Cost benefits of implementing an intrapreneurship programme
Increased and cost-effective R&D
Increased and cost-effective R&D
Increased and cost-effective R&D
Intrapreneurs are instinctively minded to be on the lookout for innovations. If a company’s culture supports this, then the frequency and success of new product or service development will increase.
Gaining a competitive edge
Increased and cost-effective R&D
Increased and cost-effective R&D
A culture that is instinctively innovative means less money spent on external research and development. It should also form part of the way a company can attract new clients to its portfolio, reducing cost of sales.
Reducing time-to-market
Increased and cost-effective R&D
Reducing time-to-market
With fewer cogs in the system, and with a greater sense of ownership within the company, a new product or service idea will get to market more quickly, thus reducing the time taken to achieve an ROI.
Developing talent in-house
Developing talent in-house
Developing talent in-house
The obvious benefit of this is less money being spent with recruitment agencies, and less staff turnover.
Improving company culture
Developing talent in-house
Developing talent in-house
Being an attractive and fostering company will mean lower staff turnover. Having team players that are content at work reduces the number of conflicts and HR issues, which are all essentially non value-add.
How does intrapreneurship differ from entrepreneurship?
Intrapreneurship considers the entire culture of an organisation, rather than one individual’s approach. An Intrapreneurial culture is a fecund place that should encourage entrepreneurs.
Think of Intrapreneurship as being a state of mind, and entrepreneurship being the ability to come up with revolutionary new ideas. In this respect, an entrepreneur could develop out of an intrapreneurial culture. If an entrepreneur is to also be a successful intrapreneur, they will exhibit behaviours such as free-thinking, resilience and being relationship-building.
What are the barriers to intrapreneurship?
The main barrier to intrapreneurship is that it has not been fully adopted or accepted right across the organisation. Intrapreneurs must be wholly empowered and be free to fail. Any feeling that this is not the case will simply stunt their work and growth. So, it is important that managers are tolerant and focussed on the bigger picture.
Another is that the communication has not been effective. As Intrapreneurship naturally encourages free-thinking and counter-intuitive behaviours, this can manifest itself in ways that might look odd to onlookers. This should not be the case if communication has happened effectively, and all stakeholders are fully bought-in.
Good examples of intrapreneurial organisations
Facebook – 'Likes'
Liking a post or photograph on Facebook is familiar to modern culture 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.
Sony – Playstation
Not many people realise, but the original Sony Playstation was actually a prototype based on the original Nintendo console. Who created it? An 'intrapreneur' working for Sony as a junior member of staff.
Ken Kutaragi had been playing around with his daughter’s Nintendo in an attempt to make it more powerful and deliver her a better gaming experience, in doing so he came to the conclusion that an independent soundcard would improve the quality of game that could be produced.
When he presented this to his bosses at Sony, they did not agree and appeared to ignore his ideas. A while later the CEO of the company recognised the value in joining the gaming industry. This CEO allowed Kutaragi to keep his job at Sony while working on the prototype alongside Nintendo’s development team. Amaxingly, Nintendo rejected what would become known as the Playstation... and Sony jumped at the chance. The rest, as they say, is history.
Google is a company that embraces intrapreneurship by offering their workforce a 20 per cent timeframe on developing personal projects relating to the business. One of their employees, Paul Buchheit created a project that was the initial template for Gmail, particularly the search function (the first of its kind from email service providers) and increased storage capacity.
Today, Gmail remains one of the most widely-used email platforms on the web; driving key traffic to Google’s products. And all thanks to the brainchild of one of their employees.
3M – The Post-It Note
The Post-it Note we have all come to love or hate dependent on your view point was created in an act of early intrapreneurship in 1980.
3M were one of the first multi-national corporations to recognise the creativity contained within their workforce, and allowed them to spend up to 15 per cent of their work time developing new projects. One of their scientists Spencer Silver developed an adhesive that wasn’t complete rock solid – giving it a more user friendly stickiness.
Spencer struggled to find an end use for it, until Art Frey, a colleague at 3M, recognised that the sticky solution could solve an everyday problem he was experiencing: his bookmarks falling out of his reading book.
The Post-it Note was born, and after an intense marketing campaign became a favourite of offices and stationers across the globe.
Steve Jobs - Apple
When Steve Jobs and his co-workers separated themselves from the fold in 1985 to concentrate on developing the Apple Macintosh, they had an Intrapreneurial approach. They operated free of the normal constraints of a business, such as structure and hierarchy. They were not governed by the same rules as other employees. The results of this approach were radical product and service innovations that helped to shape the company we see today.
Montessori Education
The Montessori Method of Education, where students learn concepts from working with materials rather than by direct instruction? In these schools, teachers are highly skilled in observing innate talents and abilities…just like an Intrapreneurial coach would.
Alchemist Intrapreneurship Programmes
Introduction to Intrapreneurship
If you are looking to introduce intrapreneurship into your organisation, we can deliver a tailored intrapreneurship course to your employees that will support them to gain an understanding of intrapreneurship and how it can support them in their roles taking account of the wider organisational context.
Intrapreneurship Consultancy
We can support you to transform the culture of your organisation using techniques such as intrapreneurial leadership and viral change, building the capacity for transformational leadership within the organisation.
Alchemist Apprenticeships
Here at Alchemist we incorporate a module on intrapreneurship into our Level 3 Team Leader/Supervisor and our Level 5 Operational/Departmental Manager apprenticeship standard programmes as an added value module. This has been positively received by the organisations we currently work with.
Get in touch to find out more.