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It is of great importance for today’s institutions and organizations to adopt an innovative approach and nurture the entrepreneurial spirit of their employees to gain competitive advantage over their competitors and achieve sustainable growth. Rapidly changing market dynamics, differentiation in customer expectations and technological advances require companies to be more flexible, innovative and adaptable to change. Intrapreneurship, also known as internal corporate entrepreneurship, comes into play at this point, helping firms stand out from their competitors and opening the doors to a much more innovative future.
Intrapreneurship is an approach that enables employees in private institutions and organizations to develop innovative products, services or business models by implementing new ideas. This concept helps firms to be more flexible and innovative against external threats, competitor pressures and market changes, and to gain competitive advantage. This enables these firms to turn change into an opportunity, respond better to customer needs and be successful in the long term.
Intrapreneurship takes place within an existing organization rather than establishing a new company from outside. In this way, employees can benefit from company facilities such as infrastructure, financing, technology and human resources needed to realize their innovative ideas. Thus, they can innovate faster and with lower risk. On the other hand, they are restricted to a limited scope of action as they lack the freedom and autonomy that independent entrepreneurs have.
The essence of intrapreneurship is to unleash the creativity and innovative thinking of employees and use it for the success of the company. Companies that adopt this approach not only develop new products and services, but also renew their business models and achieve a more flexible and agile business process. Thus, they adapt to changes more easily and increase their competitiveness.
Therefore, intrapreneurship is a strategic approach that enables businesses to be dynamic, innovative and ready for change. In this way, firms can increase their profitability, attract talented employees, build a strong brand reputation and realize sustainable growth. Therefore, in today’s competitive business world, companies that encourage intrapreneurship and integrate this culture into their corporate DNA have a better chance of success.
With the internal training catalog we offer as INVEXEN, you can encourage intrapreneurship in your company and have much happier and successful employees!
Differences Between Intrapreneurship and Traditional Entrepreneurship
While traditional entrepreneurship refers to the realization of a new business idea and the establishment of an independent company, intrapreneurship takes place within an existing firm. The main differences can be summarized as follows:
Resources Used
While traditional entrepreneurs act with their own personal risk and resources, intrapreneurs can utilize the company’s infrastructure, technology, financial capabilities and other resources.
Control and Autonomy
Entrepreneurs retain full control, while intrapreneurs have limited autonomy within the rules and policies of the organization and the approval of top management.
Risk: While independent entrepreneurs take high risks, intrapreneurs take lower risks. A failed project affects only that project, not the entire company.
Rewards: While the rewards for traditional entrepreneurs are revenue and profits from their successful businesses, intrapreneurs usually focus on internal rewards such as promotions, bonuses, and the like.
In intrapreneurship, employees can use the company’s facilities to bring a new idea to life. However, in this process they enjoy less freedom and autonomy than independent entrepreneurs. There are therefore advantages and disadvantages between the two approaches.
Examples of Intrapreneurship
Many companies have initiated various programs and practices to encourage intrapreneurship. Here are a few examples of these apps and the success stories that have emerged:
Google “20% Time” App
This practice, which allowed Google employees to dedicate 20% of their work time to working on original projects, gave birth to products such as Gmail, Google News, Google Talk, Google Maps, AdSense, Google Glass, Google Translate, etc.
3M “15% Rule”
This program, which allowed 3M employees to devote 15% of their time to new project ideas, led to the creation of Post-its, sticky notes. In this way, 3M was able to reap the fruits of intrapreneurship.
Intuit “10% Time”
Intuit, which allows its employees to spend 10% of their time working on original ideas, has developed TurboTax, Mint and other popular products thanks to this app.
Microsoft Garage
Microsoft’s entrepreneurship program Garage allows employees to bring their projects to life. Many features added to the Office family of software originated from this program.
Facebook Hackathon
Facebook organized Hackathons to encourage employees to unleash their originality and develop new ideas, resulting in many innovative products and features.
