Corporate business plan competitions – an initiative to identify intrapreneurs and create open innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

You know that some people in your organization have the potential to drive innovation forward, but how do you identify them? And once you’ve found your potential “intrapreneurs,” how do you train them and support their success? The chief tool I recommend for this purpose is a corporate business plan competition.

Such competitions are patterned after the business plan competitions run by educational institutions such as MIT and Harvard Business School, but the idea has been successfully adapted for a corporate environment or even used to drive open innovation. Companies that have successfully used this strategy to foster intrapreneurship include Danfoss Ventures, an international leader in mechanical and electronic products and controls; Novozymes, the world leader in bio-innovations; and computer giant Hewlett-Packard.

Corporate business plan...

Great cases of intrapreneurship

by Stefan Lindegaard

I stumbled over a couple of blog posts from BNET and after having read this I urge you to visit their feature on intrapreneurship if you aspire to build new businesses within your company. Great stuff – check this link: Unleash Your Inner Intrapreneur

Identifying the people driving innovation

by Stefan Lindegaard

Companies need two kinds of people to make innovation initiatives successful. They need innovation leaders who focus on building the internal platform required to develop organizational innovation capabilities. This is work on the strategic and tactical level.

Innovation leaders are often also involved as coaches and facilitators for the second group required for innovation, the intrapreneurs who turn ideas and research into new products and services. Intrapreneurs are much more operational minded, and they are rare within most companies. Usually, about 10% of white-collar employees have an intrapreneurial mindset and skills that enable them to contribute in one or more phases of a process in which the goal is higher than incremental innovation. With some efforts, you can train another 20-30% within your company.

How...

Ten critical elements for an open innovation culture

by Stefan Lindegaard

In our Leadership+Innovation community on LinkedIn, Chris Thoen who is a R&D Director at Procter & Gamble asked the question which elements are needed in order to create an open innovation culture. Our community had an interesting discussion and I want to share the key elements that came up.

- Willingness to accept that not all the smart people work for your company. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company.

- Willingness to strive for balance between internal and external R&D. External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.

- Willingness to give part of the control to others. We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it....