IF you love the idea of becoming an entrepreneur but are reluctant to give up the comfort, and the monthly pay packet, of working in a large company, there is a fantastic solution — it is called intrapreneurship and its effects are quietly but increasingly being seen all round us.
Used wisely, intrapreneurship can be a powerful tool, both for the company that promotes it and for the individuals who have the creative ideas. Employees benefit from seeing their ideas become reality without having to give up their job and risk everything to pursue a dream, while companies benefit from holding on to their best people and reaping the rewards of their creativity.
Mike Southon, author of The Boardroom Entrepreneur, and an adviser on how to benefit from intrapreneurship, said: “Becoming an intrapreneur is much less risky than becoming an entrepreneur because you are surrounded by people you can talk to about your idea throughout the process, and also your company is likely to have customers for your product or service.
“If you approach it right and have enough standing in your company to find support at a senior level, it can go incredibly well.”
A good example of intrapreneurship in action is Mobile World, a product that was dreamt up by David Goldie while working at Carphone Warehouse.
Mobile World is a mobile-phone service targeted at people living in Britain who come from other countries and need to phone friends and relatives overseas. Goldie discussed the idea with a small team of colleagues and then worked with them to bring it to market.
Goldie, now chief operating officer of telecoms at Carphone Warehouse and a champion of intrapreneurship, said: “Carphone Warehouse is an organisation that encourages this sort of thing. It is a fast-growing business and a company cannot grow fast if it merely continues to maintain the products that it has.
“The company has established a structure that is intended to encourage people to bring new products to market and to achieve career recognition through their success in doing this. Career development at Carphone Warehouse is based on people’s ability to innovate and execute. That is what the company is all about.”
Not every company is so enlightened, however, and for intrapreneurship to work effectively certain rules must be followed on both sides.
Southon said the first step for company bosses was to get the culture right.
He said: “The last thing a chief executive should do is say to his employees, ‘we are having a new initiative today where everyone is going to be more intrapreneurial,’ because internal resistance to change will usually stifle it. If someone has been doing the same job for 20 years the last thing they want is someone deciding to change everything.”
Goldie said that having the right structure in a company was also vital: “In my opinion the secret of intrapreneurship in a technology business is to have flexible systems so that you can get products to market quickly and cheaply,” he said.
“This is really the key. At Carphone Warehouse we have managed to structure our business in such a way that we can bring a product like Mobile World to market for an investment of just a few hundred thousand pounds. Then if we feel we have success we continue to build from there, rather than having a long product- development cycle and lots of market research.”
