Don’t let the headline fool you. I know that there are real intrapreneurs in some companies. Sometimes they’re really exposed, in the most cases they’re hidden in the dark rooms… Still, the general observation is that there are no real intrapreneurs existing.
To change that, we just joined the Academy for corporate entrepreneurship here in Munich. The vision is to enable more and more enterprise customers to be innovative themselves.
But wait! Why should we do this? Doesn’t that kill our own business model?
The clear answer is: not at all!
We’re sure that by helping our potential customers to help themselves, our role will be even more important. Let me explain that by defining an intrapreneur / corporate entrepreneur:
For me, an intrapreneur is someone that enables corporate innovation. That doesn’t mean that he or she has to do it all himself! The person needs to know what the important steps for a successful innovation project are – and needs to enable others to do the innovation work! In nearly all our projects we have a strong sparring partner from within the organization. This person is the intrapreneur, even though in most cases, he/she doesn’t know it!
We strongly believe that you cannot drive innovation solely from external (that’s why I don’t believe that corporate accelerators / incubators can solve the non-innovative-problem of corporates). You need someone (strong) from within that is truly dedicated to fight for the project. And someone that is really into the process! That someone needs to know, which stages an innovation has to go through. One can compare that to a good scrum master. I don’t believe that a good scrum master can exist if that persons hasn’t been a developer himself once… So a good intrapreneur must have been a project driver once before (or needs to have seen what innovation looks like) in order to enable others to be innovative.
You always have to differ between a startup and a corporate. No corporate exists of one person driving a vision. It’s always the mass of people that need to give a new product its strength. Therefore we need to enable more people to enable the mass! That’s why we joined the AfCE.
Let’s make the world more innovative 😉
Categories: motivation
the lean consultant | mantro.net 