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Innovation Management

Intrapreneurship

Want to unleash the entrepreneurial spirit in your teams?

Implement an intrapreneurship program and turn your employees into agile innovation champions. By enabling your teams to acquire the skills and know-how they need, you can anticipate changes in your industry and stay ahead of the curve.

Definition and objectives of intrapreneurship

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What is an intrapreneurship program
and why launch one?

An intrapreneurship program is designed to encourage the adoption of entrepreneurial approaches within a company and brings together all the actions, processes, management tools and organizational forms put in place to achieve this objective.

An intrapreneurship program differs from a corporate innovation program in that it places greater emphasis on the employees who will bring the projects to fruition. Although the ideation phase remains essential in an intrapreneurship program, it usually goes with an application phase to identify the talents ready to turn the collected ideas into projects.

The objectives of an intrapreneurship program can vary depending on the challenges you face. By focusing on employees and their skills, an intrapreneurship program helps to attract and retain talent. It can also help identify new markets, business models, products or services, and generate additional revenue streams.

The stages of an intrapreneurship program

How can you make your intrapreneurship program a success?

Step by step

Screen plateforme intrapreneuriat

The keys to a successful intrapreneurship program

An intrapreneurship program encourages employees to develop their entrepreneurial skills, which can be disruptive to your business. Before launching an intrapreneurship program, it is important to think through the objectives of the program and the strategy for achieving them.

A number of key factors are essential if your intrapreneurship program is to run smoothly:

  • Build strong sponsorship: ensure that top management and Business Units managers are committed to your approach to ensure the availability of the human and financial resources needed to make your intrapreneurship program a success.
  • Choose a tailor-made tool: choose a platform that can meet your challenges and allow you to closely monitor the ROI of your program, so that you can adjust it if the results do not meet your expectations.
  • Set clear, realistic goals: clearly define the challenges of your program and ensure that they are aligned with the strategic objectives of top management. Communicate them transparently to all stakeholders.
  • Support and reward your intrapreneurs: encourage your intrapreneurs by giving them the autonomy and resources they need to make their project a success, and reward them accordingly.
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Screenshot of an intrapreneurship platform home page

Step 1: Design your intrapreneurship program

This first phase will be crucial to the success of your intrapreneurship program. Before you start, make sure you have the following elements in place:

  • There are several possibilities when starting an intrapreneurship program: an approach may already be in place, or other innovation programs may exist in parallel. To get the most out of your project, it's important to understand how your organization can accommodate this type of program. For example, identify the successes or failures of existing programs, and talk to your top management to align the ambitions of your program with your company's strategic goals.

  • Define the vision and objectives of your approach up front and communicate them transparently to your target audience. Then set the KPIs related to these strategic challenges so that you can measure the success of your intrapreneurship program. This will enable you to focus your efforts on the initiatives that are most beneficial to your business.

  • To define the operating model for your intrapreneurship program, you need to identify the following elements:

    • The target group you want to involve in your intrapreneurship program;
    • The potential roadblocks and the solutions you can offer to overcome them;
    • The stages and milestones of your program (calls for ideas and applications, selection process and criteria, duration of stages, stage gates, project steering, etc.);
    • The methods and resources required for the program to ensure the success of the exploration and maturation phases;
    • The mechanism for involving stakeholders in your program;
    • The support of the program by your HR teams (definition of an intrapreneurship charter, support for employees who have chosen a path, integration of intrapreneurial missions in annual objectives, etc.).

    You may need to adapt your operating model along the way. Don't forget to build a continuous feedback system into your intrapreneurship program to make it more agile.

  • As part of an intrapreneurship program, it is essential to define clear governance: it can be centralized, decentralized, hybrid, etc. It will particularly depend on your organizational structure, your history and the challenges of your program. Once these elements have been clarified, identify all your stakeholders and their roles (core team, external experts, sponsors, etc.), then define the bodies that will make up your governance (engagement committee, selection committee, etc.).

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Step 2: Collect a maximum of ideas and talent in your intrapreneurship program

You've designed your intrapreneurship program: it's now time to invite your target audience to take part. Find out how to get as many ideas and applications as possible:

  • Running an intrapreneurship program requires a comprehensive tool that is tailored to your needs. The Yumana platform is 100% customizable, allowing you to collect ideas and applications according to the criteria of your choice.

    A wide range of features help you capture the best ideas and candidates:

    • Idea correlation system,
    • Auto-tagging to enrich content,
    • Integrated brainstorming with our intelligent assistant Darwin, etc.

    Voted "Best Ease of Use 2023" by Capterra, the Yumana Suite drives engagement by using your users' browsing data to serve them content based on their areas of interest.

