From the previous chapter, you have read about things that can kill intrapreneurship, which you should avoid. How about what can help accelerate it? What if you are already building intrapreneurship based on the formula discussed but want something to boost it so you can achieve your goal even faster? This is the chapter for you. We will discuss boosters that help accelerate the execution of intrapreneurship, including the change of your employees’ mindset, the speed of project execution, and the ROI you have made for intrapreneurship.
Remember, what we are going to talk about in this chapter are boosters, not the formula itself. To build a good and strong intrapreneurship foundation, you will need the factors of the formula to be in place. If you do not have a proper foundation, your employees will see through the tricks. Applying boosters without the formula would risk your employees’ trust in your intrapreneurship initiatives in the long run. Always be mindful that the execution of boosters should be supported by the foundation of the formula.
Boosters for Mindset Change
Inspiration Series
If you are starting to build intrapreneurship, it is best to tap the experience of companies which have strong intrapreneurship practices. Have them come and share with your employees how they approach intrapreneurship. Ask them to share their success stories. These stories would become the inspiration for your employees. There are three types of companies that you can target to invite for sharing. Each represents a different perspective and potential takeaways:
1. Disruptor companies: These are the likes of technology-driven companies including Google and Amazon. These companies have started their development with strong intrapreneurship practices. They have pride in their culture nurturing innovation. They hire the best talents and offer the talents room to realize their ideas in the workplace. They formed the benchmark and best practices of intrapreneurship.
2. Conventional corporates which transformed: These are traditional corporates which were not strong at intrapreneurship before but have transformed over time. They have gone through the pain to successfully build intrapreneurship over time. They can share with you the reason why they decided to do it, the challenges involved, and the return they have achieved. They also set a good example to your corporate to encourage your employees that change might not come easy, but it is most certainly possible.
3. Startups in your field: You might find startups operating in a very different manner compared to your corporate. However, startups in your field might become your potential disruptor or allies. The way that startups work is usually highly customer-centric and agile. With innovative solutions, some startups can seize large market share over a short period. They also provide new perspectives of approaching a problem, potentially beyond the thinking of industry veterans. Since the startup is in your field, your employees can better relate to the problem they are trying to solve. The sharing from a startup also offers a great opportunity for a reality check as they could be potential competition.
Booster for Networking and Collaborations
1. Workspace redesign, physically and virtually
Believe it or not, the design of the work environment does influence how people behave. In fact, a good designer knows that the purpose of a workplace design is to facilitate the desired work behavior. The traditional design of offices is surrounded by concepts of cubicles. It is highly purposed to keep the employees focused on their tasks and away from distraction. The design was very much targeted at maximizing occupancy and increasing productivity. However, it is not primarily targeted at collaboration, creativity, or learning. Many companies including Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Airbnb, Google, and Amazon have come to realize that a traditional office design would not work if they wanted their employees to be innovative. Many have explored new designs below to encourage the natural collaboration and openness that is required for intrapreneurship.
a. Hot desks
The hot desk system frees employees from one definite seat assigned. Any employee can book any seat listed on the system in advance and work from there during the booked period. The employee should be given access to basic infrastructure including electricity, Wi-Fi connection, lockers, and so on. The arrangement of hot desks allows the employee to work in a different environment and meet colleagues who show up in the same hot desk location, who they might never meet otherwise. It encourages the employee to talk to people outside of their team or even departments to exchange notes about their work, get new perspectives, and learn about things outside of their domain. The growth of the network would help employees to get outside of their zone and explore thinking of other teams who are approaching different problems.
b. Modular desks
Modular desks are easy to move and can form different shapes to facilitate different working modes. They are like puzzles. The employees can pull the desk workshop and assemble the shapes they want them to be, be it the layout of individual workstations, small group meetings, workshops, or a theater. Modular desks provide the employees with flexibility, and they can determine how they like their spaces to be, depending on their needs.
Redesign of workspace is not for physical environment only. As remote working has become the new norm, many are relying on digital tools to get connected with their teams. Today, many employees are connected via digital tools and video conferencing. At first, the adoption of video conference tools like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Team brought much convenience to the organization. They allowed people to stay connected while working from home. However, many soon called out video conferencing fatigue and burnout. Some corporates have begun to set rules about video conferencing such as no back-to-back conferences or Zoom-free days. While soon we might see the end of a pandemic, it does not mean the end of remote working. Hybrid mode is expected for many in the future and some new roles are even designed entirely to be working remotely. So, what is the way to encourage natural virtual networking or collaboration?
