Intrapreneur and Innovation Culture

Harry was excited. Even though, it was 1 a.m and pretty late, he was wide awake and rather pleased at how his work had developed over the last few days. He reflected over the last few days and smiled thinking that this entire idea happened over a casual chat with a colleague during a coffee break. He was now waiting to go and present this to his colleagues and take it further.

One of the important persons who can grow and enhance the innovation culture of any organisation is somebody who plays the role of an “Intrapreneur”. In simple words, he is the evangelist who motivates people to think without any boundaries and encourages resources to go beyond their normal day jobs. It is very important that these intrapreneurs are given freedom to explore non-conventional areas by the top management. So how does this help and why is it important?

Frankly most of the benefits of this are intangible and can only be measured over a period of time. The main advantage is that a spirit of experimentation and thinking without limits is encouraged throughout the organisation. Of course, this does not mean that everybody within the organisation will become like this overnight but definitely over a period of time, resources will feel encouraged to look at new approaches to solve problems and not feel constrained.

So what are the important skills required by an Intrapreneur and how do you identify one?

Some of the main skills are:

1. Passion for a particular topic


2. Self-starter, positive and able to overcome obstacles


3. Strong Soft Skills to convince and cajole despite scepticism


4. Ability to evangelise, communicate new ideas clearly

So how do you measure results and progress of this initiative? Frankly this is a tricky subject since there are no direct answers. We cannot apply our normal project management principles to this and again results need to be measured only over a period of time. Having said that, these are some good indicators to measure progress:

• Enthusiasm within teams to try out new ideas/technology


• Number of roadshows within organisation showing cutting edge innovations and the participation at these forums


• Scientific temper within the organisation measured by the participation in seminars/patents/papers published etc

The biggest problem is sustaining these initiatives and engraining them into the corporate culture. These sound so intuitive that I am sure every organisation at some point or other should have implemented many, if not, all these initiatives. But very few do it consistently and do it regularly. We also need to incentivitise this and ensure that all the staff involved are motivated enough (regardless of the short term goals or the immediate market situation).
So how do you motivate and promote such ventures throughout the organisation? Well – there are two things which are pretty effective and which need to happen in parallel consistently enough:

1. Identify and reward role models throughout the organisation and highlight the innovation initiative.


2. Give highest priority/budgets along with the best resources to these initiatives so that the message goes across consistently that these are important.

So are there any pitfalls to avoid and watch out for? The main ones are about the direction of the initiative. Some pointers:

• It is a good idea to define broadly the theme for such initiatives just to give a direction to the thinking efforts. Having said that, keep it broad.


• The initial few success stories should be carefully chosen and the right behaviour needs to be highlighted. Since these are high profile, there will be attempts to replicate this across the organisation. So the examples should be worth replicating.


• Ensure that these decisions are free of any political or other influences. This is the easiest way to kill such initiatives. Keep these decisions as transparent as possible and encourage all attempts. Explore the idea of these decisions being taken by all the employees themselves which will increase transparency and also get everybody involved.


• Be very lavish in your incentives. I really believe that for such initiatives “If you throw peanuts, you will get monkeys”. You really need to believe that your next big multi million dollar return is going to come from this. So if this is the case, you don’t want to insult your employees by throwing peanuts for realising this.

Have more to add to this list. I would love to hear from you. Here’s to building a very successful and innovative workplace. We all deserve it!!!!