‘Intrapreneurship’: new growth engine

Updated : 2014-05-11 15:51

‘Intrapreneurship’: new growth engine

Chris Khang
Companies are constantly looking for new ways to stimulate growth and create new opportunities. Large companies especially cannot compete in the new business environment by resorting to their old ways and formulae for success. They are exploring to examine their management strategies and corporate cultures in order to find ways of developing a spirit of “intrapreneurship.”
Intrapreneurship is a strategy for stimulating innovation by making better use of entrepreneurial talent. When effectively promoted, it not only fosters innovation but also helps employees with good ideas to better channel the resources of a corporation to develop more successful products and services.
While size and scale are often assets in the business world, it can also cause companies to be slow to react and implement creative ideas in solving conventional problems as they get bogged down in their own bureaucracies. This can be a real hindrance, especially as the pace of business continues to accelerate. To be successful, companies have to be nimble and quickly bring new ideas to markets to meet customer demands. Large companies have to emulate the speed and creativity that startups are known for.
Startups often look to develop something new and disruptive while moving quickly to bring their new innovations to their customers. Large companies seek to adopt the best elements of startups, simplifying decision-making processes and empowering employees who directly interact with customers.
We are seeing more companies, large and small, launching minimum viable products (MVP) that might not provide a perfect solution for customers but creates opportunities to test the market and receive customer feedback.
Feedback from the first steps with a new product or service allows companies to confirm their initial assumptions of market demands. Based on feedback, decisions should be made as to whether to continue on the initial course, pivot and set a new direction to better meet customer needs, or drop efforts altogether if the demand for the product or service isn’t there.
It has been more than a century since GE was a startup, but like many organizations there are entrepreneurs inside our company doing the very things that startups do — developing new products under conditions of extreme uncertainty. To nurture this entrepreneurial spirit, we launched “FastWorks,” which is a set of tools, principles and behaviors aimed at bringing better and faster outcomes to customers. One of the goals of such initiatives is to get products to market as quickly and effectively as possible so that we can begin to receive feedback from our customers.
This does not mean that companies should compromise on quality or bring inferior products to market; rather they should rapidly reflect customer feedback in product improvements to better meet their needs and shape the direction of product. To speed up market response times and reflect actual market needs, multinational companies have to allow for more “localization” and have the people on the ground spend more time understanding and talking to customers before developing products and services. To achieve this, embracing intrapreneurship and letting those people who are the closest to customers guide innovations is of utmost importance, regardless of a company’s size.
Ultimately, creating a corporate culture and a working environment that encourages employees to become intrapreneurs will also be a major advantage for companies competing in the global market. Like entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs are innovators, calculated risk takers, embracers of change and constantly on the lookout for new opportunities. Large global companies can utilize their expertise in management, process and logistics to bring innovations developed locally to the global market. By combining the speed and creativity of startups with the strengths of a large company, intrapreneurship is driving a new growth engine.