What Strategies Can an IT Intrapreneur Employ
Intrapreneurs are employees within established organizations who act like entrepreneurs by coming up with innovative solutions to business problems. Often, they will develop new businesses in the company or spin off subsidiary companies. The intrapreneurship strategy can be used at any level of an organization, but it is most effective when implemented at the bottom up. MIT professor Eric von Hippel explains the value of this approach by way of an example:
Imagine you are the owner of a mechanical watch company, and electronic watches come along with their shiny, new technology that doesn’t rely on the little mechanical pieces the watch company has been using for decades. The leadership of the company sees that the future of the firm is at risk, and so they start a small internal venture to begin producing the electronic watches. This intrapreneurship initiative is what makes it possible for the firm to survive and grow in the face of the competition.
The bottom-up IT intrapreneur strategy is ideal for large corporations that want to identify innovation talent in their existing workforces and nurture their potential. This is usually done by putting together teams with a mix of experienced and junior team members. This approach is more likely to lead to breakthrough innovations because it allows people with detailed knowledge of a problem to work quickly and creatively to develop innovative solutions. This type of intrapreneurship can also be a more efficient approach for developing new ideas, since it does not require the investment of time and resources needed for the middle-out or top-down approaches.
What Strategies Can an IT Intrapreneur Employ to Drive Digital Transformation?
For smaller companies, intrapreneurship is sometimes promoted informally by allowing employees to pursue their own technical interests during company time or by sponsoring hackathons and other social coding events. Many successful IT startups foster a culture of intrapreneurship, and this can help create an environment that supports the ideation and creation of new business opportunities. Intrapreneurship is often seen as a crucial part of an organisation’s digital transformation process because it allows the company to tap into the creativity and innovation that its employees can bring to the table.
This paper identifies major learning effects and provides an evaluation of the role of intrapreneurial competencies in digital transformation. The evaluation framework combines information systems and management research with design science theory and emphasizes the importance of human transformation. It reveals that, while digital competencies are important throughout the transformation process, intrapreneurial competencies are particularly relevant at revolutionary levels of the internal integration phase and provide the basis for technological transformation.
Moreover, it suggests that intrapreneurship and human transformation can be considered an integrated model for managing digital transformation. This model offers implications for academics, IT managers and corporate leaders seeking to implement an intrapreneurship strategy. Embracing intrapreneurship as an essential component of digital transformation strategies will enable these organisations to meet their strategic objectives and remain competitive. By enabling their employees to innovate, these organisations can create products and services that are unique, attractive and fit with customer demand.
