Creativity leads to Innovation and that leads to Intrapreneurship

Last week I gave a keynote speech on how creativity leads to innovation and that can lead to Intra-preneurship.

How do you reduce poverty? Create jobs? Develop innovative new products and industries? One of the most important ways is to support entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs.

It is something I have been talking about since 2007 and what you will hear/read below is an abridged version of my decade of learnings.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. --Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is well-known as a successful and innovative entrepreneur. But by his own definitive published statement, Jobs was both an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur!

Steve Jobs, Apple’s Chairman was specifically helpful in popularizing the term “intrapreneurship.” In a September 30, 1985 “Newsweek” article Jobs said of intrapreneurship within Apple,

“The Macintosh team was what is commonly known as intrapreneurship… a group of people going, in essence, back to the garage, but in a large company.”

So to start, before we talk more about intrapreneurship we need to understand how to be more creative:

How do we engage the part of the brain that makes you creative - 

- To be creative, you need to practice - the brain is a muscle. 

- Be aware of your assumptions. Unfounded assumptions prevent you from thinking creatively.

- Value Long Thinking; judge ideas by how they fit as an ensemble, not individually. You can only do this with patience.

- Apply theories and concepts to areas that were never applied to before. 

- Creative thinking is about finding many alternatives and choosing the best answer, not about finding the right* answer.

- If your environment punishes mistakes, you will never be creative.

Did you know that you can tell if you have Iintrapreneurial spirit in you? By simply knowing what browser you use?

We can look at your commitment and job performance by knowing this.

You see chrome and firefox users outperform all others and stay in their jobs 15% longer than all others - research shows.

WHY -

It's about how you got the browser. One accepted the default that came with the computer while those that got chrome and firefox went looking for better.

You have to be the kind of person that is always looking for how to make things better, easier.

Let me explain the creative process for most of us:

• THIS IS AWESOME
• THIS IS TRICKY
• THIS IS CRAP
• I AM CRAP
• THIS MIGHT BE OK
• THIS IS AWESOME

If we look at the creative process of the CREATIVE, it looks like this:

• THIS IS AWESOME
• THIS IS TRICKY
• THIS MIGHT BE OK
• THIS IS AWESOME

Change your thinking process, you either get it right or you learn.

The idea muscle: Practice the opposite of Deja Vu - its called "VU Jaaaaa DAY" - it simply means seeing something you have seen a thousand times before but this time seeing it with fresh eyes. 

It's a screenwriter that sends in a script for over a decade but cannot get the green light for her work so looks at the classics and every passed version the main character has been an evil queen - but Jennifer Lee questions if that makes sense - rewrites the first act to re-invent the villain to be a tortured hero and FROZEN becomes the biggest film of all time. 

So when you think you can’t do anything with this problem —LET IT GO!!!

How to increase the brain muscle:

Make lists: Thank you to @James Altucher of these options:

• IDEA SEX. Combine two ideas to come up with a better idea. Don’t forget that idea evolution works much faster than human evolution. You will ALWAYS come up with better ideas after generations of idea sex. This is the DNA of all idea generation.
• OLD TO NEW: 10 old ideas I can make new. 
• 10 ridiculous things I would invent.
• 10 books I can write 
• 10 business ideas for Google / Amazon / Twitter / you
• 10 people I can send ideas to
• 10 podcast ideas I can do. Or videos I can shoot. (“Lunch with Jason”, a video podcast where I just have lunch with people over Skype and we chat).
• 10 industries I can remove the middleman.
• 10 Things I Disagree With that everyone else assumes is a religion (college, home ownership, voting, doctors). Or, for any one of those ideas. 10 ideas why!
• 10 ways to make old posts of mine and make books out of them
• 10 ways I can surprise Sam. (Actually, more like 100 ways. That’s hard work!)
• 10 people, I want to be friends with and I figure out what the next steps are to contact them (David Beckham, I’m coming after you! Larry Page better watch out also.)
• 10 things I learned yesterday.
• 10 things I can do differently today. Right down my entire routine from beginning to end as detailed as possible and change one thing and make it better.
• 10 ways I can save time. For instance, don’t watch TV, drink, have stupid business calls, don’t play chess during the day, don’t have dinner (I definitely will not starve), don’t go into the city to meet one person for coffee, don’t waste time being angry at that person who did X, Y, and Z to you, and so on.
• 10 Things I Learned from X. Where X is someone I’ve spoken to recently or read a book by recently. 
• Random: 10 Things Women Totally Don’t Know About Men or Men about the woman. 
• A problem I have and ten ways I might try and solve it. 

Inside the box thinking -  Forget outside the box if you are in a business you need to understand the importance of INSIDE THE BOX THINKING

A great example would be the Apollo 13 mission when an explosion on board caused the spacecraft to lose oxygen, electricity, light, and water 200,000 miles from planet Earth. Unless the engineers at Houston could find a solution the astronauts could implement using the materials on board, the crew would die of asphyxiation before they made it back home. Talk about thinking inside the box. You’ve got to design a new product. You’ve got to build that product. Your raw materials consist of cardboard, plastic bags, duct tape, and other low-tech materials. And, hey, just for good measure, you’ve got less than 48 hours to do it all people are going to die.

