INTRAPRENEUSHIP

INNOVATE LIKE A STARTUP,

BE ORGANIZED AS A
CORPORATE
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About the Authors

Babele

Babele is a technology and consulting company that works in the fields of

collective intelligence, business modeling and social impact. We have
pioneered application of open strategies and collaborative business planning,
providing our online platforms to universities, incubators, networks and
corporations in 4 continents.

Emanuele Musa

Emanuele Musa is co-founder of Babele. After over 10 years of experience in managing innovation
projects in companies as IBM, P&G and Bombardier, he decided to start his own venture for helping
social entrepreneurs crowdsource their innovation projects. Now he is an open innovation and
intrapreneurship consultant and CEO of Babele.

Ruxandra Creoșteanu

Ruxandra Creosteanu is co-founder of Babele. She worked as a consultant in Paris and London, for
companies such as Deloitte and Axa. She decided to start Babele to grow the impact of social
intrapreneurs. She is also the co-CEO of NOD Makerspace, the first and biggest coworking and fablab
in Romania.

Martina Orlea

Martina Orlea is one of the Babele innovation consultants. She co-created programs focusing on
innovation and entrepreneurship for different stakeholders: MNCs, accelerators and startups. She is a
BCG Aspire alumna.
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Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Who is the Intrapreneur
3. How to Recognize the Intrapreneur
4. What is Intrapreneurship
5. Why Invest in Intrapreneurship
6. How to Build your own Intrapreneurship Initiatives
7. How we do it at Babele
8. Use Cases
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1. Introduction
Disruptive change and innovation, digital businesses, a new
business paradigm are some of the most popular terms to
describe the current business environment.

Behind these trendy words, there is only one idea - the world and
business are changing at incredible speeds - and companies
need to change with them.

88%
Of Fortune 500 companies
from 1970 do not exist
anymore
Change and innovation are not any more nice to have for a
company - they’re mandatory. The business environment changes
so rapidly, that according to a Deloitte study, over 88% of the
Fortune 500 companies from 1970, do not exist anymore.

So the main question is - how can businesses change and keep

on innovating? Fostering intrapreneurship is one of the answers.

" In life, change is inevitable. In business, change is vital. "

~ Warren Beaty ~
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2. Who is the Intrapreneur

The intrapreneur was defined for the first time in the 1960s by
Pinchot - Dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on
responsibility for creating innovation of any kind within an
organization.

Basically, an intrapreneur is an employee who has the mentality

of an entrepreneur - people that see opportunities and are
willing to take the time and actions to use them.  

Every company has some intrapreneurs working inside -

managers should recognize them and give the intrapreneurs the
resources they need to pursue their intrapreneurship projects.

" Dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on

responsibility for creating innovation of any kind
within an organization."
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3. How to recognize the

Intrapreneur
In order to characterize an intrapreneur, we should look at the
qualities of an entrepreneur and adapt them to the context of
working in a company.

Entrepreneur Intrapreneur

-> See market opportunities -> Know the organization and

where others don’t the ecosystem - act as
-> Risk takers - willing to take connectors/community
the time and money to go builders
after the next opportunity -> Are a source of motivation
-> Hard-workers - in the inside the company - they give
beginning, their fresh feedback and engage
entrepreneurial venture is their colleagues
taking up all their time -> Are risk takers and always
-> Creative and problem come up with new ideas
solvers -> Spot inefficiencies in the
workplace
-> Are loyal employees, willing
to put their time in further
developing the company
products/processes
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4. What is
Intrapreneurship
Until recently, innovation activities were only assigned to the R&D
department - employees with a technical background, in a lab,
separated from the rest of the company trying to come up with
new products.

Even though we should thank R&D departments for some of the

greatest technological advances in the last century, they also
missed the mark.

One of the most important examples was the “New Coke”

experiment in the 1980s.

New Coke Study Case

Trying to win the “Cola Wars”, Coca-Cola developed a new
formula for its iconic drink. The company replaced the old Coca-
Cola with the “New Coke”, engineered in the R&D labs to help
Coca-Cola win the war against Pepsi. However, this was done
without prior market research or overall company involvement
and ended up being a failure.

The New Coke lasted only 2 months on the supermarket shelves

in the US and customers were so aggravated by the change that
they called the Coca-Cola HQ to complain.
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Keeping the innovation activities in a lab separated from other

departments can lead to many similar accidents. This is when
intrapreneurship comes into play - it’s a way of democratizing
innovation activities.

It allows businesses to easily involve and engage all the

interested stakeholders in the innovation process in an
organized way.

Intrapreneurship is a way of
democratizing innovation activities.

Intrapreneurship allows companies to be disruptive and develop a

new way of doing business (or new products or processes) within
the structure of the organization.

Here, we see intrapreneurship as a way to innovate like a

startup, while being as organized as corporate.

Intrapreneurship puts employees and their creativity in the center

and transcends hierarchical organizations, being a bottom-up
approach.
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5. Why Invest in
Intrapreneurship
Change - intrapreneurship helps companies keep up with it and
adapting to new ways of doing business.

