Internalising entrepreneurship: own your own innovations

I cannot stress enough the importance of building an entrepreneurial culture within organisations. Taking the idea and principles of entrepreneurship and having them pervade the entire company – or creating a so-called ‘intrapreneurial’ culture – cultivates competitive and forward-thinking mindsets that lead to transformative breakthroughs for any sized company. Developing intrapreneurship within your business can spark ideas that will carry your company to great heights, creating space between you and your rivals. Constantly challenging your employees also generates engagement and retention of great staff. But how can organisations achieve ‘intrapreneurial’ attitudes in the workplace? Let me provide some clarity.

Why do we need intrapreneurship?

The term ‘intrapreneurship’ was coined by management consultant Gifford Pinchot III in the 1970s, and was popularised by academic researcher Howard Edward Haller and disseminated by Steve Jobs. In essence, it encompasses entrepreneurship from inside a company. If you want your business to stand head and shoulders above the rest, intrapreneurship is an absolute requirement. It forges the future of the company and, because ideas come from minds throughout the company, the river never runs dry.

Employee morale is critical to any thriving company, and an atmosphere of intrapreneurship is conducive to a sense of belonging, achievement and, ultimately, a positive working attitude. This is where great ideas will rise and thrive.

A recent study by Ernst & Young has revealed that over 80% of executives think that innovation within the organisation is difficult, but crucial to the company’s success. An institutional approach to intrapreneurship – with innovation at the heart of company operations – can drive growth in new markets.

A state of mind

Intrapreneurship facilitates a transition to an entrepreneurial frame of mind. For example, at Gozoop, accounts are split into individual verticals, like a company’s strategic business units (SBUs). Similarly to SBUs, these verticals are separate entities governed completely by themselves: those responsible for these SBUs are responsible for everything, from growth strategy and new business, to hires and accountability. The company has its own internal programme called GZ Sparks – a platform for employees with entrepreneurial potential to present their ideas – whether for a product, process, or service. Guidance and support is provided to enable their visions to become a reality. Gozoop also began their Emerging Leaders Program at the beginning of this year, customised to individual employee’s strengths and weaknesses.

The benefits of an intrapreneurial culture extend further than simply generating new ideas. For example, the potential to explore and experiment in new markets before making a commitment, and drawing in fresh energy to the working culture are big advantages. For MNCs, the flexibility and agility usually associated with start-ups can be applied to these often more complex organisations using intrapreneurship, allowing them to change direction easily and embrace new things.

Millennials and retention

There’s no question that millennials are altering the way we regard work. Making up the majority of the American workforce, this generation are steering away from the traditional hierarchical work models, instead seeking jobs which provide them with a sense of purpose, no matter how many jobs they have to hop to get there. How different is this to the preceding generation, whose core career goal was to climb the ladder in the company they started out with?

Intrapreneurship can help employers tackle this. Many millennials, forging their careers in financially turbulent times, are somewhat averse to taking risks in starting their own businesses, for example. By offering opportunities within the company for millennials to flex their creative muscles and freely explore their own ideas, employers can drive up retention and engagement while benefiting from the resultant intrapreneurial ideas.

From an early age, I had set my entrepreneurial goals high, and know what it’s like to feel the drive to discover your own capabilities. Helping your employees realise theirs will result in serious intrapreneurial success.

Case examples: learning from the global giants

Examples of successful intrapreneurship come right from the heart of some of the largest global companies – here are some examples where ideas planted from within the offices have sprouted into hugely successful ventures:

• BT – this company has diversified from purely a telephone company to a digital media business, through new intrapreneurial ideas, such as BT Vision and BT Sport.
• Samsung – having worked directly with enterprise customers to help it align its strategy with innovation.
• Google – intrapreneurial projects from Google have given rise to Gmail, AdSense and Google News; some of its most successful ventures.
• Facebook – the social media giant’s iconic ‘like’ button feature begun as an intrapreneurial idea.
• Amazon – from the beginning, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos laid out concrete expectations of continuous innovation and intrapreneurship, which could be maintained through the start-up phase and into the future. By setting out clear leadership values, employees were provided with a framework with which to contribute to the company’s entrepreneurial orientation.

Having coached people from a number of giant organisations, like Tesco and Microsoft, take it from me (and those companies who have achieved intrapreneurial success), once this type of entrepreneurial behaviour is embedded in the company’s ethos, business growth and evolution will follow.

An innovative approach to the future

The majority of organisations fail to achieve innovation because they use analogical reasoning – the belief that something will work in the future because it previously succeeded – whereas a principle reasoning approach examines the truth of today’s situation and expands upon those foundations. Contrary to expectations, mapping out the project before starting out doesn’t work in an intrapreneurial framework, according to Claudio Vandi, Innovation Programs Director for Numa, a global start-up incubator and accelerator headquartered in Paris. He believes that “it’s critical to have a platform/framework to support intrapreneurial development”, and “it’s everyone’s business within a company to innovate”.

As a mentor at the Harbour Club, my experience helping entrepreneurs could enable you and your company to benefit from an intrapreneurial culture change. Change won’t happen overnight, but believe me when I say that the benefits will continue to pay off well into the future.