General Electric (GE) “GE Rainbow”
Through this program, GE supports innovative projects by its employees. The GE Plastics division, which produces plastic parts for electric cars, was founded from an idea that came out of this program.
Desigual “Hey King”
Every year, the Spanish clothing brand Desigual holds a contest called “Hey King”, in which it solicits ideas from its employees and puts the best ones into practice. Creative designs have been realized in this way.
Advantages of Transformational Intrapreneurship
Innovation and Creativity: Intrapreneurship develops the company’s creativity capacity and innovative product/service portfolio by enabling employees to realize their innovative ideas. This increases competitiveness, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction.
Flexibility and Agility
It facilitates faster adaptation to market conditions, changes in customer demands, competitive pressures and technological innovations. The company becomes more flexible and agile by improving and restructuring its processes.
Increased Motivation and Performance
By giving employees the opportunity to add value, express themselves and bring their ideas to life, it significantly increases their motivation, organizational commitment, creativity, performance and productivity.
Productivity and Profitability
Through the development of new products, services, processes and business models, it increases the efficiency, quality and service level of the organization and enables it to increase its profitability by reducing costs.
Adaptation to Change
It enables companies to become more flexible, agile and ready for change, making it easier for them to react and adapt to sudden changes, crises, threats and opportunities.
Competitive Advantage
By offering unique, innovative and customer-oriented products/services, it enables them to differentiate from their competitors, get ahead and achieve sustainable competitive advantage. It enables them to lead disruptive change.
Value Creation and Customer Loyalty
By offering innovative solutions to customer needs, it contributes to creating more value and thus increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Corporate Image and Brand
It helps them gain a positive corporate image and a strong brand reputation by positioning them as an innovative organization. This increases the company’s attractiveness and attractive employer brand image.
Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Increases employee satisfaction, motivation and loyalty by contributing to employees’ self-realization, personal and professional development. Facilitates the retention and long-term recruitment of talented employees.
Talent Attraction
An innovative and liberal corporate culture makes it easier to attract, recruit and retain talented, creative and entrepreneurial individuals.
New Business Areas
Through intrapreneurship, companies can expand their existing fields of activity, enter new lines of business and grow through the development of new products, services and business models.
Risk Management
It helps companies to distribute and mitigate their risks. It limits the cost of unsuccessful projects, but successful ideas offer potential growth opportunities.
R&D and Innovation
Intrapreneurship feeds companies’ research and development and innovation activities. It enables employees to make maximum use of their creativity and innovative ideas.
Sustainable Growth
Intrapreneurship contributes significantly to the sustainable growth of companies by gaining competitive advantage by getting ahead of competitors, entering new business areas and customer loyalty.
How Creativity is Sparked?
Creativity and innovative ideas are at the heart of intrapreneurship. To increase the creativity and innovation capacity of their employees:
- Create an open communication environment and encourage the free exchange of ideas
- Allow employees to think independently and take risks by giving them areas of freedom
- Build a culture that supports teamwork, brainstorming, idea sharing and collaboration
- Reward achievements, celebrate innovations and share success stories
- See mistakes as learning opportunities and avoid a punitive approach
- Develop practices that foster curiosity, discovery and questioning
- Organize trainings that include different perspectives, disciplines and mind exercises
- Adopt institutional policies that support innovative thinking and risk-taking and minimize bureaucratic obstacles
- Organize physical workspaces to allow the flow of creative ideas
- Create intrapreneurship programs and get the full support of top management.
Sustaining Motivation and Entrepreneurial Spirit
Keeping employees motivated and nurturing their entrepreneurial spirit is crucial for the continuity of intrapreneurship. In this direction, companies:
- Reward entrepreneurial spirit, share success stories and create role models
- Support employees’ personal and professional development and provide training and mentoring opportunities
- Provide sufficient budget, time, resources and support for innovative ideas
- Create a flexible and free working environment and encourage employees to dream freely
- Celebrate and share successes and ensure they inspire others
- Reduce bureaucratic barriers and rigid processes, and eliminate obstacles to creativity
- Develop performance management systems that encourage innovation and reward innovative perspectives and risk-taking
- Intrapreneurship should be embraced as a long-term strategy and have the full support of top management.