Now that we understand creativity and thinking INSIDE THE BOX. 

Let's talk intrapreneurs.

What Is intrapreneurship?

An intrapreneurs is someone who displays the same characteristics as an Entrepreneur but remains with an organization as an employee.

The term “intrapreneurship” has become part of the business lexicon for the last thirty years. TIME and Newsweek articles about intrapreneurship were both published in 1985. But three years earlier, Howard Edward Haller’s completed formal academic case study and Master’s Thesis documented the terms “intrapreneurship” and “corporate entrepreneurship.” In June 1982, Haller successfully defended his Master’s Thesis which was an intrapreneurship case study. He wrote about the Super Mini Computer firm, PR1ME Computer Inc. (1977 to 1980). Haller’s Master’s Thesis research was published by the University in 1982 (Cited in Wikipedia.org’s History of Intrapreneurship.) Three years later the term “intrapreneuring” was popularized by management consultant Gifford Pinchot III in his book Intrapreneuring which was published in 1985.

Over the last three decades both large and small growing companies have experimented with allowing intrapreneurial activity within their organizations. Several successful intrapreneurial ventures come to mind including: APPLE’s “Macintosh;” Anaconda-Ericsson Inc.’s Anaconda-Ericsson Finance and Leasing Inc.; Corona Data Systems “OEM Private Label Division”; GOOGLE’s Gmail, Google News, Orkut, and Google AdSense; General Motors Saturn Division; PR1ME Computer’s “PR1ME Leasing;” 3M’s “Post-It Notes” as well as 3M multilayer optical film technology, 3M’s Vikuiti? and 3M Scotch? Pop-Up Tape.; SONY’s hugely successful “PlayStation;” and the WL Gore’s “Elixir Guitar Sting Line.”

The hospitality industry is ripe for intrapreneurs, for you to serve as a changemaker inside your current organization. Intrapreneurship involves passionate individuals who use their entrepreneurial skills with the support and resources of their employers to drive innovation, strengthen their workplace, or improve products or processes. Intrapreneurs come up with new ideas to challenge the current way of doing things.

“Intrapreneurship; The Secret Weapon For Success”

Hospitality and Intrapreneurship 

Hilton's Step Toward Intrapreneurship

One hospitality company leading the charge toward intrapreneurship is Hilton Hotels and Resorts, a global brand of full-service hotels and resorts. In the past decade, the company unveiled a concept called LightStay, a direct result of intrapreneurship inside of their organization. The program, which calculates a hotel's environmental impact, was developed by employees to track the brand's sustainability footprint. In its first year, the company was able to conserve energy and reduce its carbon output, while providing a substantial cost saving in utility usage.

How can other members of the hotel and lodging industry follow suit? Let's look into creating a culture of intrapreneurship that can support the innovation of new ideas and generate both cost savings to the organization and a better customer experience.

But where do you start: 

First, identify your intrapreneurs by finding those individuals who exhibit a diehard passion for the hospitality industry. 

These are your employees who truly love their jobs, ask questions, and display an innate curiosity about how things operate. 

These types of people also display a certain level of creativity, a desire to work hard and lead new initiatives. 

Example of Intra-preneurship: 

A classic case is that of the founders of Adobe, John Warnock and Charles Geschke. They both were employees of Xerox. As employees of Xerox, they were frustrated because their new product ideas were not encouraged. They quit Xerox in the early 1980s to begin their own business. Currently, Adobe has an annual turnover of over $3 billion.

Features of Intrapreneurship: Entrepreneurship involves innovation, the ability to take risk and creativity. An entrepreneur will be able to look at things in novel ways. He will have the capacity to take a calculated risk and to accept failure as a learning point. An intrapreneur thinks like an entrepreneur looking out for opportunities, which profit the organization. 

Intra-preneurship is a novel way of making organizations more profitable where imaginative employees entertain entrepreneurial thoughts. It is in the interest of an organization to encourage intrapreneurs. Intrapreneurship is a significant method for companies to reinvent themselves and improve performance.

Let us look at some examples.

3M

Idea: Sometimes, intrapreneurship happens by accident. Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M, was attempting to create an extremely strong adhesive to use in aerospace technology. Instead, he accidentally created a light adhesive that stuck to surfaces well but didn’t leave a nasty residue.

Benefit: Instead of throwing away this idea because it didn’t solve the problem at hand, he stuck with it until he found a use for it. After many years of persistence and spreading the word it finally clicked with someone else, Art Fry—another 3M scientist. He thought back to one of Silvers seminars and they began to develop a product together. Post-It notes were born and if you are the vast majority of desk workers you’re probably looking at a pad of them right now.

Sony

Idea: Ken Kutaragi, a relatively junior Sony Employee, spent hours tinkering with his daughters Nintendo to make it more powerful and user-friendly. What came from his work is one of the most recognizable brands in the world today, The Sony PlayStation.

