“Today’s businesses, especially the large ones, simply will not survive in this period of rapid change and innovation unless they acquire entrepreneurial competence.”
―Peter Drucker

First, let’s get the terminology out of our way. You may find various definitions of the “intrapreneurship”, but for those who are not familiar with it, here is the one most widely used.

In the recent years, we are witnessing a significant increase in the number of disruptive business models worldwide by emerging technology startups which at the same time have achieved massive growth in a very short time frame (3-4 years) and valued billions of dollars. For example, Airbnb, Netflix, Square, UBER, and Whatsapp are just a few of them.

What should take precedence here is not how these disruptive startups accomplished this, but how they are able to threaten the territories of the traditional companies. Usually, large established enterprises are finding it extremely tough to adapt to the rapidly changing VUCA world and face multiple concurrent challenges in the sense of sustainability such as profitability, growth and retaining skilled employees. Consequently, several studies clearly show that lifespan of large companies in both S&P 500 and Fortune 500 Index are continuously shrinking.

Today, these successful innovative business models, practice state-of-the-art entrepreneurial methods for their strategies and tactics (from idea to execution). These learnable new methods, mainly are based on lean and agile principles which are widely utilized by startup entrepreneurs in the last 10 years. In fact, large global companies noticed the success of the disruptive startups and started reinventing themselves by setting up a transformational project from culture to strategy in order to have breakthrough ideas. This type of corporate initiative is usually called “act like a startup”. In my personal opinion, General Electric (GE) is one of the corporations who is managing this transformation pretty well for the last 3 years and they even  have a BHAG to become one of the largest software companies in the world.

Both mind and cultural shifts are required for those large enterprises in order to act like a startup. Needless to say that, this is a challenging task however, it’s not something impossible to achieve, if you consider GE, with over 300,000 employees; operating in tens of diverse industries, started reaping fruits of acting like a startup. Here is a recent success story shared by GE publicly. The success of a corporate entrepreneurship and innovation program  depends on a senior executive’s vision, belief, support and willpower; handled as similar as in a business transformation project (change program). The main priority should be given to, being mentally prepared for the change process and be aware of the main obstacles (see below) when you set off an innovation and intrapreneurship program (or policy):

• status quo
• inertia
• short term vision
• bureaucracy
• conservatism
• lack of speed
• unsupported creative and new ideas
• poor retention strategies for talented [young] people
• risk averse
• fear of failure
• unable to learn; how to learn fast
• most don’t learn from their past mistakes
• etc. (the list goes on)

Innovation isn’t an R&D department, it’s a process with the right mindset and behavior that involves everyone!

In the 1800s, entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom were jailed if their businesses went bankrupt , thus they were afraid to take risks and build new businesses. Surely, this was hindering growth, profitability and even worse, fear of starting a business was adversely impacting the economy. Therefore, in 1855 UK parliament passed a law called “The Limited Liability Act 1855” or in other words “bankruptcy law” by allowing limited liability for companies and simply protecting entrepreneurs and company owners. Moreover, this law was a great chance and encouragement for entrepreneurs to start again if they went bankrupt.

In a nutshell, I would say that established companies cannot survive in today’s rapidly changing environment if they don’t have the proper sustainable corporate policies in place for encouraging and boosting intrapreneurship & innovation; like the bankruptcy law established in the UK in 1855. Companies, thoroughly require change in a way they run their businesses today as well as adapting a new « Intrapreneurship Policy » to protect and encourage their creative employees and  eventually potential intrapreneurs.

Takeaways:

• Intrapreneurship is where employees in established companies are acting like an entrepreneur.
• Disruptive business models are everywhere and threatening traditional companies.
• Sustainability is the top priority for established companies and impossible to achieve it without innovation.
• Large companies lack skills and capabilities in new management methods and entrepreneurship. Stop practicing over 100 years old scientific management principles.
• Work on your obstacles first, before setting up an intrapreneurship and innovation program.
• Take intrapreneurship seriously and prepare a company-wide policy for it.