The Urgent Intrapreneur Opportunity: An Introduction for Corporate Leaders

As the global economy improves, business leaders of established corporate organizations need to consider how they can introduce an entrepreneurial spirit. Intrapreneurs are employees of established organizations with an entrepreneurial mindset. A diverse range of established organizations such as Pfizer, Target, Exxon Mobil, GE, and Intuit are already building and supporting intrapreneur efforts. Intrapreneurs are an effective channel to help with idea development and execution, innovation activity support, employee engagement, new behavior and skill set modeling, cultural change, and external positioning. There are various ways to support intrapreneurs within an organization, such as setting aside idea development time, training potential intrapreneurs in skills, providing tools and resources, enhancing incentives, creating support networks and mechanisms, securing visible leadership support, and having transparent systems and processes in place.