Creating an Intrapreneurial Culture

Building a culture to support digital intrapreneurship takes time and commitment. Below is a summary of some of the activities that can open a culture to digital intrapreneurs. 

Activity	Implementation hints
A vision of the organization’s overall destination and goals	Create and communicate a vision that inspires intrapreneurs, lets them know what challenges the company faces and invites them to come up with solutions to those challenges. (Also keep the door opened a crack for divergent ideas with small budgets as these may reveal the future.)
Active involvement of management and senior leaders	Keep talking about intrapreneurship. Watch for and celebrate successes. Reward managers, when their people innovate so they don’t steal subordinates’ ideas. Help intrapreneurs develop the leadership skills they need. Build a culture supportive of intrapreneurship.
Support intrapreneurs	Intrapreneurs are as essential to corporate innovation as entrepreneurs are to start-ups. Cherish your intrapreneurs. Build a culture that supports them. Build an intrapreneurial career path.Support implementation by intrapreneurs, not just idea inventors and early development. Allow employees time to think and test their ideas.
Support cross- functional teams	Innovations often involve changes in the way things are done in other parts of the organization. Support cross functional teams with team members from other functions. Give teams time and the authority to make decisions as a team. Support the team decisions rather than letting the decisions descend into turf battles between their functional seniors.
Create a sponsorship culture	Management sponsors who select, coach, protect, and help get resources for intrapreneurs are the primary support for intrapreneurship. Innovation is more about that relationship than any process. Train and expect managers to sponsor one or more intrapreneurs whose character and innovations they trust. Make sponsoring innovation a central part of the corporate culture and every managers’ job. Build sponsoring success into management KPIs.
Widespread intrapreneurial training	Deliver a short course so everyone knows what an intrapreneur is, what they do, how they act, and ways to be effective as an intrapreneur. Let managers know what support intrapreneurs need and how to give it. Managers, executives and individual contributors can all get the same two-hour online training so they all get to see how the whole intrapreneurship system works.
Idea Expositions	Organize both online and physical idea expositions that help intrapreneurs to share their ideas and attract others to volunteer to join their intrapreneurial team. Management can also tour the expo and look for intrapreneurs to support. Expos can create the teams that go on to the innovation accelerators.
Innovation Accelerators	Accelerators are action learning workshops that help teams of intrapreneurs develop their ideas, build teamwork and bring out their intrapreneurial spirit. They can be full time or part time, but in the corporate world part time is most common. They range from six weeks to six months or more.
Discretionary time and resources at lower levels	Today computers can monitor every minute of an employee’s time and every use of resources. This blocks the casual experimentation, daydreaming, and “fooling around” that are often the source of breakthroughs. Push discretionary budget and time down to the lowest levels – to individual contributors, their supervisors, and lower middle management. Offer employees the option of spending some of their time and modest supplies on side projects of their own choice. Let supervisors and lower level managers sponsor the early stages of innovation from their own discretionary budgets
“Sandbox” or “Seed” funds	Seed funds are pools of discretionary money for early stage innovations. Create small local seed funds distributed throughout the company. Seed funds create a route around bosses who block employees’ early stage ideas. It is not just the grant of money, it is the implied permission to work on the idea.  Let any employee apply and if they are funded, have a bit of time off to pursue the idea. Seed funds generally only give small grants for a rapid prototype test or the like.
Boundary crossing	Because innovation tends to cross boundaries, intrapreneurs need permission to cross boundaries and they need to get a generous reception there when they ask for help. This cultural attribute of generosity is a powerful booster of intrapreneurship. Reward cross boundary generosity. Ask intrapreneurs, “Who helped you in the early days.”
Anticipate and accept failure	Don’t blame or punish original mistakes made in the pursuit of an innovation. The best way to success involves making your mistakes faster and cheaper and then learning and adapting quickly. Have meaningful “good try” recognition and rewards. Make sure these rewards are seen as positive by recipients. VCs like to invest in entrepreneurs who have had a failure as well as a success.
Articulate a culture	Establish your company's vision. Talk about the kinds of things you hope innovation can do for the company. Say you need help to make those things happen.
Small beginnings	Corporate strategists often discount the value of small innovations saying they are of no significance. But small beginnings are often beachheads on major opportunities, places from which to explore and learn about a new territory. The Lean Start-up prescribes the rapid testing of “minimal viable products.” Value small beginnings and intrapreneurial investigation of new possibilities on small budgets. Then, if it starts to work, spend more lavishly on scaling what already shows signs of working.
Measure Innovation output	Measure the innovation output of each business unit. Create a scale of how impactful an innovation is with many times more points for more disruptive innovations. Give units overall innovation scores and hold them accountable for those scores. Let multiple units both get credit for the same innovation if they all made substantial contributions. This promotes cross organizational cooperation.
New ways or organizing work	Keep a backbone of hierarchical control but hang innovative structures off of it. Create conditions for a network of self-organizing and self-directing intrapreneurial teams that serve the chain of command. Let empowered intrapreneurs select their team members from those who wish to join. Let teams stay together and take on projects as a team. When possible, let intrapreneurs be responsible for the execution of their own initiatives.
Rewards     Adapted From Digital Intrapreneurship by Gifford Pinchot III and Mariusz Soltanifar in Digital Entrepreneurship (Springer Publishing)	Build an intrapreneurial career path that gives both good salaries and time and budget to innovate again for successful intrapreneurs. Freedom to work on their next idea is a most effective reward for intrapreneurial success. Reward the whole team, not just the leader. No internal forced ranking within innovation teams, “all boats rise and fall together” promotes teamwork.