HR Can Play a Central Role in Corporate Entrepreneurship

I have been a serial corporate entrepreneur (intrapreneur) and launched several new businesses or lines of business within existing companies and I can tell you that the having a well-informed, pro-active and supportive HR team can make the difference between success and failure at intrapreneurship. This is because entrepreneurs are typically tasked with entering new business areas where business is conducted differently and new fields of business typically come with different business practices.

The challenge for HR is to be nimble and adaptive so as to properly support the corporate new business initiatives while maintaining internal standards and equity. Here are two real examples.

Example 1. Same industry-different offering. From products to services. I led business initiatives that was transitioning our business activities from an equipment and product based business model to a service one. What we quickly realized is that a service model is very different from a product business model. To succeed in the service business I needed to attract new skills and competencies that we had never recruited for in the past such as instructors and schedulers. Even customer service had to be done very differently. We needed new compensation and benefits packages. Training programs were completely different than what our parent company had developed in the previous 50 years. The biggest HR challenge here was to convince them that just because the industry looks the same, it didn't mean that the HR services and challenges would be the same.

Example 2. Different industry-same offering. From aviation to healthcare. In another case, I launched a business into the healthcare sector from a company that had evolved from the aerospace and defense sector. At first, we assumed that both being heavily regulated sectors with an important government influence would lead to generally similar behaviours. We couldn't have been farther from reality. Almost everything about our HR practices had to change. Recruiting healthcare professionals was a very different undertaking than what we had been used to with aerospace and defense. Doctors, nurses, healthcare specialist respond quite differently from engineers, pilots, and technicians. Expectations around working conditions, work environment, how we deal with customers, on-boarding, and training also differed greatly. Our recruiting procedures were not longer effective and required us to find new talent pools and different recruiting agencies. The biggest HR challenge here was to get HR to realize the magnitude of the changes required in their policies and procedures to succeed in a new industry and the need to move quickly.

The HR Solution. Adapting quickly and effectively. In the world of corporate entrepreneurship the intrapreneur doesn't have as much latitude and operational freedom as his independent startup counterpart. The precious time that the intrapreneur and his/her team must spend arguing and convincing HR to change approaches and methodologies and to modify or re-invent business processes is precious time taken away from validating the business idea and working with and securing new customers.

Five Steps. To be an effective intrapraneurship partner, HR must proactively jump on board by:

1. immediately assigning an HR business partner to the new business who has enough clout and influence to be the voice of the intrapreneur inside the HR hierarchy,

2. meeting with the intrapreneur and his team to understand the new business strategy and how the target market differs from the existing one(s),

3. conducting a first brainstorm activity on what aspect of the business might be different from the current core business and how that will impact HR activities,

4. agreeing to a list of the immediate support required from HR to support the new business, and

5. establishing a regular meeting schedule to keep track of what is working well and what needs to be improved or changed to suit the new business.