Betting on Intrapreneurship for Transformative Employee Empowerment

By entrusting employee teams with the responsibility of innovation projects, rather than hiring consultants or acquiring external companies, intrapreneurship is a bet on the enterprise’s internal forces to achieve growth and resilience. It is also a transformative experience for employees, who (re)discover true collaboration, their own ability to experiment and build, and (re)gain ownership of their work activities. However, for enterprises with risk-averse cultures and vertical management, making intrapreneurship a true promise of autonomy and personal development to the employees is not an easy endeavor. We will describe the three main challenges that we have had to tackle over our five-year-long experience in accompanying 50+ teams of intrapreneurs across all industries.

1. Guarantee the intrapreneurial team’s day-to-day autonomy from management

2. Set clear business objectives and perimeters

3. Support the teams and community of intrapreneurs in their learning and development The design space to set up impactful corporate intrapreneurship programs and communities spans many aspects of the Enterprise Design framework, among which we will mainly focus on Business, People, Operations and Organization.