Most innovative activities nowadays focus on optimizing

processes and products rather than encouraging disruptive
change - mainly because it’s safer to do so and easier to invest in
something more familiar to us than something completely new.
This is how firms get caught up in what they are doing and they
miss the new business opportunity (ex: Blockbuster versus online
video streaming platforms).

20% Of all employees exhibit

entrepreneurial activity

According to Deloitte, at least 20% of all employees exhibit

entrepreneurial activity - companies just need to recognize these
intrapreneurs and give them the resources to develop their ideas.
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Deloitte 6 reasons to
invest in Intrapreneurship

I. Creates an elevating top line and keeps pushing

your organization to better products/processes.

II. Breeds talent - employees find intrapreneurial

experiences valuable.

III. Competitive Advantage - intrapreneurs see market

opportunities that others miss.

IV.
Improves organizational culture - intrapreneurship
encourages people from all departments to work
together on great ideas.

V.
Uses as little resources as possible - most
intrapreneurial activity starts with a small budget
and little time invested in creating fast MVPs.

VI. Cuts time to market - intrapreneurs move fast - so

will the intrapreneurial results.
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Examples of intrapreneurship programs

Facebook organizes internal hackatons

(innovation non-stop sprints where
employees develop MVPs) a couple of times
a year The Facebook “Like” button is the
result of such hackatons.

Google encourages employees to spend at

least 20% of their working time on
innovation projects - gives them access to
prototyping resources and mentoring. Gmail
started as a side project.

Telekom organizes UQBate - an internal

corporate accelerator.

Innovation has to be seen as a core

business function as HR, Finance,
Marketing etc.
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6. How to Build your

own Intrapreneurship
Initiatives
Before going into the detailed process of building
intrapreneurship programs, some principles have to be set.
Madhavan Ramamujan came up with the 3 commandments of
innovation.

I. Thou shalt create something

people need

II. Thou shalt create something

people value

III. Thou shalt price before product

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Even if these commandments might seem a little dramatic, they

are underlining that innovative projects should answer to a need,
be valued by people and have a place on the market.

Another main important thing for successful intrapreneurship

programs is management involvement - even though
intrapreneurship is a bottoms-up approach (the ideas are coming
from “ordinary” employees), management has to be the catalyst
of intrapreneurship initiatives. It has to provide leadership and
build the innovation culture.

According to Harvard Business Review, there are 8 primary

elements for successful intrapreneurship program:

Management structures providing leadership and building an

innovation culture.
System-wide resources employed in the process -
intrapreneurs should have the time, money, prototyping
equipment and information to take their projects further.
A governance process for the intrapreneurship project.
Mandate and scope for innovation.
An organizational structure with departments communicating
and working together.
Processes and Tools for intrapreneurship.
Metrics and Rewards.
Innovation Skills and Talent outside R&D.
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There are different types of intrapreneurship programs

Hackatons - hackatons are “innovation” sprints -

multidisciplinary teams work continuously for a set amount of
time (usually 48 - 72 hours) to build a prototype to solve a
predefined problem.
Idea Fair - employees upload project ideas on an internal
platform and the most voted ones go into the prototyping
phase.
Sandbox Fund - a special fund that provides seed funding
(ideas in the building phase) for intrapreneurship ideas.
Innovation time - employees are given a specific amount of
working time they can spend on working on intrapreneurship
projects.
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Even if these types of programs have different organizational

models and incentives, they follow similar development stages.

Define Phase

1. Management shows a clear interest in “organized

intrapreneurship” - defines the innovation needs, resources
and groups of stakeholders for the intrapreneurship project.

2. A clear set of procedures and KPIs is developed for the

intrapreneurship program.

3. All interested stakeholders are involved in the project

(some companies also invite clients or suppliers).
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Program Deployment

1. Innovative ideas are pitched by the stakeholders in an

idea fair.

2. Multidisciplinary teams are formed to work on the most

voted ideas.

3. Employees get a timeline and access to resources to

create an MVP.

4. MVPs are pitched to the management.

5. Management chooses a number of initiatives to be

further developed, according to the KPIs.
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Another important part of intrapreneurship programs is

communicating and engaging stakeholders in the program. This
is why a clear Communication and Engagement strategy should
be defined. Some ways to do this are:

Gamification of the intrapreneurship programs;

Rewarding the best projects with money or trips to
conferences of interest;
Offer training for intrapreneurs;
Create an innovation space.
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7. How we do it at
Babele
Babele is a collaborative innovation platform. Our mission is to
help organizations transition towards a culture that deliberately
leverages the collective genius of internal and external
stakeholders - to achieve greater impact. We provide the tools
and support to foster innovation for impact.

Babele is a comprehensive solution - we offer consultancy for

setting up the innovation programs, building an engagement
strategy and an online white-label platform allowing companies
to organize their intrapreneurship programs.
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The Babele Method

1. Defining Steps

1. Understand your process and needs ~ 3 weeks ~ offline

Before building an intrapreneurship program, companies

should understand what are their current innovation
processes and innovation need.

