Innovation Engine: Driving Execution for Breakthrough Results

CHAPTER 8

Building Intrapreneurs

Innovations occur when great corporate innovators generate real wealth, not just great ideas. Leaders who overutilize resources and underdeliver value cannot be called real innovators. Innovation requires diversity in ability and competence of your people. Pair them together as often as you can, and they will drive growth and performance. Create a pool of intrapreneurs as a certified group of growth resources in every part of your business.

In this chapter, we dive deeper into the most important aspect of your innovation program—the importance of finding and building real intrapreneurs across your firm.

So far we have looked at key organizational components to build your firm's innovation engine. Systematically, we have made a case for creating a culture of innovation across your organization and proposed how to create urgency for innovation, build an innovation strategy, create an innovation roadmap, and maintain momentum to gain support from all key stakeholders in the company. I have also introduced a framework for how to manage the entire innovation program, specifically, the innovation management process—to help find ideas, evaluate them, select the best ones, and properly guide them toward successful implementation while reducing risk of failure.

In Chapter 4, we briefly touched on the topic of intrapreneurs, their importance in today's global business environment, and the strategic value of intrapreneurship as a core organizational competency. ...