The power of employee innovation

A business is only as successful as its employees, and that goes for any industry.

While the above statement is common wisdom, we came upon this conclusion while bringing together dozens of intrapreneur stories from various industries spanning various points in time.

The term Intrapreneur – coined by Gifford Pinchot in his 1985 white paper “Intra-Corporate Entrepreneurship” and further popularized by his book Intrapreneuring – has been pretty popular for the past few decades.

In his book, Pinchot defines an Intrapreneur as-

“Any of the dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind within an organization.”

Anyone can be an intrapreneur. From factory workers to managers, researchers to frontline workers, flight attendants to marketing executives –we have seen people in various diverse roles that brought forward ideas that changed the fortunes of their organizations or made a positive impact on their environment.

Their ideas helped: save money, make millions in profits, gave their organizations an edge in the industry, set the standard for innovation, and even saved lives.

However, most of these Intrapreneurs did not have it easy. They had to overcome obstacles to get their ideas approved and develop them further. One thing that was common among all of them – was persistence.

Some of these include limited time and resources, lack of leadership buy-in, absence of innovation culture, and bureaucratic administration that makes getting an idea from ideation to implementation difficult.

We have seen employee innovation examples in which employee ideas were first approved by the organization’s administration and had hundreds of members working on it. But eventually they got reduced to just two people to divest resources elsewhere. Still, these intrapreneurs through their persistence were able to make their idea a success.

We have covered various such intrapreneur stories in this e-book, along with accounts of obstacles they faced, and a tip for Innovators, R&Ds, Managers, Directors, and CEOs at the end of each chapter. Which can help them cultivate a culture of innovation and intrapreneurship in their organization.