Benefit: Many Sony bosses were outraged at his work, thinking that gaming is a complete waste of time. Luckily someone in a senior position saw the value in the product and thankfully so, because now Sony is one of the world leaders in the prosperous gaming industry. This shows that company leaders should always be open to innovation—no matter how farfetched and pointless it may seem.

Facebook

Idea: Originally called the “awesome button,” the Facebook Like button was first prototyped in one of Facebook’s infamous hack-a-thons.

Benefit: Facebook has never released statistics based on the like rate and certain time frames. But to all of us in the computer using world, it is pretty evident how the invention of the like button affects us on a daily basis. Companies like Facebook, who are constantly innovating and changing, are some of the most successful out there.

As you can see, great ideas and products and came result from letting your employees think experiment and play. How you do this is different for every company. An official “20% time” rule works at some organizations, while hack-a-thons are a better idea for others. What’s important is that you embrace the overall goal of engaging employees, and choose a system for applying that vision that fits with your company culture.

Examples of Intrapreneurs:

Facebook – 'Likes'

Liking a post or photograph on Facebook is as familiar to modern culture as reading a book was to a generation decades ago. But this wasn’t the brainchild of a late night idea generation session by Mark Zuckerberg and co; it came from their celebrated 'hack-a-thons', where coders and engineers are given a platform to create and develop ideas.

So next time you click the Like button on your Facebook page, remember its origins. It came about because the social network embraced a culture of intrapreneurship... and has been reaping the benefits ever since.

Characteristics of Intrapreneurship

Intre-preneurship allows the freedom of experimentation and growth in an organization. It fosters autonomy and independence when studying every aspect of an issue and attempting to find the best resolution. For example, intrapreneurship may involve recommending a more efficient workflow chart, increasing a company’s brand within a target group or implementing a way to benefit company culture.

A successful intre-preneur is comfortable being uncomfortable while testing his ideas until he achieves the desired results. An intrapreneur is able to interpret trends in the marketplace and visualize how the company needs to evolve to stay ahead of its competition. Therefore, intrapreneurs are part of the backbone of a company and the driving force mapping out the organization’s future.

Intre-preneurship and Millennials

A majority of millennials are embracing the intre-preneurial style of work. They desire meaning, creativity and autonomy when working. Millennials want their own projects to develop as they help their companies grow. By including employees from every age group when resolving issues, a variety of answers are proposed and resolutions determined in a more efficient manner, benefiting everyone in the organization.

Intre-preneurship in the workplace

Creating a culture of Intrepreneurship is the first step in developing and then harnessing this powerful tool for business success. Some things to do to create this environment are:

Trust your employees – If you want your employees to help build your business then you have to trust them with information about your company. This allows you to get appropriate feedback and ideas in order to overcome obstacles and challenges. 

Reward the right behaviors – You want your employees to take the initiative, to be proactive instead of reactive. As a result, you cannot micro-manage and you should get out of their way so that they can do their job. Those who successfully innovate and solve problems that add value to the business should be rewarded. This reinforces not only their responsibility in the process but also your trust in them. 

Fix the issues today – When issues surface do not put them off. The old adage “If I ignore it then it will go away” means literally that if you ignore your issues your business will go away. The longer these issues remain the more disruption they cause to your business and the more disruption and stress your employees feel. Fixing things as they become known reinforces trust and removes unnecessary stress from your business. 

Exploit good competitive spirit – Everybody wants to excel. While teams win together, intre-preneurs often provide individual wins. Let us be honest, everyone likes to win and as a result, he or she wants something to win for. Healthy competition that capitalizes on the talents of your employees while keeping them together is a great way to develop your Intre-preneurial spirit. However, it is important that everyone who contributes understands their parts were also important. 

Developing this culture, and standing by it, is critical to entrepreneurial success. In fact, this Intrepreneurship could even lead to an expansion of the business that allows these intrepreneurs to potentially run their own business or even a part of yours. 

When developing and supporting your intre-preneurs you have to remember a couple of points: 

Help them grow – Growth is important to Intre-preneurs. Not only do they want to increase their skills and experience, they want to learn new things. Showing them what you know, giving them the opportunity for educational and personal development is critical to fostering a strong environment for Intre-preneurship. A great example of this is the creation of Velcro. In 1948, George de Mestral went hiking in the woods with his dog. Arriving back at his home, he saw the burrs that clung his dog and to his clothes. Looking at a burr under a microscope he saw that they were covered in tiny hooks, which allowed them to grab onto clothes and fur that brushed in passing. After more than eight years of research and work, he created Velcro. 

Companies and business leaders who understand the tremendous value of Intra-preneurship will be the business stars of the future. Tapping into this incredibly powerful and profit-making concept will help your business on its journey to success and sustainable growth and profitability. 

Hope this helps you as a company, helps you as an individual and helps you as an entrepreneur or intrepreneur.

Cheap land and labor are no longer what is being sold. Rather it is knowledge workers and a culture of innovation and creativity. This model also acknowledges that few places possess enough assets on their own to compete for and support new, existing, and emerging businesses. It’s about regions, networks, clusters, and innovation. It is about Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship!