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.
In a large company, intrapreneurship complements existing innovation pillars:
- It feeds the innovation pipeline by identifying opportunities that traditional R&D or Open Innovation might overlook.
- It creates a bridge between strategy and execution, turning top-down ambitions (sustainability, digital transformation, new business models) into bottom-up initiatives with measurable outcomes.
- It reinforces the innovation culture, building engagement, agility, and ownership among employees across business units.
- It de-risks innovation, with structured evaluation, experimentation, and governance processes that align with corporate priorities.
You’ll want to consider intrapreneurship particularly if your goal is to identify and test new disruptive ideas. When the objective is to rapidly develop and validate ideas with market potential, an intrapreneurship program is often more effective than broader corporate innovation efforts. Given the right time and resources, intrapreneurs can quickly explore, test, and accelerate the deployment of high-impact concepts, a mission traditional innovation structures are less suited to.
In short, intrapreneurship operationalizes your innovation strategy from within: engaging employees, uncovering untapped opportunities, and turning ideas into tangible business value.
