Have you ever looked closely at founders who create successful companies – not necessarily unicorns – but profitable companies that solve real problems? Very often it’s ex-corporate employees who weren’t empowered to follow their vision and make it happen. So they left and did it anyhow.

Which brings me to my point: The best ideas to disrupt, grow and optimize are already there. Inside companies like yours.

There is the notion that corporate employees are slow, reluctant to change, closed-minded and not innovative. Tools like design thinking, agile, design sprints, etc. have been invented to ‘unlock’ the potential.

I think this is wrong. These tools try to solve a problem that does not exist. Corporate employees are not lacking creativity and nor are they entirely risk-averse. They often choose to work in a large corporate for different reasons: working on something bigger than themselves, not worrying about where the next paycheck comes from or using the extensive resources of corporates to reach more people, faster. Some of the smartest minds prefer to work in corporates because they can work on things that most startups can’t offer, e.g. building a power plant, making a plane, building bridges, etc.

These things can’t be built ‘agile’ with venture capital and three founders with MBAs or a track-record at Google & Microsoft. You’ve got to have many brains, structure and serious cash to make them happen.

Most corporates already have incredibly talented and intelligent people. The real challenge is this:

How can your company create an environment that sufficiently encourages, and empowers your staff to develop and deploy their own (corporate) boundary-breaking visions?

Unfortunately, every time I say this out loud I get one or more of these arguments thrown back at me:

• We can’t do that, the managers don’t want to let their best people go, they need them!
• But where do we get the budget?
• Every time we do this it goes wrong takes years and never leads to anything!
• But the ideas are not part of our strategy!
• If we allow one person to just work on something else, everyone will want to do this – who is going to work on our core business?
• Our governance process kills all the ideas anyhow, why bother!

So what happens then in most companies? « Let’s create an incubator! Or an accelerator. » – somewhere else, outside the corporate. Let’s hire entrepreneurs and give them a lot of money to make stuff happen for us. And let’s not send anyone from the corporate there (because they’ll destroy the atmosphere).

It’s like outsourcing the solution (and future profits) to your problems. True, it’s easier to go to the CEO and say ‘We need to innovate! Inside the company doesn’t work, so let’s create something outside. Can we have 50 Mio EUR to set this up?’

This is the easy path because it (seems) straightforward. But it is not as easy as it looks, and it rarely delivers the expected value. The harder path is to carve out a space inside the corporate. To allow exceptions to processes. Convince managers to let go of their best people. I tend to think when something appears hard to do, there is usually more value in the result. And in this case I think the value add is very significant indeed.

Try to imagine how visionary and capable people inside your corporate feel when you tell them ‘cool stuff only happens outside of the company (or in the innovation department). YOU are not cool. You need to keep our core business alive, so we can pay for the cool stuff. And when we’ve found a disruptive business model, we won’t need you anymore because we have these entrepreneurs!’. I’m not sure about you, but I’d be less than enthusiastic about supporting the initiative – and I’d probably quit as soon as a better option came along.

So please try this:

• Find people with visions and ideas inside your company.
• Figure out how you need to motivate and reward your Intrapreneurs. Hint: It isn’t (just) about the money.
• Validate their ideas – does it make sense? What’s the desired outcome? What’s the one thing you can build to test it? Does a better solution already exist in the market?
• Create an environment where they can focus on their vision for 3-6 months without worrying about their old job, scorecards & targets and their manager
• Help build a minimum viable product, try to find product-market fit internally (or externally if it’s a new business). Be the internal business angel.
• Decide if you want to bring the business inside (integrate into line organization), spin-out and be the sole owner or open it to other investors & companies
• Make it a repeatable process.

It will be hard. It’s an uphill battle. You’ll need buy-in from top management, but the rewards are tremendous: innovations that continuously improve core business and every now and then create entirely new business units. What’s more, you’ll have happier staff that don’t leave, become competitors or perhaps even worse: mentally resign but stay on.

What have you got to lose?! Try it!