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There's no single formula for a successful intrapreneurship program. But the most effective programs often bring together the same essential ingredients.
From calls for ideas and selection processes to project development and strategic ambitions, companies that have successfully embedded intrapreneurship into their organizations share a number of proven practices: building strong momentum from the outset, bringing the right teams together around projects, allowing enough time for ideas to mature, and planning early for what happens beyond the program.
Our customer success stories illustrate these approaches in different ways. Here are four lessons worth learning from and applying to your own program.
Build Strong Momentum from the Start
Launching an intrapreneurship program is about more than opening a call for ideas. It's where much of the program's momentum is built. How the launch is planned, structured, and brought to life shapes employee engagement, program visibility, and the development of an initial community.
A strong launch can quickly generate a ripple effect across the organization, making the program tangible, encouraging participation, and creating a shared momentum that carries into the next stages.
Starting with an intensive event, such as a bootcamp, workshop, or another collaborative session, can make a real difference. For a few days, project leaders, coaches, experts, business units, and decision-makers work together toward shared milestones.
This focused environment helps teams quickly establish the foundations of their projects, challenge ideas, overcome initial obstacles, and reach a clear milestone, often marked by a jury or selection process.
This early intensity also benefits the program itself. It generates excitement, puts projects in the spotlight, brings the community together around key events, and creates opportunities to sustain engagement after the launch.
These events do more than accelerate projects: they bring the entire program to life.
At LVMH, the DARE program uses this collective momentum not only to launch new initiatives but also to build a sense of pride and belonging among participants. In each cohort, 60 ideas are selected for a three-day, in-person bootcamp.
With support from mentors, executives from LVMH's Maisons, and external entrepreneurs, teams refine their proposals, test their assumptions against real-world challenges, and prepare for the next selection stage.
Three ideas are then sponsored and incubated by the Group. Since its launch, DARE has engaged more than 24,000 employees and incubated over 100 projects.
Select Promising Ideas, Then Build the Right Teams Around Them
In intrapreneurship, a promising idea isn't enough to build a successful project. It also needs someone ready to take ownership and a team capable of bringing it to life.
The person who comes up with an idea isn't automatically the one who should lead it, or necessarily the best person to turn it into reality.
With its MédiaLab program, TF1 deliberately separates these two dimensions. Employees can either submit a project or apply to become an intrapreneur.
Ideas and candidates are initially selected independently, before a matchmaking process brings the right people together. Thirty employees then join a bootcamp built around ten ideas, with three projects moving into incubation in each cohort.
This approach makes selection more effective. It's no longer just about identifying the most promising ideas, but about finding the right combination of opportunities and talent.
At Air France, the Boost the Future program makes team formation an integral part of the selection journey.
Following a deliberately simple application process, project leaders can use talent matching to find employees with complementary skills. Projects then go through several rounds of review and decision-making, including pitches, expert evaluations, crowdfunding-style voting, and a final jury.
Of the 600 ideas submitted each year, 20 reach the final stage and eight are selected for incubation.
Matching therefore goes beyond simply forming teams. It becomes a way to bring the right talent into projects as their needs evolve: first by connecting ideas with potential project leaders, then by bringing together the complementary skills needed to move forward.
Enedis takes full advantage of this approach to build connections and mobilize expertise around projects. The company already had thousands of ideas, but many lacked the resources needed to turn them into concrete initiatives.
Its intrapreneurship program enables project leaders to draw on skills from different departments, gradually building the teams needed to develop each opportunity.
As projects mature, this network expands to include experts, mentors, sponsors, and business units. Project by project, the program builds the network of people and expertise each initiative needs to find its place within the organization.
Find the Right Balance Between Speed and Project Maturity
Intensive sessions help projects move faster, but longer development phases give them the time and space they need to learn.
Testing with users, refining a value proposition, gaining access to data, engaging a business unit, building a more robust prototype, or measuring early adoption all take time and repeated experimentation.
These phases allow teams to build on what they've learned, return to real-world testing, and strengthen their projects.
They also give the organization time to mobilize around each initiative: finding the right experts, securing a sponsor, preparing a budget, or identifying a business unit that could eventually take ownership.
In intrapreneurship, speed matters when applied at the right moment. Some stages benefit from shorter, more intensive cycles, particularly when teams need to make decisions, challenge assumptions, evaluate options, or bring expertise together.
Others simply need more time: observing how users behave, validating a value proposition, accessing data, developing a reliable prototype, or securing sponsorship.
Rather than trying to accelerate every stage, a well-designed program establishes the right rhythm. It combines intensive sessions with longer development phases, giving projects enough time to build evidence and allowing the organization to prepare for what comes next.
At Safran, this approach reflects the nature of the projects being developed. Innovations may take two to five years to reach implementation or commercialization. Each year, seven projects enter the Bootcamp, with two or three moving on to the Booster to accelerate their development.
La Poste Group makes dedicated working time a central part of its program.
Following a selection process involving initial screening, external expert evaluation, a bootcamp, and a final selection round, successful candidates can be fully released from their regular responsibilities for six to twelve months to incubate their projects. Some may even go on to establish a subsidiary.
This level of commitment requires a clear decision from the outset. How much time can an intrapreneur realistically devote to developing an ambitious project alongside their regular role?
As projects mature and their requirements increase, the time allocated to intrapreneurs becomes a critical program resource in its own right.
Prepare Projects for Life Beyond the Program
Most companies have become good at generating ideas. The harder part often comes when projects leave the protected environment of an intrapreneurship program and face the everyday realities of the business. In many cases, moving out of the program is more challenging than getting into it.
At KPMG, selected projects enter a 90-day Accelerator designed to develop a proof of concept (POC) and demonstrate initial business value. At the end of this phase, projects need sponsorship from a business unit before they can move into implementation.
This approach makes it essential to plan for what happens after incubation. A POC isn't simply a program deliverable. It needs to give a business unit enough evidence to decide whether to invest in the next stage.
The sponsor is therefore more than an executive endorsement: they become a direct link between the project and its implementation.
This changes how program success is measured. It's no longer just about the number of projects selected or incubated, but whether those projects can find a lasting place within the business or generate enough evidence to justify a decision to stop.
It also changes how project discontinuation is viewed. Stopping a project when its potential can no longer be demonstrated isn't necessarily a failure. Knowing when to stop investing is part of effective innovation portfolio management.
As intrapreneurship programs mature, their scope can expand, allowing them to become part of a broader innovation ecosystem.
At Michelin, the Group has brought three distinct innovation programs together within a single environment: continuous improvement through Progress Ideas, new business development through Business Ideas, and best-practice replication through Share & Copy with Pride.
They share a single entry point, but not a single journey. Each program retains its own evaluation criteria, decision-making bodies, governance rules, and support framework.
This allows Michelin to align different innovation objectives, direct each initiative toward the right program, and extend innovation across every level of the organization.
Different Programs, One Shared Goal: Turning Ideas into Projects That Move Forward
LVMH, Michelin, Safran, TF1, KPMG, Enedis, and La Poste Group have taken different approaches. Some focus on generating strong engagement from the outset, while others place greater emphasis on building the right teams.
Some give projects a few months to demonstrate their value, while others work with much longer development timelines. Some aim for business unit adoption, while others may go as far as creating an independent business.
What these success stories have in common is a clear, structured journey from idea to team, from team to experimentation, and from validation to decision-making and deployment.
A well-designed intrapreneurship program gives promising ideas the right path, resources, and support to explore their full potential.
CEO & Co-Founder
