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Some Thoughts on Intrapreneurship

What is Intrapreneurship?
Very simply put, Intrapreneurship is Entrepreneurship practiced by people within established organisations. That really begs the next question...

What is Entrepreneurship?
Two definitions spring to mind:

1. Entrepreneurship is the process of creating value by bringing together a unique package of resources to exploit an opportunity.
2. Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.

From both definitions above, we can note that Entrepreneurs are opportunity driven. Opportunity comes from changes in the environment, and one characteristic of Entrepreneurs is that they are good a seeing patterns of change. It is also evident that Entrepreneurs are not resource driven - while the manager asks, "Given the resources under my control, what can I achieve?" the Entrepreneur asks "Given what I want to achieve, what resources do I need to acquire?"

It is the Entrepreneurs drive to acquire resources in order to exploit opportunities that creates the high correlation between Entrepreneurship and business growth.

George Bernard Shaw wrote that "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." This describes the Entrepreneur - Entrepreneurs tend to be motivated by the dream of things that conventional wisdom says can't, won't or shouldn't be done. This requires a certain element of stubborn perseverance. According to Tom Peters, in Thriving on Chaos, "The role of the Entrepreneur is to stand up to all, to stand up to ridicule."

Of course, another thing that the Entrepreneur has to stand up to is failure. Because it is the Entrepreneurs who are out there pushing the boundaries and changing the world, it is inevitable that they will make mistakes. An important characteristic of Entrepreneurs is that they are good a failure - the Entrepreneur sees failure as a temporary set-back, an investment in education, and, most importantly, an opportunity to learn and to do better next time. Winston Churchill summed this up when he said "Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm".

The two magic words for the Entrepreneur are "What if...?" ("What if telephones didn't have to be connected to each other with wires?" "What if customers could design and brand their own bank?" "What if you could make cash withdrawals from the check-out tills at the supermarket?", etc.) Not all the questions the Entrepreneur asks have to make total sense, however, the seed of inspiration may lie in the answer to even the most seemingly ridiculous question. The Entrepreneur sees the world through a kaleidoscope - constantly looking at it from different angles and seeing resources combined in different ways to address different needs. For the Entrepreneur, everything is variable and nothing is fixed, assumptions exist only to be challenged. (Fred Kofman's principles of Double-Loop Accounting in Senge [1998:292], sums up the typical nature of Entrepreneurial assumption questioning.)

According to George Bernard Shaw, "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.". Entrepreneurs create their own futures. Convention defines the opposite of "reactive" as being "proactive". Perhaps a better opposite for "reactive" is "creative" - certainly the words are more similar (just move the "c" to the front). The Entrepreneur is more than proactive, predicting the future and going with the flow - the Entrepreneur understands possible futures and creates the future of his or her choice.

There are three fundamental blocks to such creativity:

1. Believing you already have "the right answer". This prevents you from understanding possible alternative futures and choosing to create the one you most desire.

• The more familiar not-invented-here syndrome - in which people, believing they know more than others in their field, reject new ideas that are "not invented here" - is viewed ... as innefficient, arrogant, and ultimately fatal to innovation."(Hargadon, A. and Sutton, R.I., 2000, "The Knowledge-brokering Cycle", Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000, pp158-166)

2. Taking life too seriously. If you take life too seriously, you will never feel free enough to ask the seemingly ridiculous questions which spark inspiration.

3. Believing you are not creative. Before you can be creative, you have to choose and create a future in which you are creative. (This presents a bit of catch-22...)

The Harvard Business Reviews notes on the case method say "Ninety percent of the task of the top manager is to ask useful questions. Answers are relatively easy to find, but asking good questions, that is the more critical skill." I don't see why the rest of us should be shooting for anywhere lower than the top? Everyone in the organisation should be able to add just as much value by asking the right questions.

Asking questions that at first seem ridiculous is perhaps the most difficult task of all. Aristotle must have recognised this when he said "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

In the final analysis, there are three foundations of Entrepreneurship:

• 1. innovation - the ability to see things in novel ways.
  2. calculated risk taking - the ability to take calculated chances and to embrace failure as a learning experience.
  3. creativity - the ability to conceive of multiple possible futures and to proactively create the one you most desire.

Entrepreneurship is not an on/off phenomenon - everyone has some Entrepreneurship within them. The questions to be asked are "How much?" and "How do we unlock more of it?"

What is different about Intrapreneurship?
There are, of course, a few things that are different between Intrapreneurship and Entrepreneurship. For starters, the Intrapreneur acts within the confines of an existing organisation. The dictates of most organisations would be that the Intrapreneur should ask for permission before attempting to create a desired future - in practice, the Intrapreneur is more inclined to act first and ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission before acting.

The Intrapreneur is also typically the intra-organisational revolutionary - challenging the status quo and fighting to change the system from within. This ordinarily creates a certain amount of organisational friction. A healthy dose of mutual respect is required in order to ensure that such friction can be positively channeled.

One advantage of Intrapreneurship over Entrepreneurship is that Intrapreneur typically finds a ready source of "free" resources within the organisation which can be applied to the opportunity being exploited. Intrapreneurs seek out the organisational slack or fat, and co-opt it into Intrapreneurial ventures.

However, innovation tends to be come harder as an organisation gets larger for the following reasons:

• 1. The larger a company gets, the harder it is for anyone to know what everyone is doing.
  2. The specialisation and separation that help business units maintain focus also hamper communication.
  3. Internal competition magnifies the problem, because it encourages groups to hoard, rather than share what they've learned." (Hargadon, A. and Sutton, R.I., 2000, "The Knowledge-brokering", Harvard Business Review, May-June 2000, pp158-166)