IT Intrapreneur Employ to Gain Buy-In From Senior Leadership
Many digital intrapreneurs believe they can create new opportunities for their company, but they also have a nagging fear that they won’t get the green light to move forward from senior leadership. This is the main reason that most innovation programmes fail. The key to overcoming this problem is for business leaders to learn how to create systems that empower middle managers and even first-line supervisors to serve as effective sponsors. This requires them to acquire a fluid knowledge of the rapidly developing landscape of exponential technology.
A key strategy is to ensure that all digital IT intrapreneur have a safe pathway from idea to implementation. It’s often the case that there are far more potential intrapreneurs buried in IT departments than management realises. When these individuals are shown that they have a clear path to bringing their ideas forward, the vast majority of them will step up to the challenge.
The second key strategy is to ensure that all digital intrapreneurs can access the resources they need to make their ideas a reality. This means ensuring that all employees have access to appropriate technology and training. It’s also important to create a culture that encourages staff to experiment with new angles of approach and workflows. For example, in the early days of Facebook, developers regularly stayed after hours to prototype new functionality and try out different ways of working. This type of play is essential to the process that produces the kind of innovative solutions for which companies are now crying out.
What Strategies Can an IT Intrapreneur Employ to Gain Buy-In From Senior Leadership?
In addition, the company must learn how to nurture its own digital intrapreneurs and provide them with the support that they need to thrive. This involves assessing the initial quality of ideas, but giving more weight to the character and competence of intrapreneurs, as well as the way that they work with others. If a company can shift the emphasis of its innovation assessment processes to place greater value on these factors, it will be better equipped to deal with the unprecedented opportunities and threats that are being created by digital transformation.
Another issue is to recognise that the most important part of an intrapreneur’s job is not the generation of ideas, but implementing them. It’s often the case that the best ideas are already on the table and simply need a clear pathway from idea to implementation. Formal processes like Stage-Gate were designed to provide this, but when they place too much emphasis on secondary information and on the testing of rapid prototypes, they tend to stifle innovation instead of accelerating it.
As a result, the best approach to facilitating digital intrapreneurship in a traditional business is not to acquire external entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs from vendor organisations, but to build the capacity within the company to foster them. This can be achieved by building the right systems and culture, displaying a willingness to sponsor and support them, and ensuring that they have a clear pathway to implementation.