c. Metaverse for virtual space
The concept of the metaverse is still relatively new, but worth paying attention to. While video conferencing is deemed old and boring, the metaverse is exciting and full of wonder. Experimenting with the metaverse workspace attracts the employees’ curiosity. For most of the video conferencing tools, you only use them when you have a specific topic to meet with the team. No one keeps the video on and waits for people to come and chat. While video conferencing fulfills its purpose of being a meeting tool, it cannot be practically served as an effective networking tool. The metaverse, however, provides a potential solution to this problem. The metaverse provides a virtual space with an interesting design in which the employees can “hang out.” They can design the look and outfit they show in the metaverse, build their own avatar, and interact with the others. When the technology is paired with the adoption of virtual and augmented reality, the metaverse can potentially offer a virtual space for teams to conduct whiteboarding, build prototypes, or even host social events.
Intrapreneurship in Action: The Accenture’s Nth Floor1, 2
To experiment with the metaverse office, Accenture has partnered with Microsoft and Altspace AR to launch the Nth floor, a virtual floor of Accenture where its employees can meet. The Nth floor brings a mixed reality experience for Accenture’s employees to meet, hang out, and attend training together.
To enter the Nth floor, Accenture’s employee creates an avatar, an individual character with a virtual body. Using that avatar and with a Virtual Reality (VR) device, the employee can immerse into the metaverse. The employees are present visually in a virtual space laid out just like an office. The Nth floor creates a more enriched experience than just a video conference. Using VR headsets and the virtual characters they created, the employees can move and look around their virtual office. They can also simulate presentation with gestures.
Office in the metaverse has yet been proven to be successful and it would take more time to become mainstream. However, it does prompt companies to rethink what virtual working means and how these alternatives can help them build better collaborations and their employee experience.
Boosters for New Ideas
The boosters in this section target situations when the number of ideas gathered from employees is falling behind expectations. To capture good or great ideas, you must first capture many ideas. However, you might be hearing employees saying that they have no clue about the customer problem, or they simply do not have a way of a solution. The employees are not the ones to blame. In fact, it is common that not all employees in a large corporate have direct touch with the customers. An employee sitting at the back office might not even know how exactly the customers use your products. The further away the employees are from the customers, the less they learn about the problems that need to be solved. Without these insights, it is challenging to inspire the employees to understand what customers are frustrated about or what their customers strongly desire. To solve this problem, bring your employees closer to your customers. Below are some quick ways you can help your employees learn more about your customers.
1. Customer problem repository
In most corporates, customer insights are held in the hands of a small number of people. Mostly these are people who have direct access to customers, including sales and sometimes operations who handle complaints. Other employees who are not involved in customer servicing have a rare chance to gain access to these insights. Without these insights, let alone the right idea, they do not even know the right problem to solve.
To create visibility, gather the key customer problem statements from various departments. Share these insights in a central repository with your employees. Make sure they know that these are the prioritized problems that the departments are trying to solve. While some problems are already being tackled by the respective departments, ideas are welcome. If the employees have ideas on how to solve those problems, connect them with the relevant department to contribute their ideas and perhaps take them further.
2. Design thinking bootcamp
This is a step further from the above. If you already have a repository or list of problems that you want to solve, you can host a design thinking bootcamp. It is a series of activities designed to capture ideas within a timeframe, usually ranging from two to five days. During a design thinking bootcamp, employees are invited into an environment away from their usual business. They are brought into the bootcamp to team up and focus on the problem they were assigned. During the bootcamp, they would go through exercises designed to help them understand the problem, brainstorm for solutions, and gain validation within that timeframe. The problem assigned can be outside of their domain, but they will be provided the support of subject matter expertise. They would prototype the solution and at the end of the bootcamp, each team should have at least one solution concept with a low-fidelity prototype. The desired result of a design thinking bootcamp was less about having a solution built, but more about capturing ideas for future validation.
3. Customer-centric series
This is more relevant to Business-to-Business (B2B) where your customers are corporates or small enterprises. Select some of your key customers. Remember to include both: those who demonstrate significant existing business and those who show potential growth in the future. Craft a series of content to allow your customers to provide insights into what is on their minds and the trends that they look out for. Have your customers share their thought leadership with your employees via talks, fireside chats, webinars, and so on. This would create space for your employees not just to focus on your business, but to better understand:
• Your customers’ current operating environment
• Competition or disruption that your customers are facing
• Future trends that influence your customers and therefore your business as well
It allows your employees to expand their thinking beyond their scope and tap into how they can help the customers grow the business.