The questions that management needs to ask are:

How are we currently fostering innovation and

intrapreneurship?
What is the interdepartmental relationship? Do
employees collaborate across functions?
What do we hope to achieve with an intrapreneurship
program? What are our innovation needs?
What is the innovation culture in the company? Are
employees willing to engage in such projects?
When and for how long will the program be
implemented? What is the implementation time frame?
Remember to start small - the goal is to get an MVP and
not the final product.
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2. Create an Engagement Strategy ~ 1 week ~ offline

Even if in an ideal world, employees would be 100% involved

in the intrapreneurship process, they might not show the
expected level of engagement. This is why an engagement
strategy needs to be done.

In order to create an Engagement Strategy, the management

should follow these steps:

Define who are the internal and external stakeholders -

Who should be involved in the intrapreneurship project?
Ex: managers, employees, customers, partners,
shareholders, field experts, researchers;
Converge on the deliverables. For each group a
stakeholders, management should define: Input, Output,
Outcome and Goals.
Create a Roadmap. Create a Roadmap combining both
the Offline and Online activities and how stakeholders
are involved in them.
Decide who will facilitate the program. Train them and
define their online/offline facilitation activities.
Work with the Marketing and HR teams to build a
communication strategy.
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3. Create the incubation framework ~ 1 week ~ online

Lean Startup Canvas, Business Canvas or any pre-defined

or internally developed Canvas or procedure can be
adapted as a framework on the platform. Intrapreneurs
have to complete each one of the framework steps in order
to successfully achieve a prototype.

4. Create tasks, deadlines and reminders ~ 1 week ~online

Each one of the framework steps can be further broken

down into tasks - for which deadlines and reminders can be
set. This way, intrapreneurs will always know what is their
next step for developing their project.

5. Get your intrapreneurs on-board ~ 1 week ~ online

Invite all the stakeholders on the platform. Stakeholders

can be organized according to business unit, function or
expertise. Their involvement (comments, views, last active
time) in the intrapreneurship process can be measured.
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6. Organize the stakeholder community ~ 2 days ~ online

The stakeholders can then be divided into circles - for

example, software developers, management, sales,
customer relations. Each of these categories can have
access to different steps of the framework, according to
their interest.

7. Create e-learning content ~ 1 week ~ online

For each step of the framework, descriptive videos or

documents can be uploaded. This way, intrapreneurs
develop their knowledge and are more engaged and better
guided in the intrapreneurship process.
Privacy for each one of the e-learning components can be
set, such that only stakeholders interested in the topic can
access it.
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8. Continuous Improvement ~ Offline and Online

Use the platform to get relevant data about the progress of

the projects, stakeholders involvement, feedback, initiated
discussion.
Compare this data with the KPIs - where they achieved?
Why yes/no?
After each project, ask for feedback and create a detailed
report to see what worked well and what were the
problems. Use the platform to follow the projects after the
program was finished.
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8. Use Cases

Ideation Platform for

Caisse des Dépôts (FR)
Since 2016 Babele is working with the French Public Bank Caisse
des Depots. A network of 2.000 employees was involved in an
open innovation competition aimed at tackling social and
environmental challenges as well as organizational issues of the
bank.

For each challenge, CDC employees can form teams, find relevant
experts and invite them to support their solution, and refine the
implementation strategy by tapping into the collective knowledge
of colleagues spread across 3 continents. The best ideas are first
accelerated (i.e. they develop a more specific implementation
plan) and after a final screening, they are
implemented, allowing everyone in the network to track the
progress and performance of those in charge to bring it to life.
This year starting September we are increasing the scope of the
platform to include also the clients of the bank in the co-creation
process through the Innov'You platform.
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Incubation Platform for

Chicco (IT)

Chicco Innovation is a comprehensive innovation platform co-

created by Chicco and Babele. This program focused on involving
both internal (marketing, engineering, CSR) and external
stakeholders (customers, partners, field-experts) in the innovation
process.

The program was organized according to the design thinking

process:

1. Identifying market needs - it allowed stakeholders to

contribute to the research phase.
2. Launching an idea competition and refining the best ideas.
3. Creating an implementation plan for the winning project.

For each of the development stages, a different type of

stakeholders could be invited to participate, maintaining
relevance and engagement at high levels.
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Accelerator Platform for the

United Nations

Youth Investment Readiness Program is an online accelerator for

young social entrepreneurs created by the United Nations
Sustainable Development Network (UN SDSN) with the support of
Babele.

The accelerator is at its third edition and has 3 main objectives:

1. Developing the skills needed to launch a successful NGO or

social enterprise - using Babele’s e-learning component.
2. Link the participants to a network of mentors and peers - by
inviting stakeholders on the platform and engaging them in the
participating projects.
3. Participants developing an investment deck to raise funds -
using the framework pre-defined in the Babele platform,
participants fulfill different assignments and create and validate a
business model, with the final task being the development of the
investment deck.
Contact

Emanuele Musa
[email protected]

Ruxandra Creoșteanu
[email protected]

https://babele.co