovation radar.

Here’s what I suggest

First of all, create comfortable conditions for idea generation, their gentle, deadline-free, iterative development. To do this, I propose giving your employees an AI buddy, AI co-pilot, AI colleague, who will help them move from the pre-idea stage to being ready to present their concept to you or other stakeholders in a soft format.?

The secret sauce of my proposal is that if previously you had to wait for the moment when an employee packs their idea into your format and is ready to step out of their comfort zone to present it, now, by giving them access to our tool, you can transparently see the employee’s thought process, their iterations, traction, and the dynamics of their idea’s development, without intervening in it or pushing them out of their comfort zone prematurely. This way, you help the employee work on their idea and easily cover the same 99% of employees who were previously unavailable to you.

Corporate comfort zone vs. entrepreneurial behavior.

Employees of large companies have consciously chosen the path of a corporate career, stability, predictability, and emotional comfort. These are things foreign to entrepreneurs and are complete antagonisms. Your role as a leader of internal entrepreneurship is to attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable and find a balance between opposite motivations — either find people with entrepreneurial behavior or at least temporarily change their behavior to implement ideas.

We discussed the search for such people above, and such people are scarce in the world, especially in large corporations. So here your ceiling is 1% of employees. That’s why we offer a solution to preserve the comfort zone while fostering motivation to create something new.

This solution is an iterative, closed process of idea development, free from external corporate attention and involvement, without deadlines, expectations, strict reporting, presentation formats, career risks, or stepping out of the comfort zone until the person is ready for it.?

An AI assistant, who takes a reactive and proactive position, accompanies the project development process, regularly helps reflect on the progress of hypothesis testing, looks at the idea from different angles, and gently nudges transitions from one stage to another without leaving the comfort zone, which is super important for many employees, from introverted developers to business developers committed to bonus KPIs.

Your employees generate ideas that your company doesn’t need.?

And when rejected, they lose motivation to do it again, lowering your retention and increasing the amount of effort you need to fill the funnel for the next round. Announcing an idea selection for a corporate incubator, accelerator, or idea competition through the idea portal, the next step is screening, evaluation, and decision-making. Obviously, many will receive rejections, negatively affecting their motivation.?

The reasons are varied, despite your efforts to formulate innovation requests, communicate the company’s strategic priorities, and explain the difference between sustaining, transforming, and breakthrough innovations. Employees still suggest things that won’t immediately appeal to stakeholders. Additionally, there is often no room for iterative development, hypothesis testing, and idea alteration during the selection and internal scouting stages.

Here’s how to fix it

In our product, we can pre-define the company’s priorities, strategic goals, core technologies, areas for improvement, or specific business cases — everything the company needs now or in the medium term. When an employee generates, discusses, and packages their idea, it will be aligned with this request and the list of priorities. Importantly, we don’t just reject ideas that don’t immediately match the requests. Instead, we gently correct them through feedback that your employee receives.?

Additionally, we generate alternative hypotheses that might prompt the employee to apply their idea to the company’s target needs.?

Finally, we provide you with signals about what your employees are working on ideas, how aligned they are with the company’s priorities, what hypotheses we have for their adjustment, and at any time, with full transparent access to up-to-date information on the essence and stage of idea development, you can engage in communication and influence its transformation long before it is packaged in the corporate standard and presented to stakeholders.

One hand doesn’t know what the other is doing — your employees are working on similar ideas without knowing it.

In every large corporation with offices worldwide, of course, there is some connection, but as a rule, it doesn’t cover the task of matching ideas that are similar in concept across different countries, offices, and departments. This leads to many employees working on solving the same problems, using similar technologies, creating similar solutions, and coming up with similar ideas without realizing that among their colleagues, there may be dozens and hundreds of such overlaps.

