Intrapreneurship: yet another buzzword or a business’s secret weapon?

While it may sound like just anoth­er glib man­age­ment buzz­word, ‘intrapre­neur­ship’ has become a high­ly prized qual­i­ty in busi­ness. Before the pan­dem­ic struck the UK, recruit­ment firm Michael Page ranked intrapre­neur­ship at num­ber one on its list of the 100 most sought-after skills in job can­di­dates. When it polled 500 busi­ness lead­ers at the end of 2020, well over two-thirds (69%) said that this attribute had become even more impor­tant to their firms dur­ing the Covid cri­sis. 

Despite this, there are signs that invest­ment in intrapre­neur­ship will be anoth­er casu­al­ty of the pan­dem­ic. A sur­vey by the Euro­pean Invest­ment Bank in Jan­u­ary 2021 found that 45% of com­pa­nies in the EU were expect­ing to cut their annu­al expen­di­ture in this area. 

But not all busi­ness­es have for­got­ten McKinsey’s research into the reces­sion of 2008-09, which found that firms that kept invest­ing in inno­va­tion dur­ing the finan­cial cri­sis com­fort­ably out­grew those that cut their bud­gets. Indeed, a grow­ing num­ber have grasped the impor­tance of enabling their teams to think and act like entre­pre­neurs if they are to thrive beyond the Covid slump. 

Stu­dio Zao is an intrapre­neur­ship con­sul­tan­cy that’s been help­ing clients includ­ing Sony Music, Tar­get and Voda­fone to do just that. Its founder is Jamie Qiu, who set up and ran EY’s first start-up accel­er­a­tor in 2014. He and his team teach entre­pre­neur­ial skills such as cre­ative prob­lem-solv­ing; iden­ti­fy­ing and man­ag­ing risk; and deal­ing with ambi­gu­i­ty and volatil­i­ty. 

They also offer train­ing in the so-called min­i­mum-viable-prod­uct method – a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from tra­di­tion­al approach­es to prod­uct devel­op­ment that is not for the faint-heart­ed. This is where a com­pa­ny puts a par­tial­ly devel­oped offer­ing on the mar­ket, often with only a few fea­tures ready to use, and asks ear­ly-adopt­ing cus­tomers for feed­back to inform the refine­ment process, instead of spend­ing months per­fect­ing it inter­nal­ly before releas­ing it ful­ly formed.

Developing internal entrepreneurs

“One of the key things that busi­ness­es need to con­sid­er is how they devel­op entre­pre­neur­ial tal­ent inside the organ­i­sa­tion. This can enable a real trans­for­ma­tion,” says Qiu, who believes that intrapre­neur­ial skills “are in great demand, as organ­i­sa­tions have realised that the pace at which they must iden­ti­fy, test and val­i­date new com­mer­cial oppor­tu­ni­ties is increas­ing”. 

He adds that, even before the Covid cri­sis, he’d observed an upsurge of inter­est among busi­ness­es in devel­op­ing their employ­ees’ skills in this area. “But now, more than ever, there’s a need to take advan­tage of the white-space oppor­tu­ni­ties com­ing out of the pan­dem­ic in a way that will improve your organisation’s resilience against oth­er crises that are undoubt­ed­ly going to hap­pen.”

Qiu says that entre­pre­neur­ial skills can add val­ue in any role at any lev­el of an organ­i­sa­tion, but he stress­es that they are most effec­tive when applied to a spe­cif­ic chal­lenge. 

That was the sit­u­a­tion for Sony Music in 2014, when Tere­sa Kotlic­ka, then its vice-pres­i­dent of peo­ple and organ­i­sa­tion­al devel­op­ment, imple­ment­ed an intrapre­neur­ship pro­gramme. The aim was to boost the company’s capac­i­ty for inno­va­tion in the face of increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion from the stream­ing indus­try by ask­ing peo­ple through­out the organ­i­sa­tion to sug­gest ideas for new income-gen­er­at­ing activ­i­ties. 

The group has since suc­cess­ful­ly diver­si­fied through part­ner­ships and acqui­si­tions, includ­ing those of music dis­trib­u­tor The Orchard and pro­duc­tion mar­ket­place Beat­Stars. It has signed fit­ness and gam­ing deals with Pelo­ton and Fort­nite, as well as mak­ing siz­able back-cat­a­logue rights pur­chas­es, includ­ing what’s thought to be a nine-fig­ure deal with Paul Simon. 

“We were try­ing to help the com­pa­ny fig­ure out how to oper­ate under a new busi­ness mod­el,” recalls Kotlic­ka, who is now inter­im direc­tor of tal­ent at Kellogg’s. “Dig­i­tal stream­ing plat­forms had real­ly dis­rupt­ed how it was mak­ing mon­ey and what its val­ue chain looked like. So we tapped into the poten­tial of our employ­ees to help solve our mean­ing­ful chal­lenges prof­itably.”

On top of the com­mer­cial returns it has achieved on its intrapre­neur­ial invest­ments over time, the com­pa­ny has also ben­e­fit­ed in a less tan­gi­ble way that’s no less impor­tant to Kotlic­ka.

“Our reten­tion and pro­mo­tion stats looked bet­ter after peo­ple went on the pro­gramme, but what meant more to me was that the con­ver­sa­tion changed: busi­ness ideas were being pre­sent­ed using new con­cepts that would have felt taboo before,” she explains. “It was real­ly impor­tant to have a diverse range of voic­es and back­grounds in the room when we were try­ing to solve some of these mean­ing­ful chal­lenges.”

Getting closer to customers

US pack­ag­ing man­u­fac­tur­er Aptar­Group turned to intrapre­neur­ship to involve both its wider work­force and its cus­tomers in an effort to improve pro­duc­tion effi­cien­cy and devel­op more sus­tain­able offer­ings. 

This process required the com­pa­ny to break down silos and share more infor­ma­tion than it had been accus­tomed to, accord­ing to the firm’s vice-pres­i­dent of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion, Fabio Di Mem­mo.

“We had to go back to this fun­da­men­tal ques­tion of what the cus­tomers real­ly need,” he recalls. “We had to get clos­er to them to dis­cov­er new oppor­tu­ni­ties, while also min­imis­ing risk.”

The risk-tak­ing spir­it that’s intrin­sic to entre­pre­neur­ial inno­va­tion is some­thing that many busi­ness­es tend to lose with age. This has led Kotlic­ka to observe that, while the appetite for intrapre­neur­ship is increas­ing among firms, they may lack the stom­ach for it in prac­tice.

“Every­one wants to talk about inno­va­tion, but who will actu­al­ly be mak­ing it hap­pen?” she says. “A lot of brav­ery needs to go into this.”