As a “want to be” entrepreneur, I felt quite guilty not to decide to create (again!) a company after my studies. But sometimes working for a company at a junior level is not such a bad choice, especially if the company helps you initiate projects. Guy Kawasaki’s book The Art of Start confirms that intrapreneurship is possible: “A large number of aspiring entrepreneurs currently work for big companies. Like all entrepreneurs, they dream of creating innovative products or services and wonder if this can be done internally. The answer is yes.”
As I will study intrapreneurship at UCLA (if I finally get the courses I chose, which is everything but sure!), I would be interested in gathering great examples of intrapreneurship (being successes of failures), so did you experience any? How does your company foster intrapreneurship?
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Hey Fidji,
I have to say that my experiences in this field have been pretty diverse and definitely timing-related. A lot of big companies today are trying to emulate the successes that garage-founded businesses like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, to encourage internal (disruptive) innovation through corporate venturing, which I guess you’re talking about? Back when I worked at Sony, I have to say that this definitely wasn’t the case, was pre-boom as well, and it still is a crappy company today for entrepreneurs to work for.
I did work for ESA and, even though that is a governmental body, I was active in the incubator there, working in a start-up exploiting their technology. It was a good experience, but the incubator is still young and stuff could be better organized. In relation to that, I’m also writing a thesis (soon to be published) where I interviewed a number of incubators, as well as start-ups and investors, about their experiences there. My take is that it’s definitely a world which needs both an entrepreneurial and corporate mindset—you have to be willing to take calculated risks, but you are working for/with a large organization with all it’s opportunities and challenges as well.
And I did a course in New Business Development for my entrepreneurship masters, which I would really recommend you do if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Basically, I had to develop a pre-launch start-up and tried to encourage companies to let me launch it with their resources. I chose the paper-industry and largely failed because a. they are very conservative and have extremely low margins, and b. it was a crappy product and neither me or my team believed in it. We did get an excellent grade though!
Hope this somewhat long answer helped! I’ll actually be publishing an article tomorrow on Palm’s Foleo and innovation management for techiteasy.org, which is somewhat related to this.
Good luck with your course!
Hi Vince,
Thank you so much for this long and insightful comment. It contributes to what I’m thinking: for a company to initiate intrapreneurship projects, it has to be a real official policy, with time and ressources dedicated to it.
It can hardly be depending on the only pugnacity of some employees willing to undertake projects, as they will always be stopped by time allocation and resources if a specific program to host those projects don’t exist.
Concerning courses, UCLA process is definitely a complex one, so I really hope that I will finally manage to get entrepreneurship courses, develop a crappy product and get an excellent grade
Anyways, I am looking forward to read your thesis and article.
Indeed, the feeling of crappiness is both wonderful and a little disturbing
Regarding your courses, lesson 1 in entrepreneurship: don’t take No for an answer! Anyway, 4 more hours and I can post… finally!
I heard that entrepreneurship courses were really practical, I didn’t imagine that much
You are creating a lot of buzz around your aticle, suspense is a good way to attract lots of readers
Couldn’t quit beat the buzz-machine around the new iPods…