Supporting and Enabling Intrapreneurship

In a previous post, we emphasized the importance of supporting creativity in the Optometry practice and avoid punishing risk-takers if they fail to implement their ideas. In their effort and search to innovate companies looked outside the organization to acquire other companies with innovative ideas for the purpose of growth and market share. In-house innovation is one of the most challenging tasks that a company can successfully perform and sustain. When we talk about supporting and enabling Intrapreneurship, managers often think that that is a ready solution to transform staff and employees into intrapreneurs. However, the process is much more complex, but rather than focusing on changing employees it consists of identifying potential intrapreneurs.

A Deloitte Digital paper provided five insights on how to start thinking about intrapreneurship in organizations. The first insight describes intrapreneurship as being a bottom-up approach and people-centric to developing innovations in-house. The second insight emphasizes that intrapreneurship pays off many times over the in terms of company growth, competitive advantage and cost savings, increased skills and capabilities, and accelerated product and service launching. The third insight pertains to finding, identifying, recognizing, and supporting intrapreneurs within the company rather than creating them. The fourth insight explains how intrapreneurs are driven by intrinsic motivation to come up with ideas, plan, and effectively achieve. That intrinsic motivation is not found in the average employee. The fifth insight recognizes that intrapreneurs being different than average employees require the company to adopt a specific management approach. It is about creating an environment that:

Supports the entrepreneurial behavior of employees, with an open culture in which no one is afraid to share his idea;

Offers autonomy encouraging employees to create new independent solutions to challenges, and problems;

Reduces control mechanism and bureaucracy to create the opportunity for new processes that make good business sense;

Acknowledges ideas and establishes a good reward system, while tolerating and not stigmatizing people whose ideas failed;

Provides resources and time to employees to come up with ideas and be able to validate their viability;

Encourages risk-taking but also shows limits defined by the corporate boundaries;

Fosters an open exchange of ideas and effective communication within the company and externally with other experts;

Establishes a decentralized structure as well as collaboration and cross-disciplinary projects to improve problem-solving quality and speed through combined experiences.