We propose solving this problem long before you have a project registry or list of ideas. We can do this constantly, literally daily. Having access to the current set of hypotheses, the current roadmap, the current version of the raw pitch, we can analyze all the raw ideas at stages far from presentation, compare them with each other, cross-pollinate, enrich, and avoid idea duplication, ultimately increasing the quality of the final idea and its scaling potential.

Corporate loneliness.

It’s well known that creating a startup is a team effort, and the survival rate of teams with 2+ founders is higher than that of solo founders. But in corporations, everything is different — on one hand, employees are united in groups, teams, blocks, and departments responsible for achieving common goals and with personal zones of responsibility for each.?

On the other hand, when it comes to generating and developing a new idea that came to an employee’s mind and has not yet received political support, allocation of corporate resources, and approval from the leadership, this is the role of a typical solo founder who finds themselves alone with their idea.?

They can, of course, package it and present it to a stakeholder, but the probability, speed, and quality of such a process are far from the best. And worst of all, ideas usually come to people with limited competencies — either the person can create a prototype but doesn’t know how to test its market potential for commercialization, or the idea comes to a business-oriented person who sees the customer’s problem, demand, and market opportunity but cannot create a prototype/MVP of the product to test its feasibility without the support and access to the company’s resources — developers, designers, distribution channels, etc.

We propose solving this problem in a similar way to the one described above. Having access to ideas at the earliest stages, we can identify the core competencies of the idea’s creator and predict the gaps that will arise for them during hypothesis testing.?

The solution is to highlight these gaps to balance the necessary resources for each idea and match them with the competencies of their colleagues who may not be the idea’s owners or leaders but are happy to join a colleague’s ideas, as is always the case in market conditions.

Here’s what we provide

Transparent access to information about what your employees are working on long before they pitch anything, without pushing them out of their comfort zone.

Feedback and alignment of employees’ ideas regarding how they match with the company’s priorities and needs, to avoid working on ideas the company doesn’t require.

Team formation and filling skill gaps, creating cross-functional teams capable of testing and implementing ideas.

Our vision at PitchBob

The people who generate these ideas are a tiny percentage of the company. That’s why we say the following: We increase the conversion from internal entrepreneurs to teams of corporate entrepreneurs, leading to a successful startup within the perimeter of a big company.

We use the same product, which is integrated into corporate messengers, thus becoming one of the employees who always has access to it. And what’s important is that we aim at something other than the top 1% of people with entrepreneurial thinking in a big company. We aim at the 99% of people who don’t have this thinking and who value corporate comfort.

That’s why they usually don’t enter innovation development programs or offer any ideas. We aim to reach a large group of people and create a comfortable tool for them to generate discussion. In this soft and comfortable state, they can discuss their ideas and work on them without going beyond their comfort zone, pitching, presenting, risking their careers, or creating an uncomfortable situation for themselves. The tool is the same.

It’s a bot that helps formulate, reflect, pack, make a hypothesis, plan, get feedback, etc. We have several values. First, we provide transparent access to information about what your employees work on before they pitch it to you.

I repeat, without taking them out of their comfort zone. Second, we give feedback to employees even before they do something. Employees often work on something the company does not need or require.

We align with corporate strategy. We compare what the employee will work on with the company’s needs, and we can warn them immediately if it holds no value.

Large companies with different departments and offices often work on the same projects. And sometimes, people with a lack of competence work on projects. In our case, having access to all the ideas from the earliest stages, we compare ideas from different parts of the company.

On the other hand, people with different competencies should form a professional team to work on this project further. So, this is the Corporate Innovation Solution aimed at developing internal entrepreneurship in a large company. It increases the conversion from employees to entrepreneurs and from entrepreneurs to thriving startups within the perimeter of a large company. At the same time, it targets a broad, large group of people who are not ready to leave their comfort zone because they are in the perimeter of a large company.

It also gives them a tool to develop their entrepreneurship skills and gradually implement their ideas for a balanced corporate vision.

Let’s discuss launching a pilot project or proof of concept for PitchBob’s integration into your company.