Intrapreneurship

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.

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:

• The assessment of the existing situation

  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.

• The framework of the intrapreneurship program

  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.

• The operating model of the intrapreneurship program

  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.

• The governance of the intrapreneurship program

  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.).

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:

• 1. Go for a dedicated platform

  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.

• 2. Communicate about your program on a regular basis

  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.

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:

• Popularity, scorecards, public voting and expert communities

  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.

• Search for sponsors

  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.

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.

• 1. Help your prize-winners build their teams

  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.

• 2. Bring your talents together by organizing special events

  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.

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.

• Model your internal development process

  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.

• Set up a workspace for your intrapreneurs

  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.