Benefits of Intrapreneurship
Intrapreneurship can bring many benefits to companies:
- Recognize and evaluate opportunities and threats in the market faster.
- Develop more innovative, unique and value-added products and services.
- Respond more quickly and effectively to the changing needs of their customers.
- Increase their profitability and competitiveness by reducing their costs.
- Gain a leading position in the market and increase their market share.
- They can gain advantages in retaining, motivating and recruiting talented employees.
- They can generate higher returns from R&D investments and employee creativity.
- They can more easily capitalize on growth opportunities and enter new business lines.
- They can lead the sector with business model innovations and pioneer disruptive changes.
- They can create a corporate culture that is more flexible, agile, innovative and adaptable to change.
- They can have a strong brand image and reputation.
- They can manage risk more effectively.
- Achieve sustainable growth and gain competitive advantage.
How Can I Get Intrapreneurship Consultancy?
Companies can benefit from professional consulting services to create, structure and sustain an intrapreneurship culture. Consultants to companies:
- Creating entrepreneurship programs, strategies and frameworks
- Organizing trainings, workshops, mind maps and mentoring programs
- Designing practices to increase employee motivation, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit
- Providing resources, support, budget and process consultancy for innovative ideas
- Establishing, structuring and managing the entrepreneurship ecosystem
- Sharing examples of successful intrapreneurship and best practices
- Aligning company culture, policies and performance systems with innovation
- Ensuring the support, ownership and leadership of senior management
- Identify metrics and KPIs to measure the success of the intrapreneurship program
They provide support in such matters. Thus, they contribute to organizations to follow an effective strategy in this field and achieve success.
What are examples of intrapreneurship?
Many successful companies have adopted intrapreneurship and created an innovative corporate culture:
IBM: Innovations such as hard disk, barcode reader, laser printer, UPC barcodes, SQL, magnetic stripe storage.
Hasbro: New toys with the “Rainbow Brick” program
Citi Group: Projects working with the “Venture Opportunities” program
General Electric: Electric vehicle parts production through the “GE Rainbow” program
Microsoft: Software and service innovations with Garage program
Intuit: Products like TurboTax, Mint with “10% Time”
Desigual: New designs with the “Hey King” contest
Facebook: New features through hackathon events
Amazon: Innovative ideas with the “Employee Innovation Portal”
Google: Gmail, Google Glass, etc. with “20% Time”
3M: Post-it sticky notes with the “15% Rule”
Netflix: Innovative ideas with “Girveli Aquarium”
It is critical for companies that want to achieve innovation and competitive advantage to adopt intrapreneurship as a strategy and support the entrepreneurial spirit of their employees. This approach increases the flexibility of organizations while enabling them to deliver quality products/services, adapt to change, attract talent and achieve sustainable growth. With a successful intrapreneurship program, companies can gain a competitive advantage in the long term and become leaders in their sectors.
Corporate Entrepreneurship Opportunities with INVEXEN
Providing a comprehensive consultancy service from A to Z to companies in the field of corporate entrepreneurship, INVEXEN aims to guide rising startups, unicorns and new leaders of entrepreneurship by serving its valued clients in a wide range of services ranging from venture capital fund management and venture capital training to investment round consultancy, acceleration program consultancy and intrapreneurship program consultancy.
If you want to get your share of the ever-expanding entrepreneurship pie and implement different internal intrapreneurship models within your organization and you are uneasy about the steps you will encounter after that first step, you can contact us as INVEXEN and you can get the consultancy service that will always support you on your journey to the peaks with confidence.