Boosters for Speedy Execution
Are you frustrated because you have heard enough ideas but not enough progress? Do you find that there are more conversations than actual execution? If you wonder how you can speed up the execution of the ideas, consider the arrangements below:
1. Hackathons
A hackathon is an event in which you can bring your teams together to focus on developing new solutions. It usually takes two to five days. Given the advancement of technology and the widely adopted agile practice, most new solution concepts can be developed into a working prototype within days. The structure of a hackathon can be similar to a design thinking bootcamp and therefore you might sometimes see elements of both being blended. The difference between the two is that the design thinking bootcamp focuses more on ideas, while the hackathon focuses more on development. It is therefore a natural extension of the design thinking bootcamp into the hackathon. During hackathons, project teams are paired with developers to solve a problem by developing a working prototype. This working prototype should prove the solution’s technical feasibility, at least the key components of it. Because of its time-bound nature, the teams participating in hackathons are required to be highly focused and efficient.
To further enhance the creativity of your employees, you may consider different types of hackathons:
• Internal hackathon: Your employees are the only participants in the hackathon. The objective is to have your employees team up to solve problems for your corporate.
• Customer-partnered hackathon: Your hackathon is designed to solve the problems of your customers and your customers are open to cocreate with your teams. This is more common when your customers are corporates too. In this case, your teams will be assigned a customer problem and team up with customers or its representative(s) to develop the solution.
• Technology-partnered hackathon: Your hackathon is focused on helping your employees explore emerging or new technology. The purpose of the hackathon is to allow your employees to get comfortable with using these new tools so that they can explore more ideas in the future. For example, Microsoft sponsors corporate hackathons to help the corporate employee get used to Microsoft Power Apps, a low-code development platform that allows teams without coding skills to develop solutions.
2. Open innovation
Not all great innovation comes internally. It is becoming more common for corporates to experiment and practice open innovation. Open innovation provides the opportunity for corporates to tap on inspiration and resources beyond their own operating environment. Imagine if you can augment your intrapreneurs externally and have agile teams executing for the corporate without consuming more bandwidth of your teams. Most often, open innovation also results in a potential talent pipeline and partnerships that generate rewards in a long run.
Open innovation requires the corporate to share the problem or opportunities it is focusing on with an external audience. It is similar to a request for proposals. The external audience would submit ideas on how they propose to solve the problems. Moreover, the external audience will also be involved in building the solution together with the corporate.
Although the word “open” somehow suggests public context, the target audience of open innovation is often specific. Below are two common target audiences of open innovation:
• Academia: Corporates often partner with universities and academic research teams to explore emerging technologies or new solutions. In open innovation, the corporate shares its problem to be solved with universities and asks for team entries to pitch their ideas. A team with a successful pitch would be paired up with subject matter expertise to further the development of the solution. Depending on the nature of the problems, the corporate can target teams that specialize in relevant domains.
• Startups with commercialized products: For niche problems that require a quick solution rollout, corporates might prefer sourcing solutions that have a certain maturity. Open innovation allows the corporate to call for partnership with startups. The startups should have a relatively developed solution that the corporate can scale quickly. It is quite often that the solution developed needs customization or further development to fit the corporate’s needs. Therefore, an intrapreneur is still required to sort out the design of the product leveraging the solution brought by the startup. Open innovation with startups provides advantages to the corporates as it offers speed and agility.
The idea of open innovation sounds quick and easy. However, do not underestimate the effort and time required to help the external team understand your business context and also the integration post-development. On top of those, be aware of the implication for your confidential data and intellectual property.
3. Intrapreneur hours
One of the most common problems that slow down the progress of an idea is the founder team’s bandwidth. The founder team has their own duty to perform as they are hired to do so. Executing the idea becomes a second priority. They usually have to wait until all their primary job duties are completed, before they can work on the idea. Sometimes, it means that they are working extra hours for the idea. It might be fine within a short period. They are excited about the idea and driven by adrenaline. However, over time, their excitement would peak and begin to decline. They are buried by their work duties and stop progressing the idea. Give the intrapreneurs their “intrapreneur hours” to work on the idea. Make it a priority by providing them the required time to execute. For example, Google’s “20% time” rule3 gives its employees 20 percent of their time to work on ideas that interest them. That is equivalent to one day per workweek. Not all corporates can afford to offer that to all of their employees. What you can do is to offer this arrangement only to the founder teams with more maturity. The further they go through the funnel, the more time they can be assigned to work on the solution. It makes logical sense as the more matured the idea is, the higher chance it would become a new solution. The amount of work also increases as a new solution is to be developed and launched. When the founder team moves toward a proof-of-concept or pilot stage, consider allowing the team to dedicate more time to enhance their success rate.