Thousands of articles get published on entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship every week, but little gets written about intrapreneurs. Every company starts with one or two entrepreneurs who had a dream of bringing a product or innovation to market. But a corporation’s continued growth and relevancy will require many more people who are equally entrepreneurial, talented, and capable as the few founders. These are the intrapreneurs, and your company needs many to ensure it can outcompete its competition.

If you want to launch more innovation to the markets and remain relevant, you will need to identify, develop, and empower your intrapreneurs.

Richard Branson, the infamous entrepreneur himself, says that intrapreneurship is a title “that hasn’t gotten nearly the amount of attention it deserves. He further claims that intrapreneur is an entrepreneur’s little brother. 

Smart organizations know this already and make sure that they create an environment where intrapreneurship is embraced, valued, and flourished. We all have heard about companies like 3M, or Google who became poster children of intrapreneurship (although Google does not offer 20% time to work on passion projects anymore.)

The story of Spencer Silver, who was a chemist at Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (or 3M as most know it) and specialized in adhesives, has become a corporate fairy tale. 3M credits him as the inventor of the glue that helped Art Fry develop the Post-It™. The story has been widely covered by many and inspires many intrapreneurs today to continue their work.

In Employees and Entrepreneurship, author Ivan Pongracic quotes 3M’s chairman, Lew Lehr.

“For many years, the corporate structure [at 3M] has been designed specifically to encourage young entrepreneurs to take an idea and run with it. If they succeed, they can and do find themselves running their own business under the 3M umbrella. The entrepreneurial approach is not a sideline at 3M. It is the heart of our design for growth.”

Although intrapreneurship is not a new concept, it is still not treated as a core capability by many organizations today. One of the many sins that businesses commit is to stifle the creativity of their intrapreneurs. 

Who is an intrapreneur?

Let’s first start with defining the intrapreneur. The term, intrapreneur, was coined in 1978 by Gifford Pinchot who said intrapreneurs are “the dreamers who do.” They are self-motivated, action-oriented employees who take the initiative to pursue innovative offerings. They fight against the corporate immune system to get their innovation to the market, or create a new business or venture. They are equally driven, have grit and perseverance as an entrepreuneur.

MIT Sloan professor Michael Cusumano says that “[intrapreneurs] are not building something entirely from scratch, nor are they risking their own money… They’re creating something that hasn’t been done before or done quite the same way.” 

Many intrapreneurs don’t necessarily have to come up with an innovative idea themselves, although it’s possible. An intrapreneur’s role is to bring an innovative product to the market and creating a business around it. Therefore, many intrapreneurs are primarily business leaders and not always innovators.

What Is Intrapreneurship?

Intrapreneurship is the system that allows people for behaving like an entrepreneur while working in a large organization. Intrapreneurs are employees of a company and are supported to create new products, services, and offerings. 

The term intrapreneurship also refers to the system that allows employees to act like entrepreneurs with that organization.  

Examples of intrapreneurship?

One of the well-known examples of intrapreneurship is Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works group. This group was first brought together to build the P-80 fighter jet. Kelly Johnson, who became famous for Kelly’s 14 rules of intrapreneurship, was a director of this group. 

Facebook Likes is a great example of intrapreneurship. Liking a post or photograph has become why people visit facebook or other social sharing apps. Yet, Facebook Likes wasn’t invented by Mark Zuckerberg. The ideas came from one of their celebrated ‘hack-a-thons.’ It came about because the Facebook embraced a culture of intrapreneurship and has been reaping the benefits.

One of the most famous intrapreneurship cultures can be found at 3M. The company embraced intrapreneurship as a core competency. 3M provides freedom to employees to create their projects, and in many cases, fund these projects. 

Similar to 3M, Google used to embrace intrapreneurship by offering their workforce one day a week. They reportedly don’t do that anymore. But this helped develop a product that later became Gmail. Today, Gmail remains one of the most widely used email platforms on the web, driving critical traffic to Google’s products. And all thanks to the brainchild of one intrapreneur.

How can organizations foster intrapreneurship?

Developing an intrapreneurial culture is a long-term commitment. An organization should invest significant resources for improving processes, culture, and its workforce to take risks. 

1. Offer creative freedom

Creative freedom and time to work on personal projects is a critical factor that made companies like 3M more successful than their peers. Why not adopt that approach. 

According to Barry Schwartz, a social psychologist at Swarthmore College and the author of Why We Work, says that it’s important for companies to give “…employees more of a say in how they do their jobs” and “making sure we offer them opportunities to learn and grow.” Combine that with purpose, and you can create an army of intrapreneurs willing to commit their personal time advancing your corporation’s innovation agenda.

2. Offer good incentives

If intrapreneurs are your growth engine, you should consider incentivizing them well. Entrepreneurs risk a lot to build a company, and they’re rewarded for it as founders and shareholders. 

Some intrapreneurs might build hundreds of millions, or billion-dollar businesses for a company, but most aren’t rewarded proportionally. The bonuses they get are usually nowhere near the value they create for their employers. 

Why can’t organizations create better incentives for intrapreneurs? 

I once took a job where I was responsible for commercializing an exciting innovation. The first week on the job, I received a phone call from someone in the company I had never met. He quickly congratulated me for my new job and added that there had been three others before me who didn’t succeed in launching this offering. He said that none of them were with the company anymore. 

I thanked the man and focused on doing what I knew best: do everything I can do to deliver this offering to the marketplace. After two years and many late nights, and weekends we made our first 7 figure sale with great success. The company never acknowledged this other than giving me a nice bonus that was primarily linked to company performance as well as my performance. 

I often wondered what would have happened if I just acted like others, and didn’t put the extra effort. Would I not receive a similar bonus? I probably would have. 

Regardless to say, I decided to leave that organization and never looked back.

Most of an organization’s employees are not intrapreneurs. So why not go the extra mile and reward them? Everyone would be much better off in the long run. 

3. Celebrate failures

I once worked with an organization where failure was perceived to be an absolute no-no. Employees in this organization were so afraid of making an error they would draft plans with huge buffers of margin. This resulted in a culture that took absolutely no risk to doing anything new.

Bill Gates once said, “It is fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.” 

Thomas Edison is one of the most celebrated inventors and businessmen who didn’t shy away from failure. 

“Isn’t it a shame that with the tremendous amount of work you have done, you haven’t been able to get any results?” Walter Mallory asked Thomas Edison when he learned that after more than 9,000 experiments, Thomas Edison has still not had any success developing a new type of battery storage unit. 

“Results! Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work!” Thomas told his friend.

I would venture out and say, let’s celebrate failures. Because if you do, you will create a culture that is open to engaging in a dialogue and talk about what didn’t work. Your teams will learn what doesn’t work, and at some point, one person will go out and try a solution that might work.

Conclusion

Intrapreneurship is as necessary for your company’s future as fuel is for your car. You don’t fuel it; your organization won’t continue moving forward. 

Darwin said it’s not the strongest that survives, it’s not the most intelligent that survives, it’s the one that adapts to change that survives. Organizations that nurture intrapreneurship are thinking organizations. They attract better talent and have a higher likelihood for future relevance.

Read more on how to create innovative organizations here and here.