Intrapreneurship Hoax: lessons SMEs can learn from the world Cup

The 2018 world cup is here with us and most of us are pretty excited about the prospects of best football players the world over are clashing for a single prize; the world cup trophy.

Something interesting any pedestrian football analyst will pick from the tournament is that there is a difference in performance between teams that play as a unit such as Spain for example and Portugal or Brazil that rely on their star players for creativity and goals.

Although the jury is still out there my hypothesis is that teams that have creative and institutionalized systems that don’t rely on any single player stand a greater chance of progressing further in the tournament compared to teams that rely on the creative spark of one or two of their star players.

Coming back to business and borrowing a French leaf from football; Intrapreneurship has been touted as a solution for incumbent organizations for innovation whereby the entrepreneurial staff can be creative with more organization backed resources and less risk.

Typical intraprenuers are depicted as rebels of some sort who break existing corporate rules and go against the tide to achieve remarkable results. Although sometimes it may work for one or two organizations this is an unsustainable way of driving innovation. A great example is Kodak in which case one of their engineering staff discovered the portable camera. Although it was a brilliant idea and the future the company dint recognize it and became a massive missed opportunity.

The ‘’Kodak Moment’’ and many other similar experiences clearly demonstrates that no single person genius or not can single handedly take an innovative idea to reality. Instead innovation must be an organization wide effort, supported across board from top management to the bottom staff, supportive systems and structures in place and entrenching a culture that cultivates transformative ideas.

Simply put organizations need to make deliberate efforts towards institutionalization of innovation rather than recruit genius black sheep entrepreneurs and expect miraculous innovation to flow with existing unsupportive structures in place.

For starters innovation needs to be recognized as a permanent function of an organization similar to sales, accounting, HR among others. The proposal may seem odd but if we refer to organizational development history you will realize that mainstay functions such as Marketing, Social media, Public Relations, CSR and most recently sustainability never existed 50 years ago.

Based on this premise if companies today want to be able to consistently innovate, they need dedicated innovation professionals to carry out the functions of discovery, development, incubation, acceleration, and scaling.

Finally companies looking to survive the future need a strategic plan for professionalizing and institutionalizing innovation across their organizations