From Marika and Adrian and Coca Cola to Mark at Barclays and Graham at GSK, from the Lab a very strong trend emerged - that intrapreneurs are key to creating an enabling environment.
Example - David Grayson spoke of the the importance of a god-parent' that protects you when you need to and promotes you when the time is right - but our intrapreneurs at GSK and Coca Cola only found a 'god-parent once they stepped up and did something - then their 'god-parents-to-be' spotted them and stepped up too.
So undoubtedly, the environment of all of our intrapreneurs had common themes - but the Lab showed so many of these factors arose out of the intentionality and first steps taken by the individual.
The Lab showed - don't wait for the enabling environment. Get started and, if the idea is strong, the environment will orientate itself accordingly.
My suggestion would be to find your intrapreneurs and get them together. Ask what they need and co-create support mechanisms to support them.
Another useful technique is to tell stories about intrapreneurship elsewhere - sharing these stories can help people to identify as an intrapreneur. (See leagueofintrapreneurs.com for some useful stories as well as the field guide on social intrapreneurship from SustainAbility.)
Finally, we are seeing that employee volunteer programs - like GSK's pulse programme - are massive catalysts for intrapreneurship. People get exposure to new issues and new environments and come back to their day job itching to make a difference. Working with these types of teams could be a great way to catalyze and support intrapreneurship.
I would say that it starts actually with a culture if innovation within the organisation (not just on social intrapreneurship projects). One of the ways I have seen this made possible through the creation of structures that encourage very open dialogue about the external environment in which the organisation is operating. (Like cross function and cross geography advisory forums/think tanks that meet once or twice a year and are mandated to feed back into the strategy of the business). Mostly though the enabling environment is created by key individuals rather than processes so building a clear internal stakeholder management plan is vital to develop broader support for your ideas.
Things that inhibit are also mostly just the business context especially when the economic context is tough. Another aspect is that you are always competing with other potential initiatives for limited resources and so have to put forward stronger, well articulated arguments to get the necessary attention. Timing is everything though.
"At LinkedIn, employees can come up with a new idea once each quarter, put a team together and pitch their idea to the executive team. If their idea is approved, they are able to spend up to three months time dedicated to turning the idea into something that benefits the company. At DreamWorks, they take this a step further by actually teaching their employees how to formulate their pitch and then allowing them to practice in front of executives, something hundreds have already taken advantage of. At Facebook, and many startups, they have hackathons where they encourage engineering teams to collaborate on software projects. The “Like button”, one of the most important innovations in the company’s history, was the product of a hackathon." -- Dan Schawbel, "Why Companies Want You to Become an Intrapreneur"
An easy way to promote intrapreneurship is to make it set part of everyone's work day or work week; setting aside a hour a week or so just to take a step back and come up with ideas to streamline your particular workflow or get together with colleagues over lunch to have bluesky ideating sessions.
I think intrapreneurship is always possible, but I think whether or not your idea will sit comfortably inside your company is another question. We learned from Amit Mehra at Reuters Market Light that sometimes you should think about spinning out your idea if it gets too difficult to push from within.
Hi Mette - looks like you've already cracked how the e-discussion works!
In any company you'll find a whole host of 'enablers' and 'disablers' - things that make social innovation possible and other things that create barriers - such as competing priorities, culture, politics, standardised investment criteria or lack of available time and resources . All intrapreneurs will face many of these challenges at various stages and will need to draw on all their knowledge of the organisation to help push through - in addition to requiring a lot of personal resilience.
In Barclays we launched our Social Innovation Facility last year to directly support intrapreneurs within the organisation and help overcome some of these barriers or 'disablers'. The Social Innovation Facility has its own project assessment criteria, dedicated funding and resources and a governing council made up of senior leaders from across the business who can help provide sponsorship and 'air cover' for teams working on business propositions addressing social challenges. We've got some great projects in the pipleline and its a fantastic way to find and support passionate social intrapreneurs.
Agree with lots of the comments above....not waiting for the enabling environment, taking that first step etc.
Your last point Maggie around how ideas are generated in the first place is a good one. I'm convinced that corporates need to find opportunities to create "crucible" experiences for their latent intrapreneurs such as the experience Graham Simpson of GSK had when on a Pulse assignment. It's something of a living laboratory - taking employees out of their normal cocoons of business life and exposing them to a different context. that's where innovation comes from. After all, if you want employees to think out of the box, they first have to live out of the box!
I would agree here. Acumen is currently partnering with Dow Chemical as part of their Dow Sustainability Corps. Sending top-quality talent to help co-create solutions to solve critical business challenges with our social enterprises. We see a lot of potential in both helping these enterprises scale but also facilitating this learning piece for corporate employees to develop leadership skills and learn about how to engage low-income markets.
Great, thank you, Maggie, I will have a look! I wrote an article on the topic back in 2009 for California Management Review (http://hbr.org/product/bottom-of-the-pyramid-organizational-barriers-to-i/an/CMR436-HCB-ENG) based on a case study of internal organisational barriers associated with implementing a BoP project in a large Danish-based multinational. We are planning a follow-up article in the new year as the company has since then managed to launched a successful BoP initiative - hopefully there will be some good learnings there for other companies as well but in the meantime it is great to see how much attention has been awarded to this topic since I began my original study back in 2007 (back then the discussion was mostly about external barriers...)
A more low tech version of this is simply an idea log. I have worked in an organization where employees were asked to hold onto their good ideas - and then gave them a structure to develop these into more robust possibilities. These were later voted on by staff.
A social intrapreneur armed with a great idea that is well articulated can change the context and can play a role in creating an enabling environment for others. The pioneer social intrapreneurs will create space and can change organisational mindsets.
Survival would be one critical measure of success! Being able to survive and ideally thrive within a corporate immune system which seeks to suppress disruptive change
I think Adrian's point is a great one. There are different levels of impact for intrapreneurs.
Direct impact - social, environmental and financial (brand, income, customer retention, etc. etc.)
Indirect - influencing mindsets and behaviors both inside and outside the organization. Though, I've seen less of this than I would have hoped and we see that intrapreneurs often leave because not enough of the shift is happening.
So perhaps a follow on question - what can we do to help intrapreneurs affect the behavior and mindsets of others??
Adrian - one thing we heard at the Intrapreneur Lab was that normal business metrics can stifle the intrapreneur - who might either be operating on a longer business timeframe, or with a hybrid of business and social impact metrics. What advice do you have for others around navigating the traditional metrics, and for truly measuring your own success as an intrapreneur?