Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Harness Intrapreneurship to Make a Digital Leap

Intrapreneur leadership is a unique combination of “being innovative” and high mature leadership behaviors that achieve high quality results over a sustained period of time.


Organizations no matter large or small, all face the unprecedented changes, uncertainty, and accelerated business dynamic. To keep well-established organizations energetic and innovative, intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture within established organizations to leverage the startup culture for catalyzing changes and inspiring creativity.




The heart of intrapreneurship is about change and innovation: Being innovative is a mindset and a prerequisite to run a sustainable business nowadays due to fierce competitions and frequent disruptions. Innovation is the heart of business improvement because intrapreneurship activities can improve organizational growth and profitability, and their impact will increase over time. Thus, business leadership has to understand that innovation is a process which can be managed, instead of maintaining hierarchy or status quo. They should create and enforce the culture - the collective mindsets of creativity through practicing intrapreneurship and encouraging learning and experimenting. Otherwise, traditional companies will become irrelevant because disruptive innovations will happen no matter how well you prepare. Risk-taking is part of innovation. Intrapreneur leaders should have balanced viewpoints to perceive business success and failure objectively because their mental toughness and emotional intelligence will directly impact their business culture and help their organization become more resilient and nurture the culture of risk tolerance.

Balancing innovation and intrapreneurship practices with other organizational priorities and activities: Intrapreneurship is about discovering the new path for business growth by taking entrepreneurship activities. Practicing intrapreneurship in large enterprises needs to strike the right balance between stability and change, process and creativity. It presents a greater challenge and reward by pioneering the development of new products, services, processes, or business models, etc. There are two sets of leadership in those organizations: Professional managers keep the lights on, set up and manage within the box; entrepreneurs leaders think out of the box, bend some rule in order to discover the new path of growth or figure out different ways to solve problems. In fact, they can learn from each other, such two sets of leadership characteristics are not exclusive but complement with each other to run an innovative and high mature digital organization. Running an innovative business doesn’t mean everything goes rogue, practicing intrapreneurship in the large organization also doesn’t mean getting rid of all rules. Instead, a high-innovative business has more discipline, not less.


Increasing the business pro-activeness and willingness to capture opportunities and manage risks: The entrepreneurial activities help companies develop new businesses that create revenue streams. Practicing intrapreneurship is about creating the future via learning, experimenting, and discovering. Practicing intrapreneurship also means enterprise should go smarter and flexible, with the right dose of risk tolerance and risk intelligence to convert a problem into an opportunity. There is “no one size fits all” magic formula. Every organization needs to develop its tailored intrapreneurship practices by leveraging effective technologies, tools, or methodologies and apply them wisely with the expertise to really add value or drive innovation, harness intrapreneurship and doing more with innovation. Corporate intrapreneurship activities enhance a company’s success by advocating the culture of creativity and enforcing business innovations.

To run an innovative organization, the most difficult challenge is not just about launching successful teams but maintaining their motivation and focus. Intrapreneur leadership is a unique combination of “being innovative” and high mature leadership behaviors that develop and achieve high quality and meaningful results over a sustained period of time.

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