Corporate intrapreneurship and innovation must focus on corporate acceleration and incubation, and how to best support intrapreneurs in the process of defining and developing their ideas into products or services for their company.
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it. 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.” —Steve Jobs
Innovation must be accepted as a regular business of the company, just like other business functions such as HR, marketing, operations, sales, and finance. As any business can’t survive without marketing, advertising or sales, the same is true of innovation today. If companies want to be able to consistently innovate, they need dedicated innovation team of experts, skilled professionals to carry out the functions of invention, development, incubation, acceleration, and scaling.
Innovation section can’t be siloed off from the rest of the business. Company incubators and innovation labs must be an open ecosystem connected with the rest of the organization to achieve success. Game-changing innovations require a holistic approach throughout the organization.
Research shows that, in order to develop, incubate, and scale disruptive innovation, organizations need an ecosystem where:
• Leadership and an innovation culture are fully committed
• Intrapreneurship is celebrated
• Equal opportunities are given to everyone
• People are empowered
• Risks and failures are acknowledged
• Transparency and Accountability is fixed
• Resources are available
• A well defined process that can deliver on a clearly envisioned mandate and scope for breakthrough innovation
• Rewards and recognition for the teams behind the innovation
• Collaboration, competition, coordination and cooperation
• Skills and talent that are differentiated from traditional Research and Development or new product development roles.
Innovation is a discipline, and it requires the help of trainer for intrapreneur to become innovators.
According to a research the role of training in the intrapreneurship programs is very significant. Research shows that trainers serve not only as an experienced guide, helping intrapreneurs to incorporate new ways of working, but also as an important connection to a network of talented, skilled, experienced professionals both inside and outside the organisation.
Actually the intrapreneur comes up with an idea and trainers have to work on two main segments:
One part is turning the idea into a product service and for this they will need resources and guiding principles from their coach. Resources can be UX UI designers, technical team, developer, product marketing, business developer; the role of the intrapreneur is to approach these resources, and fascinate some of them to work on their different innovation project.
The second and most important part is helping the intrapreneur to get support to commercialize his project to the end customers. From the beginning the intrapreneur has to have a business leadership to sponsor his project. Collaboration between different business department, networking with inside and outside associates or vendors, dedicated teams, sales and marketing teams need to bring together to find out the ways to commercialize the project.
Stages of the Corporate Intrapreneurship Process
1. Inviting the Idea: Open invitation to submit their innovative ideas to the people in the company, short listing and filter out the ones with most problematic areas and future challenges.
2. Bootcamp: The selected ideas are worked out in the boot camp to research and study various impacts and present to the leadership. This process usually takes two to five weeks of time period.
3. Incubation: The finally selected 2-3 ideas go to the incubation stage to be developed and prepared to introduce to the market. It might take 1-2 years.
Trainer brings innovation skills, technology know-how, on ground experience, networking with subject expertise, exposure to failures and roadblocks to the intrapreneurs. Without trainers, the results of such initiative cannot bring the desired success. Trainers are ready to roll up their sleeves and work with intrapreneurs at any stage of the idea.
• Coaching helps in the idea validation, market potential, tech viability.
• Coaching provides the necessary methodologies.
• Coaching helps in preparing the PoC and MVP. MVP is quite crucial to decide as the overenthusiastic intrapreneur usually wants the product to be launched with all the features, but the trainer helps in filtering out the minimum viable features to test the revenue streams and customer experience.
• Trainers help in segregating the target market and customers
• Trainers bring the best talent and skills on board to support the ideas and prepare the product.
• Trainers help in preparing the business plan, road map for the revenues and evolution of the product.
• Trainers help in necessary actions in case of something goes wrong or unexpected.
• Trainers conduct the workshops to involve the intrapreneurs in having better perspective of their ideas, exchanging views and feedback on the work being done and sharing their experiences.
In summary, it’s the passion, persistence, perseverance of the people that can help the company in innovation. People are the most important factor in the transformation, innovation and disruption of the industry.
We at Transform Partner, have exclusive customized plans for the training and workshops for the corporate intrapreneurs. Get in touch ( raj (at) transformpartner (dot) com) to help you in establishing the innovation setups and intrapreneurship ecosystem in your organisation.