Intrapreneurship Leadership & Balance

 Intrapreneur leaders can add a new dimension of vision in making the right choice for balancing the business’s short-term gain and long-term win. 

With increasing pace of changes and fierce disruptions, modern businesses have to make many tough choices in its growth-maturity business journey. For many companies across the vertical sectors, especially those large traditional corporations, entrepreneurialism becomes a new fixture for management in their efforts to spark creativity, substantiate competitive positions, affect the market landscape, and drive new revenue growth.

Practicing intrapreneurship in large enterprises needs to strike the right balance between stability and agility; "keep the lights on” and generate new business models: Organizations no matter large or small, all face unprecedented change, uncertainty, and accelerated business dynamics. Due to silo mentality, overly rigid organizational hierarchy, legacy technologies or processes, culture inertia, many well-established organizations are struggling with innovation. Intrapreneurship is about creating a new venture from within established organizations to leverage the startup culture for catalyzing changes and inspiring innovation. It’s about discovering the new path for business growth and balancing innovation with other organizational priorities. It presents a possibly even greater challenge and reward by pioneering the development of new products, processes, and services through enriching its competitiveness and developing their business strength.

The heart of intrapreneurship is about changes, the intrapreneurship activities can improve the organizational growth and profitability, depending on the company’s dynamic environment, their impact will increase over time. In essence, corporate innovation is about exploring the alternative way to grow the business. Trends are just a means to an end for successfully innovating business models and making the profit. For example, in today’s digital dynamic and technical environments in which Information and Technology are being used more and more around the globe for revenue-generating initiatives, the business model generates predictions for how to make the profit and improve customer satisfaction. In practice, there are obstacles such as the poor fit between new businesses and old systems, imbalance of innovation and standardization, “not now, later” culture, etc. The management needs to contemplate how to develop a new business model or build up a startup culture; how to figure out a better way in which an enterprise intends to leverage the emerging technologies or uprising trends to make profit, etc.

Practicing intrapreneurship means enterprise should go smarter and flexible, build the culture of risk intelligence to convert a problem into an opportunity: Corporate entrepreneurship is embodying risk-taking and more radical changes, helping the company develop either the new business or the unique capability to create revenue and improve the top line growth, and promote & sustain business performance and renewal the business energy. It helps to substantiate a competitive position, unlock business growth by increasing the firm’s pro-activeness and willingness to take risks, capture opportunities, roll it out and measure the performance result accordingly.

The healthy intrapreneurship activities help to engage employees, motivate people to solve problems in alternative ways, pioneer the development of new products, processes, and services through enriching its competitiveness, drive new business revenue growth, and shape the digital landscape to make sure there’s a steady flow of ideas flowing in the pipeline, improve risk intelligence, and manage innovation in a structural way. With “VUCA” new normal, there are known and unknown risks, the business should have the right dose of risk appetite, the enterprise risk management would be making continuous improvement based on the feedback from the risk management process; and the companies should reclaim the right balance of standardization and innovation, process and flexibility; stability and change, competition and collaboration, etc.

To awakening innovation in the well-established organization, business leaders should think as an intrapreneur and act as a startup manager: Intrapreneurship is a unique combination of “being innovative” and high mature leadership that develop and achieve high quality and meaningful results over a sustained period of time. Intrapreneur leaders can add a new dimension of vision in making the right choice for balancing the business’s short-term gain and long-term win. They often have balanced viewpoints to perceive success and failure objectively, communicate with people at the different levels of the business hierarchy and ecosystem, to understand their needs and collect feedback for sparking creative ideas, managing innovation and recharging business models.

Many leaders and professionals are trapped by conventional thinking. Intrapreneur leaders are open-minded and confident to take the path perhaps no one ever took before, and be resilient to fail fast and forward. able to explain the big why clearly, articulate the strategic rationale behind the venture, systematically address the innovation strategy agenda, bring back new designs that they might not even recognize using the current context. They are not only self-motivated, but also motivate teams to cultivate change capabilities, encourage the staff to think out-of-the-box, bring fresh perspectives and new designs to delight customers and achieve high-quality results over a sustainable period of time.

Creativity in the corporate world has a lot to do with fostering a creative environment to disrupt outdated mindsets, systems, processes, cultures, business models, or practices. Intrapreneurship is a good practice to catalyze innovation and unlock business potential. The entrepreneurial activities help companies develop new businesses models or ventures that create revenue streams, and depending on the company’s competitive business environment, their impact will increase over time significantly.

Posted in: Digital Balance,Innovation,Leadership Master