HOWZAT

There are certain rules for the employee hoping to become an intrapreneur. Southon said the key thing was to get a mentor.

“Mentoring it is vital to the entrepreneurial process. If you don’t have anyone you can bounce ideas off, you are not going to be able to form a team and so you are probably going to fail. You have to build up networks so that if your idea does turn out to be good you have support.”

He said that employees hoping to become intrapreneurs in a company that does not readily embrace the concept should adopt a softly, softly approach. “The reason intrapreneurship fails in organisations is that the system chucks out anything that is different. So you should just try out your idea somewhere small first in your department and see what happens.”

He said: “The golden rule of intrapreneurship is never ask for permission, always ask for forgiveness. And all the time be aware of people who might stifle your idea through jealousy or boredom.”

Intrapreneurship has been a good way of developing new products at Multimap, a company that provides internet mapping for businesses and consumers. When one of the company’s Australian employees, Ian Dodds, was asked by a customer to solve a particular problem, he went one better and created a new way of displaying complex shapes on maps. The idea was taken up by the company and is now being rolled out across Multimap’s global operations.

Not surprisingly Multimap founder Sean Phelan likes the idea of internal innovation. He said: “Intrapreneurship is part of the culture at Multimap. People love working here because it is an environment where they can take entrepreneurial ideas forward and they are surrounded by other people who think the same way.”

For the company, the benefits are immense. He said: “If you get it right you can have the fast-moving dynamism of a small start-up with the support, power and global distribution of a large company.”

For the employee, the rewards are peer recognition, the likelihood of a salary bonus, and the satisfaction of seeing his or her idea become reality.

Phelan said: “If you have an idea for Multimap, it will go out on our public website and will be seen by 10m people.”

He said that for a system of intrapreneurship to work, an employee must be given full recognition for his work.

“The worst thing would be for a middle manager to take a junior person’s work and say here is a great thing I have done. That would really demotivate somebody.”

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