Welcome to the world of intrapreneurship! Intrapreneurship is an exciting and rewarding journey within the corporate world. Intrapreneurs are the bold innovators and change-makers within an organization, driving new ideas and projects to success. But, are intrapreneurs born with these skills, or can anyone develop them? Let’s explore this question
Skills for Intrapreneurs
The world's most successful companies are driven by innovation... And innovation is driven by highly skilled intrapreneurs.
What Makes an Intrapreneur Highly Effective?
It all comes down to these 3 critical skill areas...
Customer Focus
Customers first, then product. Not the other way around. Intrapreneurs understand how to uncover what customers really want, and only then develop solutions.
Enabling Change
No one gets it all right first time around. Learn how to systematically build business model experiments to create an unstoppable business.
Rapid Learning
Productive failure is at the heart of intrapreneurship. Discover a structured learning framework that helps you turn failed ideas into growth.
The Intrapreneur Skills Framework
The Intrapreneur Skills Framework lays out all the skills and behavioural traits that expert intrapreneurs possess in an easy-to-understand graphical format.
Use the Skills Framework to assess your relative intrapreneurial strengths and weaknesses, and to begin to devise your own intrapreneurial development plan.
Intrapreneurial Skills Articles
Build Intrapreneurial Behaviours
No-one is born an intrapreneur! Discover the practical steps you can take to develop the core character traits that intrapreneurship is based on.
Develop Technical, People and Business Skills
Character traits are only the beginning. The next step is to develop the specific business, people and technical skills you need to deliver an innovation project to successful launch.
small group training & coaching programme
The UK's #1 Training Programme for Intrapreneurs:
Intrapreneurship Mastery
Discover how to create the products and services customers really want and will pay for
(as quickly as a start-up)
The Intrapreneur Nation Approach
Hi, I’m Mark Bower, the co-founder of Intrapreneur Nation and author of many of the articles and tips you’ll find on this site. I’ve spent most of my career flipping between startups and big (often global) companies.
I founded Intrapreneur Nation because I was frustrated that those big companies – who often aspired to be creative, innovative and entrepreneurial – frequently had no strategies, no processes and no tools with which to steer new ideas from concept to launch.
Instead, new ideas were driven through the existing project management process…
A project manager would be assigned to help write the plan and business case justification: capital costs, operational costs, resourcing, Gantt charts, ROI projections, risks and more.
But the thing is – for innovation projects – these kinds of business plans just don’t work.
Nobody knows with any degree of certainty how the project will play out. Which means that the original plan is often far too optimistic, and contains far too many unknowns to be used as a real forecast. The business case is nothing more than a fantasy plan. An illusion, crafted with the sole purpose of getting through the review gate.
But managers and executives, lacking any other system to use need something to measure progress against. And so, without an alternative, they cling onto the business case document and the project plan. Even if they know it’s guesswork.
The Anti-business Business
No-one intended for businesses to operate in this way – to deliberately put obstacles in the way of effectively serving their customers.
Conventional management theory, rooted in the 1950s, defined organizational structure and best-practice processes within the constraints of the technology of the day: Rigid hierarchies. Top-down management. Low defect, Six-sigma process improvement etc. For over 60 years those principles have served businesses well. And they continue to do so. Modern companies must certainly be able to deliver their products and services with great quality and reliability.
But nowadays, thanks to instant global communications, international supply chains and low-cost IT services, the barrier to entry for new competitors has never been lower. Customers have almost unlimited choice, and are firmly in control.
The Road Forward
To compete effectively with dozens or even hundreds of new market entrants, a modern company must have the ability to rapidly discover what new products to produce. Then be able to call on a pool of intrapreneurs with the skills and abilities to be able to take these ideas to market.
Cross-functional teams. Iterative deliver. Metric-driven. Customer-focussed. Constantly learning.
At Intrapreneur Nation we believe that intrapreneurs are made, not born.
We’re on a mission to enable all businesses to be as entrepreneurial as startups. And we’re doing that by providing the tools and training to give everyone who wants them, the skills to become a trusted intrapreneur.
As I write this, I can tell you we’ve now trained hundreds of intrapreneurs. We’ve seen people completely change their outlook and behaviours, leapfrog past problems and lead innovation projects that deliver real progress, revenue and company growth.
That’s how I know that with the right strategies, skills and mindset, you can do the same too.
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