I really look forward to participating and giving a talk at the Intrapreneurship conference in Paris on December 13. As part of my preparation the organizers have asked me a couple of questions that I will look into in the coming week. The first question went like this:

When do you let your employees embrace entrepreneurial behaviors and initiative? 

My view on this often stirs some controversy because I don’t think you should let all employees work with innovation – at the same time.

A large majority needs to just focus on their job and keep the big corporate engine running. They might do some incremental innovation, but otherwise they should just do their job.

Some might argue that innovation should be part of everyone’s job and that is of course a very good argument. However, if you let everyone innovate at the same time things will get messy and you are at risk at damaging the engine that over time allows you to invest in innovation.

Everyone should be given the opportunity to work with innovation

On the other hand, I strongly believe that every employee should be given the opportuntity to work with innovation even at a certain radical level through a variety of initiatives setup by your innovation leaders. This could be idea generating campaigns, internal business plan competitions and innovation camps.

Such initiatives not only identify great ideas within – or outside – your organization. They can also help you identify people who have natural capabilities for making innovation happen. Some are just better than others and you need to identify and develop these people even further. Doing all of this will help you build a strong innovation culture.

As a closing comment on innovation culture, I would like to remind people that a corporate culture is almost carved in stone during the early years of the company and it takes disruptive events to change it significantly. Thus, it is quite dangerous to be inspired by things like Google’s 20% project in which employees can work on their own projects for 20% of the time.

This worked at Google in the early years (not even sure it works anymore at Google), but it will be very difficult to implement this concept in a culture that is not used to this. The mindset and processes needed to support this are simply not in place.

Intrapreneurship as a corner stone for a new corporate culture ?

Most companies need to develop this mindset and create the processes almost from the ground up and as they do so, I advice them to pay more attention to intrapreneurship.

The term and concept is new to many corporate innovators, but I believe this is about to change. More companies will embrace intrapreneurship and we will soon read great cases and attend conferences – like the one in Paris – on this topic.

On my end, I can promise you more posts on intrapreneurship and you are welcome to suggest topics or issues that I should look into on this.

Stefan Lindegaard is a world famous expert in Open innovation and Intrapreneurship. Hiss blog 15Inno is among the most popular internationally  on these hot topics. He will be present at the Intrapreneurship conference in Paris to present his talk “Intrapreneurship : a key ingredient to embrace open innovation”