Your Corporate Innovations Will Die on the Vine if ...

A major mistake made by companies in search of the next market success is to place all the focus on the R&D and innovation and forget about the all-important question, “what team will be charged with taking our product/service breakthroughs to market?”

If you do not have a clear picture as to who your intrapreneurs (corporate entrepreneurs) are and how to create winning intrapreneurial TEAMS inside your organization you are running the risk of having your innovations die on the vine.

In the book, Winning at Intrapreneurship, I discuss the attributes required of successful intrapreneurs. I use the term intrapreneur explicitly because successful intrapreneurs differ from their independent entrepreneurs counterparts in their skill sets and the obstacles they must face and overcome to succeed. In addition to reviewing the entrepreneurial traits required of the independent startup entrepreneur, I list the following 7 knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for intrapreneurs to win:

Change agent

How to be both the agent of change and capable of expert change management

Corporate leadership

Motivate corporate functions to provide support

Leverage the corporation

Skilled at selecting capabilities inside the parent organization that can propel the new business

Protective

Know how and when to turn unwanted help away to protect the corporate startup

Manage expectations

Set and manage expectations in corporate environments under pressure to deliver the next quarter

Emotional intelligence

Clearly see through the human side of resistance to change, need for empowerment, and gaining corporate support

Team player

Give credit to supporters and allies

These skills and the use of intrapreneurial tools such as how to expose intrapreneur pretenders, selecting corporate force multipliers, spotting the compounding cushion effect, avoiding control descent into failure, identifying corporate resistance, staying clear of materiality minefields, and several others discussed in the book are key to winning at corporate entrepeneurship.

Master them and you will have a great innovation harvest. Dismiss them and risk having the fruit of your innovation die on the vine.