Recent times have driven home that to survive in today’s disruptive business environment, organisations need to continuously review, re-engineer and reinvent their processes, practices and cultures. In this context, they would be well advised to borrow from the skillset of entrepreneurs to develop an intrapreneurial culture.
We’re all familiar with the concept of the entrepreneur – a person with vision, able to generate innovative ideas and develop viable business opportunities by running their own business, undertaking all the risks faced within volatile markets.
Intrapreneurs can play a critical role in developing innovative business models when market trends shift
Critical role
Intrapreneurs are employees who adopt some of the skills and behaviours of entrepreneurs and apply them inside organisations where there is more safety, less market vulnerability and less direct exposure to business-based risks. They can play a critical role in developing innovative business models when market trends shift.
A Deloitte guide to accelerating innovation within organisations highlighted that intrapreneurial cultures translate directly into ‘tangible business benefits, including cutting time to market for new products and services, driving both top-line growth and cost savings, and improving business processes’.
The approach is gaining traction. In Cape Town, South Africa, the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation (AGOF) has established an entrepreneur development programme that operates across Southern Africa. Currently an estimated 60% of its graduates become intrapreneurs within organisations.
From my experience and a series of client interviews with South African finance professionals, a number of conclusions on how to promote an intrapreneurial culture can be drawn.
Establish buy-in
Key to a productive intrapreneurial culture is buy-in from the different leadership levels within the organisation. Intrapreneurship cannot be cascaded within the culture if ‘autocratic’ models of management are prevalent. The importance of leaders being ‘facilitators’ of a process as opposed to ‘managers’ must be emphasised.
From the outset, the concept of intrapreneurship must be clearly defined and embedded within the organisation’s culture. It must align to its core values, and systems of practice must exist.
To achieve this, leaders must create platforms for ongoing dialogue with their direct reports and co-create an environment that effectively identifies and facilitates intrapreneurial skills and behaviours. In this scenario, critical thinking, disruptive innovation and opportunity recognition are skills that will grow in prominence in the years ahead.
Managers need to celebrate and incentivise innovation and problem-solving
Further down the hierarchy, managers need to give their staff freedom and space to take more risks, within the constraints of financial regulatory requirements.
An organisational culture that facilitates ongoing innovation and support for employees who foster new ways of growth should provide this opportunity. Intrapreneurial discussion forums and idea generation slots can be included in weekly or monthly meetings. Managers need to celebrate and incentivise behaviours that focus on innovation and problem-solving, and to integrate these behaviours into existing key performance indicators and balanced scorecards. Translating the behaviours into quantifiable outputs can further facilitate the practice.
Prioritise innovation
Another vital element is that leaders need to filter and develop intrapreneurial initiatives throughout the organisation. Our interviews reinforced the need to prioritise innovation as a catalyst for post-pandemic growth. Corporate intrapreneurship programmes demonstrate investment in people, thereby increasing employee retention.
Interviewees identified the following interventions as value-adding in building an intrapreneurship culture:
- corporate orientation programmes, leadership development/intrapreneur programmes and skills workshops
- processes to identify and develop change agents for intrapreneurship
- coaching and mentoring platforms (by other intrapreneurs), role or job shadowing opportunities
- networking/intrapreneur forums, sharing of intrapreneurial success stories
- rotational projects/assignments
- recognition and compensation that promotes intrapreneurial behaviours.
One interviewee stressed the important role of leadership in celebrating and benchmarking intrapreneurial wins and providing opportunities for successful intrapreneurs to share how they achieved them.
Ericsson's way
IT specialist Ericsson operates an internal accelerator, Ericsson ONE, to promote intrapreneurship and new thinking. Employees with new business ideas are supported to drive their own projects and build successful ventures outside the company’s core business.
Intrapreneurs are provided with everything they need to launch a new venture and scale it quickly, including dedicated resources, training, funding and access to potential customers.
By giving its people this opportunity, Ericsson aims to support employees on their innovation journeys, while developing new products that its own customers will benefit from.
Intrapreneur incubators
Finally, organisations should consider developing their own internal intrapreneur incubator to harness ideas and sustain their talent (see box). These hubs must integrate with day-to-day challenges and bottlenecks.
Organisations that failed to promote intrapreneurial behaviours during the pandemic had to retrench, downsize or close
This will serve as a platform for immersion learning, whereby innovative solutions for complex business problems are moved forward. Employees and creative thinkers can collaborate and present their ideas to other leaders in the form of success stories, case studies and potential opportunities.
‘Driving improvement and efficiencies ensures you stay relevant within your industry and with your client’s changing needs,’ one interviewee told us. ‘It is an opportunity to push the boundaries.’
As the pandemic experience showed, those companies that were agile and promoted intrapreneurial thinking adapted their business models and ways of working to survive. Organisations that failed to promote such behaviours had to retrench, downsize or close their businesses.
In the future world of work, intrapreneurial mindsets, cultures and practices will be prerequisites for organisational growth, adaption and sustainability. The concept will not only be part of the human capital strategy, but integral to a company’s systems, processes, strategy and overall business success.