  • Are you aware of your employees' appetite for your future intrapreneurship program, but worried about a lack of participation? Don't worry, the Yumana platform allows you to promote your program and its new features to the audience of your choice. Push notifications, dedicated emails or a global newsletter, the Yumana suite has all the tools you need to keep your audience informed on the topics of your choice. Want to go further? Implement a content strategy tailored to the different profiles of your users: videos, articles, webinars, etc.

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Screenshot selection criteria

Step 3: Evaluate and select the best ideas and candidates for your intrapreneurship program

You now have collected hundreds of ideas and applications.

Discover the tools at your disposal to identify the most promising ones:

  • Four tools allow you to select the best applications and the best ideas:

    • Idea popularity: the more your people interact with an idea, the more "popular" it becomes.
    • Scorecards: designed to make it easier to identify ideas that meet your strategic objectives, scorecards are fully customizable and give you an initial idea of an idea's value to your program. They also allow you to pre-select ideas and candidates.
    • Community voting: once you have made your pre-selection, you can put it to a vote in your community.
    • Expert community evaluation: for topics that require specific knowledge, you can invite business experts to participate in the selection process.
  • Once the best ideas have been selected, there is one step between the winners and incubation: finding sponsors willing to support their project. In order to identify the people willing to finance their initiative, the winners can either approach them directly or contact them via the platform.

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Team builder screenshot

Step 4: Build high-performance multidisciplinary teams

Your winners have been selected and have found their sponsor. Before moving on to the incubation phase, they must bring together the profiles they need to make their project a success.

  • Helping your winners identify the people who will make their project a success can be a complex task. To simplify this stage, the Yumana Suite offers you several tools that are directly integrated into your platform:

    • The Activity Profile, which allows your staff to identify the hard and soft skills of each user. To determine the soft skills of registered employees, the platform uses their browsing data and activity.
    • The Magic Team Builder, which allows your award winners who are looking for the best team to identify and invite them with just one click.
  • To ensure the success of the intrapreneurship projects selected by your company, it is essential that the teams formed get to know each other and work together. Organize hackathons or bootcamps to give the newly formed teams a chance to learn how to work together effectively.

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Screenshot based on the one below (kanban) with the stages of incubation: Selected idea, Maturation of the idea, Refinement of the idea, Validation of the project, Launch of the project

Step 5: Explore the feasibility of projects and accelerate their deployment

The project exploration phase, also known as the incubation phase, allows intrapreneurial teams to validate the value proposition of the selected ideas. Before accelerating the implementation of projects, the teams usually carry out a product-market fit assessment to confirm the potential of the idea.

  • Exploration, value proposition, product-market fit, acceleration... It's essential that you define the different milestones that represent your internal development process. They allow you to accurately monitor the progress of your teams and the relevance of the ideas under development.

    To facilitate the management of these different phases, the Yumana Suite allows you to create a workflow based on the milestones you've defined upstream. Fully customizable, it allows you to model your entire internal process directly on your platform, centralizing the management of your program.

    Want to bring in experts to assess the value proposition of a project before you test the product for market fit? With the Yumana Suite, you can select the different validation elements that will determine whether the project proceeds to the next step at each stage of the workflow.

  • To ensure that their projects come to fruition, teams of intrapreneurs benefit from a workspace that enables them to collaborate effectively. Planning, task management and budget monitoring are all elements that require powerful tools to ensure that projects run smoothly. Don't want to invest in multiple tools? No problem. The Yumana platform integrates all the elements you need to track and monitor your teams' progress.

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Customer testimonials

They launched an intrapreneurship program with Yumana

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Yumana's platform facilitates the entire process of collecting and evaluating future business ideas for Safran. The Yumana teams have been with us from the beginning of the collaboration and have taken the time to understand our process to customize the platform to our needs.

Customer Success Stories

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your intrapreneurship program!

FAQ

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All you need to know to launch a successful intrapreneurship program

  • To ensure the success of your intrapreneurship program, you need to master 5 key areas:

    1. Engaging and aligning stakeholders: to ensure that your program runs smoothly, it is essential that your various stakeholders are involved in the project. Comex, HR, business departments, managers, etc.: everyone needs to know their role and be ambassadors for the project.
    2. Allocate resources to intrapreneurs: the main obstacle to the success of intrapreneurship programs is the lack of resources made available to employees. The most important of these? Time. So, think about dedicating time to your intrapreneurs by taking them away from their original mission. You should also set aside a budget to ensure that projects are funded and delivered.
    3. Manage your program with precision: launching an intrapreneurship program involves costs for your company. To ensure the long-term future of your program, equip yourself with the best tools to monitor its performance and communicate the results transparently to all stakeholders.
    4. Value the intrapreneurs and their projects: commitment is one of the sine qua non conditions for the success of your program. To successfully involve your intrapreneurs, think about valuing their contributions and their careers: set up training courses leading to certification, reward them during celebrations, promote their careers, etc.
    5. Anticipate the aftermath: once the development of their project is complete, intrapreneurs will have to return to their original mission. Think about supporting them in this mobility process, which can sometimes be complex for your employees. You should also be transparent and sympathetic towards participants whose projects have not been selected. Explain the concrete reasons for their failure and encourage them to try again at your next event.
  • Launching an intrapreneurship program without the proper tool is impossible for a number of reasons:

    • Manually matching the best ideas with the best profiles is particularly time-consuming. With a platform like Yumana, you can quickly identify the ideas and candidates with the most potential and match them with the click of a button.
    • Transparency and communication are essential to the smooth running of an intrapreneurship program. By choosing a platform, all projects are centralized: all stakeholders can see current projects, choose to join a team or simply check the progress of submitted ideas.
    • By choosing not to use a platform, you are choosing to manage the performance of your program manually. However, this usually leads to a lack of accuracy and forces you to rely on declarative information. By choosing a solution such as Yumana, you have control over all the key indicators you define upstream and centralize all monitoring information.
  • Corporate innovation, open innovation, intrapreneurship... all terms that seem to refer to similar programs. However, these programs are very different. Modalities, objectives, processes and stakeholders: each program has its own characteristics. Discover our guide to choosing between intrapreneurship and corporate innovation:

    • You want to acculturate your teams to innovation: although intrapreneurship enables some employees to come up with innovative ideas, the aim of an intrapreneurship program is not to involve all your employees. To ensure that all your teams are acculturated to innovation, opt instead for a corporate innovation program. By putting all participants on an equal footing, it encourages spontaneous ideas and favors continuous improvement over disruption.
    • You want to identify and test new disruptive ideas: if you're launching an innovation program to rapidly develop new ideas for market launch in the short to medium term, an intrapreneurship program is a better option. If you give your intrapreneurs enough time and resources, they will be able to quickly explore, test and accelerate the deployment of new ideas. Corporate innovation, which is less focused on disruptive innovation, is less suited to this challenge.
    • You want to launch your first innovation initiative: if you've never launched an innovation program within your organization before, it's generally suggested to start with an innovation challenge. It is quicker to set up, allows you to start acculturating your teams to innovation, and collects results in a shorter time than corporate innovation or intrapreneurship. You can then decide whether to move on to intrapreneurship or corporate innovation.
  • If you're embarking on intrapreneurship, it's important to learn how to engage your talent in the long term. Intrapreneurs are a highly valuable resource for your organization. If they don't feel recognized or valued, they will tend to abandon your program or, worse, leave your company.

    • Promote their know-how internally: highlight your intrapreneurs! Invite your intrapreneurs to internal events and give them the floor: by describing their career paths, they will encourage other employees to get involved. Communicate the success stories of your intrapreneurs and include portraits of them in your official newsletters; this will help to promote the success of your intrapreneurs and their projects. Finally, organize opportunities for alumni intrapreneurs to share their experiences with your new generation of intrapreneurs: this way they can pass on their knowledge and inspire future innovation.
    • Promote intrapreneurship externally: let your intrapreneurs speak and represent your company. If you're attending trade shows, promote their projects and what they've brought you to the attendees. Also, consider inviting your intrapreneur alumni to act as expert juries during the selection phases of your future programs: they will be in the best position to assess the candidate profiles effectively.
    • Certify your intrapreneurs' skills: intrapreneurial certifications, which have been developed in recent years, allow you to recognize all the skills that intrapreneurs develop during the course of their project. They are highly valued by employees and help to legitimize their approach in the eyes of their peers.
    • Support their career development: intrapreneurs are naturally driven and often ambitious individuals. If you want to retain them, invest in their future: follow their careers, support their mobility and consider their development requests. You can even go one step further by creating a new and highly valued function within your organization: intrapreneurs.

Our innovation management solutions

Discover all our innovation management solutions

Innovation challenge

Launch calls for ideas campaigns to quickly identify concrete and innovative solutions to deploy.

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Corporate innovation

Acculturate your teams to innovation to design and improve your products and services

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Open innovation

Turn your external communities into key stakeholders committed to your growth

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Resources

Our resources to launch a successful
intrapreneurship program

Yumana launches the first intrapreneurship barometer!

To all the curious, the experts… to all those interested in the future of intrapreneurship!

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Innovative ideas: how do you spot them and turn them into reality?

Yumana shares some tips on how to identify an innovative idea and assess its implementation potential.

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What does disruptive innovation mean?

Yumana gives you the keys to understanding what a disruptive innovation is and measuring the effects it can produce.

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All resources

Ready to launch your intrapreneurship program?

Don't wait any longer, contact our experts today and join the Yumana community!

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Want more information about our solution? Let's talk! I'd like to learn more about your innovation challenges.

—Vincent JAMET,
SDR at Yumana