Why do most companies fail at innovation?

Do you know intrapreneurs? A term and an employee role that has received a real boost in attention and spread within the company in recent years. In the last 5 years alone, Google search results for intrapreneurs and intrapreneurship have more than quadrupled.
While an entrepreneur can be described in the classic sense as the founder and owner of a company, the question often remains, what exactly is an intrapreneur?

An entrepreneur as a classic entrepreneur has decided by founding a company to take risks and take personal responsibility. Nowadays, many young people want to be part of something, actively contribute to innovations and bring their own ideas to the company. It is precisely this attitude that describes an intrapreneur: the intracorporate entrepreneur, an internal counterpart to the entrepreneur – in other words: employees in the company who carry out their work with the same attitude as entrepreneurs, although they are integrated into a company organization. This means taking responsibility independently, thinking in a networked way and aiming for sustainable corporate success with your own actions and the development of new products, processes, services, etc.

In principle, anyone can be an intrapreneur, develop into this in the course of their career, or be enabled to do so. For many companies, however, this is precisely where the greatest challenge lies: to awaken the intrapreneur, to develop it, or even to give the opportunity to discover and allow the intrapreneur in oneself. Subsequently, intrapreneurs must be promoted and a range of tools made available as well as the time to be able to work on their own ideas and innovations.

In this context, the so-called T-shaped skillset is often considered the optimal prerequisite for intrapreneurship. The letter T stands as a metaphor for in-depth knowledge in one’s own specialist area and comprehensive, specialized knowledge (vertical line) and the ability to be able to connect and engage in dialogue with other knowledge and specialist departments, customer milieus, etc. across departmental boundaries (horizontal line) – a basic requirement for successful work in interdisciplinary teams.

Intrapreneurs are therefore personalities who represent one of the most important keys to the future-oriented further development of innovations and ultimately also to the success of a company. These keys only have to be found and used.

How? More on this shortly…

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