This is a question that was put to us recently online. It’s a big topic and more detailed answers will depend a lot on your specific circumstances, but we’ll try to touch on some themes that should be broadly applicable.
First of all, what is an “intrapreneur” and how is it different from an “entrepreneur”? Like an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur leads or drives new product or business creation, but unlike an entrepreneur, they do so within the context of an established company, which brings with it some very unique opportunities and constraints compared to their external counterparts.
1. Understand your Company's Strategic Priorities and Metrics for Success.
Many intrapreneurs (myself included in the early days of my intrapreneurial journey) focus on their product or business idea. That’s clearly very important, and if you were an “entrepreneur” developing the opportunity “outside” of an established company, then it would probably be one of the most important things on which to focus. But within a company, the company is likely your sole “investor” as well as the target “exit” path. So, it’s more about how your idea help’s your company achieve its goals than the value of your idea.
2. Understand your Company's Risk Tolerances.
This will dictate to a large degree what types of opportunities are even viable for consideration as well as how many resources can be applied towards pursuing and new opportunity and what risks or uncertainties are of greatest concern for your investor; financial ROI, alignment with existing businesses or market segments, alignment with existing assets or operational capabilities, investment required, time to revenue, time to positive cash flow, etc. These areas of concern will drive how to prioritize and stage your initial research to validate your opportunity hypothesis.
3. Understand How your Company Manages New Business Innovation.
Formalized new business innovation practices are still in their early stages of adoption and optimization across the business world. Even companies that do have them are probably still learning how to make them work with repeatable and more predictable results or more capital and operationally efficient. IS there a centralized Center of Excellence for managing new business investments? Is that function distributed within business divisions? Make sure you understand how your company is trying to do things and try to work within those systems. If they don’t exist, see if you can get an executive sponsor willing to explore developing them and give us a call.
4. Focus on the Problem.
Many intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs tend to focus on their solution or product concept (which is most likely based on their personal interests or needs). not a problem. If you focus on the problem, you can understand the potential size of the market that faces that problem and evaluate how much value it has for them to solve it. If the market or the value is really small, then it doesn’t matter how great your solution it. It will also be easier to identify multiple potential solutions as well as indirect competitive alternatives to your solutions if you focus on the problem first.
5. Take an Incremental Approach.
When you first have an idea for a new product or service (assuming that it’s one that addresses a real problem or market need) you should think of it as a hypothesis. It’s neither proven or disproven. Identify the aspects of your hypothesis with the greatest uncertainty, and then try to come up with the fastest and cheapest was to improve your confidence in your assumptions about those uncertainties. Use those experiments to either validate your hypothesis or more likely, evolve it into something better and incrementally build the supporting evidence for your strategy. The resources you can use to do these experiments will be driven by your company’s risk tolerances (#2 above) and what processes are in place for pursuing new business opportunities (#3 above). Taking a prudent approach of small incremental investments that validate your assumptions with data will make sure you don’t invest too much down the wrong path and earn you credibility with internal decision makers and stakeholders.
6. Be Mindful of Company Fit.
Some opportunities, no matter how great, are not going to be a good fit for your company, even if you are able to garner some executive support or sponsorship early on. If the business processes and priorities of the new business are not well aligned with those of the company’s core business, then the new opportunity will likely fail without a more custom-tailored governance structure around it. You can learn more about that topic in another blog post: “Is your Innovation Project a Zombie?”.
7. Consider Multiple Potential Paths to New Business Growth.
Organic, internal development is not the only path to develop a new business for your company. There’s a whole spectrum of approaches between organic internal development on one end and mature business acquisition on the other. We’ll be posting a blog article on that topic shortly.
8. Invest in Your Own Skills.
The book “The Innovator’s DNA” has a great breakdown of behavioral skills demonstrated by successful innovators that you can develop yourself through practice. Explore new business innovation tools and methodologies that can be applied to intrapreneurship.
