by Janus Boye
We still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity and inclusion and this has deep impact on corporate innovation as well.
In a recent member conference call with Nicolas Bry from Orange in Paris, we covered rapid innovation inside large organisations, specifically the term intrapreneurship - the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.
While there are a vast majority of documented intrapreneurship cases by men, in Nicolas Bry’s experience, there are as many active female intrapreneurs as male. One of the reasons he cited, was that it’s less risky compared to start-ups and usual entrepreneurship, as you still have corporate security in intrapreneurship programs.
Intrapreneurship as the secret weapon of the business world
Back in 2014 Christian Koch 2014 wrote in the UK-based Director magazine about the Rise of the Intrapreneur and said:
Intrapreneurs – entrepreneurially driven employees – are the business world’s new secret weapon
Nicolas has been an innovation booster at Orange since 2008 and Orange Startups Studio Founder in 2016 working on structuring incubation for internal startups, intrapreneurs, and new business models.
In our call, his key advice to make programs like that work is:
To find the right sponsor
Ensure close coaching - a good intrapreneur is both flexible and stubborn
Involve the business units upstream
A transformative innovation case study
He also shared the story of how using the mobile money service, Orange Money, for trash collection had emerged as the quite unexpected winner in late 2018 Grand Jury Session.
View the 3-minute video below which captures both the atmosphere and underlines that given the proper support, intrapreneurship is really button-up.
Learn more about rapid innovation and intrapreneurship
Nicolas has written more details in a blog post on The Intrapreneurship Factory, where he also goes through the 10 steps as outlined below.
You can also view the slides (PPT) from the call or enjoy the 30-minute recording from the call below.
And if you are ready to go out from behind your screen, we naturally cover innovation topics at our annual Boye conferences and in our corporate innovation & intrapreneurship peer groups.