Innovating within big companies is always hard as one needs to overcome all the status quo (processes, policies and administrative hurdles) in order to innovate and for this, you need a ‘Wild’ team that processes some distinct characteristics.

In their recent book, titled, Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win, Chris Kuenne & John Danner mentioned about 4 types of personalities of the builders who instrument successful businesses. These are- Drivers, Explorers, Crusaders and Captain. Each one of these personalities has its own way to deal with corporate strategies to gaining customer loyalty. But how to build an effective Corporate Intraprenuership program?- where organizations transform selected staff to become entrepreneurs within, to create new products and services or improvise current offerings that will eventually bring reasonable amount of extra revenues.

So, here are 5 action points for you:

Recruit Winners

Hire People who have track records in winning competitions- mostly in sports. Winning any sports competition requires an individual to be extremely focused and disciplined. Winning comes after hard work, dedication and a passion for excellence. All these characteristics are important to excel in the Corporate Intraprenuership program. It would be better if you can find winners in team sports, i.e. Soccer, Baseball, Cricket as team work is a must in innovation. If you are unable to find a winner and the relevant academic and organizational skills, look for something unique in the resumes- someone who has created a product (wow!), authored a book, established a cultural group, traveled to more than 20 countries (travelling challenges your brain and thus makes you more adventurous) etc. Corporate Intraprenuership requires people to stand in a separate line, challenge status quo, being experimental!

Identify Internal Leaders

You may not able to recruit many new people and therefore, scan your current talent pool- what should you look for? Staff who: led teams, developed projects from scratch, networked with many to get things done, are great communicators, know your customer well and never gives up. These types of people can be found at any levels of the organizations- don’t just look at a specific point. Some of them may not be very technically sound but the innovation team requires all types of people with the right attitude.

Establish a Corporate Innovation Fund

Any initiatives, old or new, requires fund to implement. An innovation goes through phases- ideation, prototyping, testing, implementation and a dedicated fund can enable such activities. This fund can act like ‘Seed Fund’ where an organization should not expect an immediate return. The innovation might not see the final light due to poor customer feedback and fault in design- but when organizations become miser in allocating seed funds to test out new ideas, they strangle the opportunities to earn big revenue in the long run. This fund can be allocated for a period of 3 years and should mostly use to test out final proof of concept. Full scale production can be streamlined with other corporate initiatives with yearly budget.

Adopt Agile Processes

One of the major hinderance of innovation in many organizations is embedded in its complicated, bureaucratic processes. You may have a great team along with some seed funds but due to several approval, procurement and outsourcing processes, initiatives lose its momentum. Explore and figure out if some of these processes can be flexible and you can bypass them, if not, the whole innovation development process (ideation, prototyping, testing) needs to be incubated at the innovation lab, where business processes are very agile and separate from the usual practice of the organization. In many industries the competition is intense, and companies need to come up with new product fast. In such circumstances, the final phase of innovation (commercial production and scale up) also requires non-traditional processes in engaging with customers, co-creators, suppliers, partners etc.

Have a Foresight Team

This team is like the Eyes for the Future who identifies innovation opportunities by- understanding current and future trends, scanning technology advancement, exploring dynamics of change, empathizing with customer demand, assessing organization’s capacity etc. and then suggest new strategic focus areas for the organization. The team usually undertakes Scenario Planning, Forecasting, Design thinking, Horizon Scanning exercises to come up with new growth areas. This team consists of people who are good at critical thinking, analysis, systems thinking, external and internal communication etc. You can build such a team consisting of people from various disciplines in the organization. The team needs to understand that their work is dynamic, and it does not follow standard processes.

A simple process:

  • Foresight team relay their findings and recommendations to the innovation/intrapreneurs team
  • Innovation team ideates and designs prototypes of new offerings to test out with clients.
  • Upon successful testing, relevant departments take the control to implement the solution OR in the case of a major project, a new team can be formed to carry out and monitor the production process with agreed timeline.

The article was written by Naguib Chowdhury, Innovation and Knowledge for Development; A Corporate Intrapreneur; and first published here.

Image: “A person standing on top of a ladder in the clouds.” by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash